With the holiday season fast approaching, many marketers are scrambling to prepare for the busiest time of the year. After all, a half-baked advertising strategy could mean missing out on record levels of high-intent traffic.
Retail brands especially are striving to stay on top of their digital marketing game. The pandemic has increasingly transitioned the holiday shopping season to online, even outside of Cyber Monday. In fact, eMarketer predicted that ecommerce sales will rise by 11.3% in 2021. However, marketers in any industry can benefit from revamping their online advertising strategy, from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses.
If you’re feeling behind on your advertising plan ahead of the holiday season, don’t worry. We’ve put together a complete guide to how your company can make the most of your marketing budget this year. With newsletter sponsorships, you can partner with publishers in your niche to connect with your target audience. Let’s talk about why email advertising can work for your business, and how you can launch your campaign in time for the holidays.
Why newsletter sponsorships are essential for your holiday advertising campaign
When running a holiday advertising campaign, you never want to put all of your eggs in one basket. Many businesses aim to spread their marketing efforts across several mediums, from influencer sponsorships to LinkedIn ads. Over the past few years, they’ve also increasingly flocked to email marketing. According to marketing software provider Emarsys, 81% of SMBs rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel.
There’s a good reason why email marketing has started to compete with social media giants. According to a report by The Radicati Group, the number of people using email reached 4 billion in 2020, making up half of the world’s population. By 2024, this figure was projected to climb up to 4.4 billion.
Whether your business has already started investing in in-house email marketing or you’re completely new to the industry, newsletter sponsorships can help you get ahead of your competition. Let’s talk about some of the main benefits of partnering with newsletters this holiday season.
Reach a wider audience
Social media adoption has reached an all-time high. According to findings by Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans use some form of social media. However, that still leaves out nearly one-third of the population. This missing piece is disproportionately made up of older audiences. While you may be able to reach 84% of young adults (age 18-29) on social media, that figure drops to 45% for seniors (age 65+).
Additionally, user growth has begun to slow for all demographics and even decline for some. On the other hand, email has been around since 1971, and it doesn’t seem to be leaving anytime soon. Despite its age, it’s gradually expanded over the years as it continues to play a central role in day-to-day life.
By investing in email, you can expand your campaign to reach a range of potential customers, including those who aren’t active on social media.
Create timely campaigns
When it comes to effective marketing, timeliness is key. Newsletter sponsorships can allow you to align your message with the surrounding content, appearing more relevant to your audience.
High-quality newsletters often curate their content for each issue around a chosen theme. For instance, a news-oriented publication may focus on a common thread from current events over the past week. On the other hand, a fashion newsletter may use most of its email content outlining a new trend.
By working with publishers to connect your offerings to the overall theme, you’ll appear more valuable to readers, which can improve success.
In the fall and winter, many publishers will run a special edition of their newsletter, ranging from festive content to holiday gift guides. Holiday emails may have a higher budget and themed designs, or they may just focus more heavily on seasonal topics.
Either way, most readers know what they’re getting into when they open a holiday edition newsletter. Therefore, if your company is launching a seasonal product line or running a Black Friday deal, partnering with a holiday newsletter may drum up more interest.
Target audiences directly
Although targeted advertising has been around for decades, it’s made significant advancements over the past few years. These improvements seem to benefit advertisers and customers alike. In fact, in a study by Adlucent, 71% of respondents said that they prefer ads tailored to their interests and shopping habits.
However, researchers have also found that targeted ads can also give rise to concerns over privacy. Customers generally appreciate seeing ads that align with their interests, but it can be unnerving when those recommendations are too accurate.
With newsletter sponsorships, you can figure out your audience’s interests based on the niche of the publication. For instance, if a reader subscribes to a yoga newsletter, there’s a pretty high chance that they’re interested in yoga, as well as other health-related topics. Because opting to receive a newsletter indicates a high level of commitment, it’s a strong signal to advertisers.
Programmatic ads for newsletters
If you’re a die-hard fan of programmatic advertising, you can still test the waters of email sponsorships with tools like Paved’s Ad Network.
With our ad network, you can identify your target demographic based on specific qualities, including age, gender and job title. Once you’ve defined your audience, you can set a daily budget, bid type, bid amount and frequency cap. When it’s launched, your placement will run across several newsletters at once based on your specifications.
Build relationships
Research finds that advertising is the least trusted source of brand information among consumers. After all, who can blame them? If you’ve ever driven by an empty billboard on the highway, you know that for the right price, anyone can display their message to the masses. Digital advertising isn’t much different.
Earlier in 2021, the consumer group Which? found that Facebook and Google failed to remove a significant proportion of scam ads on their platforms, at 26% and 34%, respectively. That, coupled with ongoing problems with misinformation, has left consumers skeptical of social media content.
With newsletter sponsorships, you’re presenting to an audience that has already built a relationship with the publisher. Your placement will appear as a part of the newsletter rather than a single post in a user’s feed.
Additionally, unlike with programmatic ads, publishers won’t necessarily accept any sponsorship offer that comes their way. They may reject requests that they don’t think would be a good fit. This provides a quality check to ensure that they’ll only partner with brands that they deem valuable to their readers.
Holiday advertising tips
If you’re running a holiday advertising campaign this year, odds are that your content is all but launched by now. However, if you’re falling behind on your advertising, we’ve put together some marketing tips and ideas to engage your audience this season.
