Where do your subscribers come from?
Odds are, your list is full of people who found you. They’re the people that found you via search, through linked sites, or were forwarded your organization’s newsletter.
These are the right people. They are clearly engaged and interested. BUT, they’re doing all of the work to sign-up.
Alleviating the user-burden
Asking a partner site to give you a shout out is a nice start, but if you really want to extend your reach, you need to be proactively searching out donors. So you run web banners, social media and paid search campaigns. While this increases your online visibility, there are some obvious drawbacks:
1. Attention is fragmented: On average, a person will view 91 web pages per day. That’s a lot of content, frequented by erroneous “fat fingers” clicks or passive users simply passing through.
2. Viewability: Banners often compete for attention on over-crowded pages and end up hidden below the fold, wasting your impressions.
3. Anonymity: If you’re advertising on multiple channels, it is difficult or impossible to determine if the same person is seeing your ad multiple times, again throwing away impressions.
Alternative outreach
The most overlooked channel for acquiring donors that are active in email is also the most obvious: the inbox.
The reader is already in the email mindset and less bombarded with content, receiving on average 4 subscription based messages per day. This should be your key demo – email newsletter subscribers – the people who’ve already raised their hand and said “I really like receiving email! I like it so much I ask people to send it to me.”
How to reach them
The problem with reaching subscribers is that you can’t identify them across the web. You also, well, don’t have their email yet, so you can’t get into their inbox directly.
The way to reach this audience is by making sure your message is in the requested media (emails) they are already receiving and opening through an email exchange like LiveIntent.
Here’s how it works:
1) You upload any number of IAB standard creatives.
2) Determine who your key demographic is and select the proper targeting parameters (i.e. Age, Gender, Geo, Income)
3) Decide on a budget and a goal – meaning the amount you are will to pay per email acquired.
4) Launch your campaign!
That’s it. Now, depending upon your targeting and budget, whenever someone opens the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast, Hearst, Business Insider, Weather.com, AOL or any of the other 664+ publishers that make up the LiveIntent Exchange, your message is served.
What else is good about this?
1. Efficient Spend: The LiveIntent platform works just like display and pays out on a CPM basis, meaning you don’t have to worry about open rates and wasted sends. The only time an impression is counted is when a newsletter is opened and the images are rendered.
2. Higher Engagement: All of your ads are actually seen instead of the 5-15% typical of standard email marketing. These views are high quality, too; the majority of our publisher partners place their ad spaces above the fold.
3. Known Audience: Each email is being opened by a person that has subscribed and often performed a double-opt in, so the inbox is also nearly-impervious fraud. Also, since all targeting is tied to the hash of an openers email address, your campaigns are not only accurate, but efficient.
Best of all, you can increase your presence in the inbox without sending any more of your own emails. As discussed in my last post, while email volume send proved to be the winning ticket for fundraising and election day victory for Obama in 2012, the campaign’s open rate suffered when they ramped up their send volume.
Displaying your ad among the newsletter content your audience is already interested in reading means cutting the risk of flooding your subscriber’s inbox and ending up relegated to the Spam folder.
What to do with that big, bad list?
Next week, I’ll take you through how to leverage your new and improved subscriber list to reach them everywhere and on every device to drive donations and action.
