The inbox is the place to be. Let's talk about how we monetize it...
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| July 7 · Issue #5 · View online |
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The inbox is the place to be. Let’s talk about how we monetize it…
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We’re in an email newsletter boom. But every newsletter is different — from topic to frequency to how it’s monetized. To provide a clearer view of the landscape, Montague Street Media is conducting an informal survey of newsletter and email operators. If you fit that bill, please consider taking our 2020 Email Revenue Survey (it should take about 5 minutes). All responses are anonymous — they won’t be tied to your email or your Google account. Below are 9 ways you can make money with your newsletter. And next month I’ll be back with data from our survey on how others are making money with their newsletters. Thanks, and…
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If you have a newsletter, chances are you’re looking to make money from it. As a publisher, your relationship with a reader’s inbox is one that you own. Facebook isn’t charging you to reach it. Apple doesn’t have to approve you. Google isn’t deciding if you’re cool enough to rank (so long as you stay on the right side of the Gmail Spam filter). You’ve built a relationship with a reader one-on-one, and now you can decide what is the best way to nurture and profit from that relationship. So, what are your options? The great thing about newsletters is that there are lots of ways to monetize. Some you’ve probably thought of; some, perhaps, you haven’t. Here are some ideas for you, in rough order from easiest to execute to hardest.
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This is an easy one for me to talk about… because this is the category Newspackr falls into. I considered a few models when I wanted to start writing about media growth and monetization, and the simplest path for me was to try to provide people with actionable insights and advice — and figure various opportunities would arise from it. Bingo! That’s been a great model for me. People with content and growth and monetization challenges have gotten in touch and become clients of my consulting practice, Montague Street Media. My tips for pursuing this type of model are pretty simple: provide value, make it clear what you do (consulting, creating, speaking, etc.), make sure your welcome email asks people what their challenges are… and then listen!
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Are you selling a course? A group membership? A subscription to another product? Then you can use your email as marketing — subtly or not — for a direct revenue stream. Major publishers do this all the time. Make sure you’re tracking conversions, and A/B test different pitches and offers.
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If you’re writing for passion, or you’re hoping to generate money a bit more directly than the ‘relationship’ route above, you can work on a donation model. There are some big donor-supported newsletters. Most famously, Maria Popova’s widely read Brain Pickings is supported by donations from readers. |
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If you’re creating a newsletter that provides real value to an identifiable group of people, you should think seriously about taking the big, bold step of… charging for it! You’re probably familiar with Substack, the paid newsletter platform that has led to a mini-boom of people launching paid newsletters. But they’re hardly the only game in town (and they take a pretty hefty bite of your profits). With an email service provider (like MailChimp) and a payment platform like Memberful or Pico, you can quickly and easily build your own paid newsletter — with full ownership of your audience (and the letter’s look and feel). You can make your newsletter fully paid, or you can offer some content free and some paid (maybe weekdays are free, for example, and a more in-depth weekend piece is for paid members). You could also leave all of your newsletters free and then charge for access to a special group or Slack. The possible variations are infinite, and the start-up costs are low.
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With affiliate revenue, you recommend products — in an email or in a web article you link to from your email — and you get a cut of the profit when one of your readers buys. Like this…
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From Fatherly's newsletter
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You typically have to apply to be an affiliate; it helps to have a big and engaged audience. The cut can be small or big, ranging from roughly 3% to 50%. You get a code to track when users come from your media property. And you’re off to the races! (You can get an overview of affiliate marketing here.) |
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If you want to dip your toes into advertising — or supplement an existing advertising program — you could start offering classified ads for things like job listings and events. Presuming your newsletter addresses a specific audience or niche, there’s probably a natural community of people with similar interests or in the same industry. Ann Friedman’s newsletter has run these types of ads for a long time, priced by the ‘digital inch.’ Depending on the size of your audience, this could be worth in the hundreds per week or in the thousands.
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If you have a big enough email list with a lot of opens (typically you’ll need to be in the millions of email opens per month), you can run programmatic advertising in your emails. This is basically the equivalent of the website banner ad — but in email. If you’ve paid attention to ads in your inbox, and looked at the small text, you’ve seen the main brand names, such as LiveIntent and PowerInbox. |
From a Washington Post newsletter
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You’re not going to get a great rate on these ads. But they can help fill unused email inventory if you’re running a big email operation and have not been able to sell enough of your stock directly. Which brings us to…
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If you’re selling advertising, the best business to be in is selling to sponsors. You’ve got a nice, valuable email list; your sponsor wants to reach your audience… Bam! A newsletter sponsorship typically looks like this, with the sponsor’s logo under your own:
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A typical sponsorship
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Usually this type of ad is paired with a native ad unit in the body of the email. That is, something that looks like the content of the newsletter, but set off with a label making clear that it’s sponsored. Like this:
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A native unit with the sponsorship above
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This type of email advertising is a huge business right now — and is much more profitable than programmatic email advertising. You can sell newsletter sponsorships directly with an internal sales team or with an outside team. (If you don’t have anyone to sell ads currently, drop me a line here.) |
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When it comes to selling advertising to sponsors on email, this is the big-ticket item. A dedicated email, or sponsored email, is when an advertiser programs the entirety of the email you send to your list.
