Banner or Text Advertising in Email Newsletters
A client asked our advice last week about email newsletter sponsorship and the effectiveness of advertising formats to generate click-traffic. They had the opportunity go with three options either individually or together including banner advertising, text advertising (like Google Adsense) or sponsored editorial content. They didn’t know which was likely to return the best response.
Most people’s gut instinct is to be very wary of banner advertising because many businesses have had their fingers burnt by expecting PPC level CTRs and click-throughs from websites where banner advertising is a real-estate filler. However, you need to divorce yourself from this mindset of traditional display advertising because the email newsletter audience is already far more targeted than general website traffic. This particular newsletter was a specialist bulletin that was an opt-in publication to members of an content-rich website. With a significant volume of recipients, the publication looked like a good fit for our client. But what type of advertising should they opt for was the question – banner, text or advertorial?
Unlike many online marketing initiatives, there is surprisingly little information, case-studies or advice on this subject. This is probably because of the individual nature of email newsletters and the composition of their audience profiles. We have worked with clients that send lengthy content-rich newsletters that recipients will print to read whilst commuting, whilst other publications offer 1-line teasers of website-based content that draws the recipient back to the website and further information and associated products/services.
A study carried out by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants found that sponsored content such as case studies or white papers received more reader attention than banner adverts. Having analysed the time readers spent on specific sections of a content-rich email, they found that sponsored editorial content received around 90% of the time that the reader spent on content from the regular authors. They also found that results could be significantly improved when combinations of brand exposure were used such as sponsored editorial content plus graphical advertising or text advertising in the same newsletter. Whilst they acknowledged that using banner and text advertising together was more effective than a single ad channel alone, response rates were eight times higher when graphical/text adverts were used in conjunction with sponsored editorial content. The study’s author Hank Berkowitz said “If you don’t have the sponsored content to reinforce the message in your ads, they are less likely to remember who provided the information.”
Another study carried out using the email publication Hedge Fund Daily looked at the response levels of text and banner advertising formats when driving recipients to download a white paper. Despite an initial hypothesis that the visually appealing graphical banner would be more effective, they actually found that the text ad outperformed the banner ad by a ratio of more than 2:1. They believed that this was due to effective integration of text advertising alongside regular editorial content and the reader’s tendency to ‘tune-out’ graphical advertising. But they did add a caveat that this would be something that should be tested on each publication due to the nature of the audience profile.
We would agree with this note of caution when advising anybody of the choice of ad formats. There is no golden rule for which format to use. The best option would be to run split-tests to determine the effectiveness of each format or combination of formats. However, this might not be possible so a sequence of tests could be carried out to the entire user-base on successive broadcasts using various combinations of advertising.
Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full display advertising service from creative development to placement and reporting as well as a full email marketing service for both sales broadcasts and newsletter communications. Contact us to discuss your display advertising requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.
Tags: banner advertising, Display Advertising, Email, Email Marketing