General Mills increases email newsletter revenue by 26%

Background

General Mills serves the world by making food people love. They engage with their subscribers through several email newsletters across their many brands, including Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Tablespoon, and Box Tops For Education. LiveIntent helps General Mills generate revenue from their newsletters with direct-sold advertising and by bringing demand from the LiveIntent programmatic exchange.

Goal

General Mills was searching for ways to improve their newsletter monetization and increase revenue without disrupting their subscribers’ reading experience.

Solution

As the first step on the path to kickstarting revenue growth, LiveIntent reviewed the layout of General Mills’ newsletter templates. All of their ad units were placed at the bottom of their templates. Knowing that ad units placed higher in email templates typically attract more premium bid rates and receive better engagement, their LiveIntent team worked with General Mills to place a multi-size ad unit above-the-fold in their newsletter.

Since this incremental ad unit occupied premium real estate within their newsletter, it justified a premium price. A higher CPM floor was set and the ad unit was made collapsible, meaning ads would only serve when high-value bids were available.

Keeping their subscribers at the front of their decision making, General Mills conducted a controlled test of the new ad unit in a few lower-volume newsletters to see if the above-the-fold ad units had an impact on subscription and engagement rates. Not only did this placement have no impact on subscription rates for General Mills, but results from the initial test yielded CPMs and fill rates well above what they had expected. With successful test results in hand, General Mills expanded the implementation of the above-the-fold ad unit to all of their high-volume newsletters.

Results

After rolling out the above-the-fold ad unit to all their major newsletters, General Mills saw a +11% increase in high-value, bid-on impressions (YoY) yielding a +26% increase in revenue.