Play on emotion
Whether you’re advertising for Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Years, holiday marketing campaigns are often synonymous with emotion. According to the Ace Metrix 2020 holiday ad analysis, 24% of ads last year were considered heartfelt, 24% evoked nostalgia and 31% were soothing. This makes a lot of sense if you think about where you’ll see many of your customers during the holiday season-- finalizing plans, reminiscing on the past year and preparing to spend time with their loved ones.
If you want to tug on your viewers’ heartstrings, think about the role that your product or service plays in your customers’ lives. Does it help people connect? Will it let them spend more time with loved ones? Once you figure out where your product can fit into the holidays, center your placement on that idea.
Retail brands like Kohl’s are infamous for running the best holiday advertisements year after year, including 2021’s Dance with All Your Heart commercial. However, some companies may have to dig deeper than others to find an emotional angle.
Still, even the least sentimental brands can find ways to reveal the emotion behind their customer experience. Think about the commercial for the Porsche 911. A luxury car may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an emotional ad. However, it focuses on the nostalgia of daydreaming as a child to tap into a personal memory for many viewers.
Take away the seasonal stress
It’s important to recognize that warm and fuzzy feelings aren’t the only side effects of the holidays. According to a survey conducted by OnePoll and Joy Organics, 88% of Americans feel that the festive season is the most stressful time of the year. Topping the list of holiday stressors are financial concerns, pressure to get the perfect gift and keeping up with the expectations of the season.
With this in mind, marketers can focus on creating value for their customers by aiming to reduce stress. For this strategy, you can think about the more practical benefits of your product. You can go above and beyond to put out product seasonal content or tools to help potential customers.
If you’re going to create new resources, make sure that your offerings match up with your identity as a brand. For example, a company like Hello Fresh might release a series of holiday cooking webinars. Similarly, a web design firm might offer seasonal web page templates. As a retail brand, you can even do something as simple as putting together a list of gift ideas to help out holiday shoppers.
Not only can this kind of content serve as an effective lead magnet, but it can also build authority among potential customers.
Make it fun
The holiday season is a time to celebrate and be merry. If there’s ever a time to get creative, it’s right now. When running a holiday campaign, feel free to think outside the box. Get your audience engaged by creating a branded hashtag, hosting a giveaway or running a challenge. You can also gamify the experience by offering quizzes or games related to your company.
On the other hand, if you want to impress your leads with festive graphics, you can send them to a holiday-themed landing page. Similarly, if you have a physical product, you can temporarily release new designs to spread holiday cheer. Think: Starbucks’ annual holiday cups or Macy’s Christmas windows.
Whatever you create, don’t forget to add a touch of holiday spirit. It can be as simple as adding wintery accents like snowflakes across your website, or as major as redecorating your online storefront to look like Santa’s workshop.
Keep in mind that these types of campaigns will likely require more time, money and effort. Before committing to an idea, make sure that you have the resources to pull it off effectively.
3 ways to run a holiday advertising campaign on Paved
Ready to launch your holiday sponsorship campaign but not sure how to pull it off? Let’s go through three methods you can use to run a seasonal campaign on Paved.
1. Send out a dedicated email
A dedicated email is an email entirely devoted to the advertiser. The partnering publisher will send the content out to its email list, typically including its own logo at the top of the email. While this is generally a more expensive option, it also tends to perform better than other types of sponsorships.
To run your own dedicated email on Paved, navigate to the marketplace and search your chosen category. For instance, if you want to promote your fitness brand, you might sort by Health & Wellness. You can look through the newsletter profiles to see what stands out as the right partner. If you find one you like, check under Available Sponsorships to see if there’s an option for Dedicated Email.
Once you’ve chosen a prospective partner, click Book a Sponsorship to choose your preferred dates and send them a message. If the publisher accepts your request, you can upload your creative immediately.
2. Run ads in several newsletters across your niche
If you’d like to diversify your holiday marketing strategy, you can run ads in multiple newsletters within your niche. If you’re working with a smaller budget, you can opt for more affordable types of sponsorships, such as a sponsored email. This can help you test out newsletters without committing too much of your budget at first.
When it comes to choosing the right partners, you’ll want to base your research on three main areas: niche, value and demographic. To start, you can find newsletters in your same niche through the Paved marketplace. Simply search or filter by a category to find newsletters surrounding the same topic as your brand.
On Paved, we also track sponsorship performance metrics based on previous campaigns. That way, you can use a publisher’s historical cost per click (CPC) to decide whether it’s worth it to partner with them. Similarly, we report each newsletter’s demographics, broken down by qualities including location, gender, age, employment and interests.
Once you’ve run a round of sponsorships across a range of newsletters, keep an eye on your performance to decide which publishers to run repeat sponsorships with in the future.
3. Target your audience using the ad network
The third main strategy for running newsletter sponsorships on Paved this season is through the ad network. This platform is the closest you’ll get to social media ads when sponsoring newsletters. With this system, you can target specific customers through a range of attributes, including location, job title, industry, company size, location, gender and interests.
You can also set specifications such as a daily budget, bid type, bid amount and frequency cap. Once you build your target audience and upload some festive ad copy, we’ll integrate your placement natively into several newsletters across our platform.
Final thoughts
The holiday season is a crucial time for marketers. Luckily, you can make the most of it by incorporating newsletter sponsorships into your advertising. Sign up as an advertiser with Paved to launch your holiday newsletter campaign.