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A dedicated email sold by Pocket to The Wall Street Journal
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Here, The Wall Street Journal takes over the email and runs their content instead of Pocket’s. These types of takeovers can be content-based, as in this example, or they can be purely commercial — such as using the space to pitch a credit card offer (or anything else). You have to be judicious here. Your audience signed up for content (usually). But with a daily newsletter, it’s possible to do 2-4 of these a month with minimal disruption — especially when the voice, tone, and content of the offers feels organic to your brand.
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Ultimately, you’ll always be balancing content and commerce. But, when you do it well, these things should enhance each other. If you build a valuable subscription product, the revenue that makes it sustainable is ultimately what allows the content to exist — and to improve and grow. If you build a valuable advertising business, you’ve created an audience — a group of people — with common interests. And you’ve connected them to the companies that want to reach them. When it comes to content and commerce, the growth of one fuels the growth of the other. Go out there and grow.
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6 keys to Facebook and Instagram advertising
If you want to grow your email list, you will need to learn the secrets to Facebook and Instagram ads. Social media advertising can grow your list reliably and at a reasonable cost.
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7 smart moves for your media business during coronavirus
The world has changed, but that doesn’t mean it’s stopped for your media business. You still want to find ways to grow, survive, and thrive.
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Great email subject lines: This is what 9,673 tests have taught me
Great email subject lines have certain things in common. This is how to write an email subject line that will get opened.
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The 3 best stories about finding your audience…
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50K emails subscribers (after 14 months)
How the Exploding Topics newsletter got to 50K+ email subscribers.
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How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users
First-hand accounts of how essentially every major consumer app acquired their earliest users, including Tinder, Uber, Superhuman, TikTok, Product Hunt, Yelp, and more than a dozen more.
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Sarah Cooper’s 10,000 Hours
The comedian and Trump lip-sync master honed her humor skills right before our eyes. A look through 100s of tweets, videos, and blog posts to chart how she grew into a phenomenon.
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The 3 best stories about keeping your audience…
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The Email Deliverability Guide
Do you send emails regularly? Then this will be useful for you. Learn everything you need to know about getting deliverability (that is: making it into the Inbox) right.
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Babylon pioneers AMP for Email to achieve a 20% increase in engagement
If you’ve been considering an experiment with AMP for Email, here’s a case study from a health care company that might inspire you to give it a go.
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How puzzles play an essential role in reader engagement
The Wall Street Journal found that using puzzles increased retention significantly, but less than 1% of the audience had played a puzzle. They revamped their onboarding process to encourage new subscribers to play a puzzle in their first week — and boosted engagement across the board.
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The 3 best stories about generating revenue with your audience…
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Nathan Tankus's newsletter subscribers don’t care about diplomas
Subscribers to Nathan Tankus’s newsletter, Notes on the Crises, aren’t bothered by his lack of diplomas. The newsletter, with 450 subscribers, is netting him $45,000 a year — and he thinks he can earn an additional $20,000 from other speaking and writing engagements.
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E-replica editions, the ugly ducklings of digital news, have suddenly become strategic
Once a flawed product, e-editions are now central at several news publications, especially during the pandemic-caused advertising downturn.
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'Churn and burn': Publishers are prioritizing subscription volume over immediate revenue
How major publishers are structuring subscription offers to profit from the pandemic.
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To Gmail, most Black Lives Matter emails are 'Promotions'
One more reason to turn off the Gmail Promotions tab (and for tech companies to stop trying to mediate our relationships with our inboxes): Google shuffled mass emails about racial justice into the marketing tab in this test, mirroring its categorization of political emails.
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The New York Times is opting out of Apple News
A giant potential audience isn’t good enough on its own anymore: “It’s time to re-examine all of our relationships with the big platforms.”
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How Substack has spawned a new class of newsletter entrepreneurs
Founded in 2017, the company allows writers to build their own paid subscription businesses, taking a 10% cut of revenue (in addition to Stripe’s transaction fee for payments). Most coverage of Substack has focused on the coterie of writers newslettering full-time who earn salaries rivaling mainstream jobs, but the chaos of the current media moment has widened the platform’s appeal. New writers have joined and different business strategies, such as bundles, are forming.
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Discover 50+ of the best email newsletter tools in 2020
This is just a lot of good stuff.
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1. 50 free resources for your graphic design projects in 2020
If you happen to be short on funds right now or have been handed a tight budget by a cash-strapped client, there are many free design resources that can help.
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2. Free JSON API to instantly check the spam score of your email messages
Have you ever wanted to process the spam score of incoming or outgoing email messages? Just paste in your email and go.
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3. NiftyImages.com: Real-time email marketing
Want to send an image with your customer’s name on it? Deliver personalized email content using real-time data. Works in every major ESP. With free and paid tiers.
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As a service to readers, Montague Street Media compiles guides to the best resources for media makers…
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Montague Street Media LLC, 99 Wall Street, #1775, New York, NY 10005
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