Email advertising: Tips for campaign success

Email advertising is one of the most powerful ways for brands to connect with consumers. With consumers spending 20 minutes of every online hour engaged with email, you can be sure you’ll have a captive audience in the increasingly crowded and competitive online environment.

Let’s take a look at what makes email advertising so appealing.

Email advertising: The benefits

Email advertising has a lot to offer brands. Firstly, there’s no need to worry about bots or ad fraud with email advertising. You can rest assured you’re reaching real, logged-in audiences in email newsletters. Email is also a less noisy, less cluttered environment than other channels — like social media feeds for instance — which enables email ads to truly stand out. Furthermore, by partnering with premium newsletters you align your brand with reputable and trusted publishers. And, that’s not all, either.

Given that subscribers have opted into the emails they receive, they’re already more engaged with the newsletter, the content in it, and — subsequently — the ads within that newsletter. Say, ‘Hi captive audience!’

Another major benefit to email advertising is email’s ability to help brands grow their first-party footprint — a critical component to surviving a cookieless world. And, because email newsletters don’t use third-party cookies to enable targeting but rather hashed emails, email advertising is privacy-safe advertising.

What types of ads I can run?

You’ve got a couple of ad choices at your disposal when it comes to advertising in email.

• Custom display ads. Think of custom display ads as banner ads for email. Units can vary in size depending on the newsletter template and format. Some sizes include 70×550,970×250, 728×90, and 300×250, and can be static or animated. These ads offer high visibility to increase engagement and drive clicks.
• Native ads. Native ads reflect the look and feel of the email environment. Because these ads blend seamlessly with the newsletter, they’re less intrusive and often produce higher engagement rates. You get to leverage publishers’ high-quality brand assets and capitalize on their premium content, while also effectively promoting your products.

How can I ensure a successful email advertising campaign?

When you choose email advertising, you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to ensuring that your ads produce results. However, there are additional steps you can take to make your campaign as successful as possible.

Leverage first-party data

Put your first-party data to work to achieve precision targeting and deliver relevant messaging. We built LiveIntent’s Audience Manager to help you easily leverage your first-party data to create and target the right audiences and meet your business goals.

Custom Audiences:

You can leverage custom audiences for customer acquisition, retention, and re-engagement. All you need is a customer list from your CRM or other data warehouses to define your audience.

Dynamic Audiences:

Leverage site visitor data to reach audiences with ads that reflect products or pages they’ve engaged with on your website to drive purchases.

Lookalike Audiences:

Expand your audience by targeting those who have yet to purchase with your brand but are likely customers based on shared attributes with your best customers.

Measure the right metrics

Align your key performance indicators (KPIs) with your email advertising campaign objectives to make sure you’re tracking the right metrics. With LiveIntent’s reporting tools, you can gain more insight into how your campaign is performing through customized reports, optimize your performance, and boost your results.

Focus on creative

You want your ads to stop customers mid-scroll and capture their attention. So, with this in mind, keep design and ad copy minimal and succinct. Make sure your message and call-to-action (CTA) are prominently displayed. Additionally, a strong image and clear logo are key.

Tailor your landing pages

Landing pages can’t just be beautiful; they have to include a clear and memorable CTA, and highlight the value of your product or service with copy that conveys your brand voice and aligns with your brand image, ad expectations, and campaign goals. Additionally, you’ll want to test your landing pages to drive optimal performance. Swap in different CTA copy to see what resonates with your audience. The insights you glean from experimentation will lead you to a more effective campaign.

Have questions? Want to get started with your campaign? Connect with a LiveIntent expert to learn more about email advertising.