Publishers often look at newsletters as a necessary evil, as they don’t generate enough revenue by themselves (in most cases) to justify real focus. That said, newsletter signup is the single most important tool for capturing emails from consumers.
At the heart of any robust authentication strategy is a well-managed newsletter business. Newsletters grow the user base, grow the number of repeat visitors, and help to tie users to their emails, and when done correctly, the effects can ripple across adtech, marketing, and editorial teams.
Email as cookie replacement
With the phasing out of cookies, authenticated identity – as well as the solutions that enable it, such as LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution – are key to helping the ecosystem find viable replacements for third-party cookies. Email addresses, when properly protected, are a durable, privacy-conscious way to identify your users. By encouraging newsletter signups, publishers are not just collecting emails – they’re capturing valuable first-party data that can be leveraged across multiple platforms.
Newsletters are excellent at generating repeat traffic, which not only ties users to emails, but also drives page views – and as a result, ad revenue. To make this successful, newsletters must be frequent and contain only teasers for the full stories:
- Each piece of content should include only a few sentences in the newsletter. These must be written to entice users to click and “read more.” While editorial teams often prefer whole articles for an improved user experience, the low scale of most newsletters makes it far more effective to think of as a traffic generation tool rather than a content vehicle.
- Click-through URLs should include the email address of the consumer. This enables the email to be pulled into publisher systems, such as your DMP or CDP, once the user arrives on site.
Paying for newsletter signups
While newsletter content and the curation of the written material should be generated by editorial, the business side should be sending and managing newsletters. In addition, a common practice is to earmark the money made from newsletter advertising – usually via programmatic – to in turn promote the newsletters while suppressing the existing user base.
This outreach then drives new user traffic to the newsletter signup page, and with that, increases your audience. This turns bought traffic into increased intent signals, helping to better filter your content to the audience that wants it the most.
To make all of this work, you need your systems to talk to each other. Wherever you attract emails, every email needs to be fed into every relevant system, and these systems should make it easier to utilize emails for advertising and other purposes.
Newsletters: the base of any successful authentication strategy
Newsletters are a foundation from which publishers can grow their first-party data, engage users, generate reliable traffic, and capture the core email base on which the rest of their identity strategy is built.
This is Part 1 in a series by Andrew Kraft on the importance of authentications as a corporate-wide strategy. Read Part 2 here.
Andrew Q. Kraft speaks on issues around identity, privacy, industry evolution, and what all of those mean to the publishing and broadcasting side of the business. Most recently, he served as President & Chief Operating Officer at The Arena Group. Prior to that, he served on the executive team at AppNexus in a variety of roles ranging from head of business and corporate development to the creation of AppNexus’ publisher-direct business to launching their ad sales team to his role as interim Chief Financial officer. Previously, he led the publisher-facing business at Collective after spending several years growing the IAB as head of revenue and member services.
