E-mail marketing for publishers: challenges and solutions

E-mail marketing for publishers can be a challenge, but it is also an essential opportunity for publishers who want to attract more visitors to their website. Many publishers, such as New Skool Media, Hearst Magazines the Netherlands, F&L Media, and VIP Media, use Basedriver. It is possible for these publishers to get up to 40% of their online traffic from e-mail. There are a number of specific challenges for publishers who want to be more successful with e-mail marketing.

This article is also available in Dutch.

Selecting the right subscriber

Every publisher will recognize it: monitoring the marketing database is very difficult. Clients get a subscription, give this as a gift, unsubscribe and subscribe again. Over the years, they may have had a large number of subscriptions and cancelled them again. E-mail marketing for publishers starts with a good marketing infrastructure that is prepared for subscriptions.

When selecting clients, it is essential to take this into account. It is not possible to just select all unsubscribers for a win-back campaign: everyone who has become active in the meantime must be filtered out.

Selections on the various publisher brands

Many publishers have multiple brands. Campaigns where clients of one brand are approached with another brand can be very successful. However, this makes selections extremely complex. If you approach the unsubscribers of four brands with an offer from a fifth brand, the active subscribers of this fifth brand should be excluded. If several marketeers create campaigns for their own base and those of others, it is essential that the process of selections is well automated and safe.

In Basedriver, we ensure that not every marketeer can approach clients of other marketeers. In addition, we keep track of every client’s relationship with the brand (prospect, newsletter subscriber, subscriber, unsubscriber, etc.). Based on these relationships and the contact pressure, a personal contact planning is made. In this way, everyone can safely create campaigns and the selection process is automated.

Selecting multiple brands in Basedriver

Reuse of published content for e-mail marketing

One thing that plays an important role for publishers, is content. After all, it is the primary product of the publisher. It often happens that content is sent once in a newsletter and is not reused later on. That is a waste of resources.

Basedriver keeps track on who received what content. We also create a personal content planning for each profile. This makes it for instance possible that new subscribers still receive the best content of the past year. Because of the personal content planning, almost everyone can receive a personal newsletter. This newsletter is created fully automatically. Since it is possible to import content with RSS feeds, you are always up-to-date.

Adoption by marketeers and editors

If a database analyst is needed for every selection or HTML knowledge is required for every e-mail, it becomes very difficult to create enough campaigns. It might be more successful to send small campaigns more often than large ones. However, this is labor-intensive. Only when editors and marketeers are able to create campaigns themselves, the volume will increase and with that the revenue.

Basedriver makes sure no technical knowledge is required to create campaigns. The user interface of our e-mail marketing software is user-friendly and selections are made automatically. Because of this, marketeers and editors will be more productive and the e-mail marketing for publishers becomes more successful. That is also why adoption is one of the first steps in our step-by-step plan to generate more traffic from e-mail.

Do you want more information about e-mail marketing for publishers?

E-mail marketing is an essential part of the marketing mix for subscriptions. Basedriver is email marketing software specifically designed for this challenge. For example for automatically approaching unsubscribers, sending personal newsletters or automating campaigns. We make sure that you generate more visitors from e-mail marketing and that you can recognize those visitors on the website.

Would you like to know more about e-mail marketing with Basedriver? Please contact us for a personal demonstration.

This post is also available in: Nederlands (Dutch)