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The Secret to a Great Newsletter Ad Campaign

Paul McLean, Senior Account Executive, ArcaMax Publishing

Paul
McLean photo With holiday season ad planning right around the corner and economic prosperity in question across the country, the demand for profitable conversions is at an all time high. Almost every day we are bombarded with talk of economic doom and gloom. However, the industry and companies surrounding the Internet have continued to boom. So throw all your money in every online advertising outlet you can find! Savvy business professional would likely say, "No!" simply because they know the secret of testing.

Although ArcaMax Publishing runs tests for advertisers every week, we still find that some advertisers do not realize the thought and strategy involved in a true test. Testing is more than just placing an ad in a newsletter and monitoring the performance.

Newsletter advertising is very different than placing banners on a website or creating your own text newsletter. ArcaMax's HTML online newsletters are hybrids of traditional print advertising, web placements, magazine subscriptions, and email. Therefore it's critical that advertisers treat it as such.

Basically, there's always two parts to any newsletter ad campaign; the ad itself and the landing page. The ad grabs the reader's interest and the landing page to does the selling for the offer. Keeping this in mind, let's now open up and expand the conversation to testing these two interrelated components.

Testing can happen in many forms. Here is just a couple examples of testing ads and landing pages. - Test two ads featuring different offers in an A/B split test
- Test the return on investment of a lower newsletter ad verses a top placement newsletter ad
- Compare two landing pages using an automatic rotator
- Test the click through rate of a banner image of smiling people verses an image of the product
- Compare the ad format of a text ad verses a banner ad

The hidden secret about testing is you need to be strategically fiscal with your chosen advertising budget from the beginning and gather as much data up front as financially possible. You need to accept the fact that the best way for you to capitalize on the test campaign is to cast the largest net possible. Remember, the goal is to determine the most profitable placement. A small net has less chance of catching the best placement. So test as many different ad placements with as many ads as you possibly can. Then, collect all the data and start planning a strategy.

The most amazing thing is that regardless of your campaign cost this can be achieved. For example, "Deep Pocket Agency" spends $5,000 to test every ArcaMax advertising placement. This allows quick identification of the best placement to post their ad in order to generate the quickest profit. This also allows them to generate revenue while testing driving traffic in other areas that were not as profitable upfront. On the other hand, "Small Time Mom & Pop Company" may only have $500 to invest but they may have to put twice as much thought into their campaign creative and still do multiple tests.

Remember, if you don’t have a target then you are being very inefficient. Not necessarily inefficient in your time but inefficient in benefiting from testing opportunities. Every time you advertise on the Internet – it's a test! This is one of the most common statements throughout the halls of the ArcaMax Sales complex.

"True" testing is the most under-appreciated mechanism of many online advertisers' strategy. When most advertisers tell me, "We'd like to run a small test," I know they’re really saying they want to test a small placement to determine if an immediate profit can be made. This is acceptable when the advertiser has realistic expectations. For example, it is unlikely that a lower ad will have the same results as a top newsletter ad. While only testing the lower banner ad position, the advertiser will never know if the top ad placement will return a profitable return on investment.

And this is where the great divide happens. Expectations should be shaped by the parameters you set fourth for your test campaign. These parameters will most likely be shaped by your campaign budget which is catalyst for your testing efforts. So layout your game plan and go to work!

Do you have questions about planning a newsletter test? Please contact Paul McLean with questions.

This news arrived on: 04/29/2008