By Bob West
If you’re like most marketers using enewsletter ads to reach your audience, you want those growers and retailers to click on your ads and visit your website, which is certainly a logical goal. That’s why we want to make sure you understand the click-through rates on different ad units and what they mean if you’re looking for click-through visits to your websites.
Meister Media’s enewsletters stand out in their markets for the number of different advertisers we can accommodate in each send, and one key to this is our unique logo/text ad unit. Here’s a picture of one:
A number of this ad unit’s features come together to drive performance, with one key feature being the way the ad resembles content. The human eye sees a block of text and thinks ‘information’ rather than ‘product.’ The numbers bear this out. In fact, the average click-through rate on a logo/text ad we ran in one of our enewsletters in 2013 was 1.30%, compared to 0.48% for the display ads.
We expanded on this successful format with the Sponsored Content portion of our topical enewsletters, as seen here:
These ads feature even more characters of type than the logo/text ads do, and they generally produce 70 to 75% of the total ad clicks from each send. We regularly see some sponsored content ads produce click-through rates of better than 3%!
This information should matter to you for three reasons:
- If you want maximum click-through visits from enewsletter ads, then the logo/text ads or topical enewsletter buys make the most sense.
- Like any other ad, these ads can be executed well or poorly. The ads that offer to educate or inform growers on solutions generate stronger click-through rates than the ads that simply tout a product.
- Most importantly, our audiences are providing marketers with valuable information regarding how they should direct future marketing efforts. Product promotion will always have its place, but you can truly engage with prospective customers by educating them. Giving them information that will help them improve their businesses is how you get them to visit your website more often and spend more time there.
This idea of getting attention for your company and your products through education rather than promotion lies at the heart of the trend toward “content marketing” that is so widely discussed these days. Our experience presenting different types of content from our clients over the past few years has illustrated just how effective this approach can be for marketers.
Bob West is the Director of Interactive Sales at Meister Media. He can be reached at 440-602-9129 or [email protected].