How to add Adverts to a Mailchimp Email Campaign

You send out your email newsletter and want to monetise your email marketing. Fortunately it’s very simple to add advertising into an email campaign. There are however considerations that affect whether you should in fact add advertisements into your email marketing.

Below I list various email newsletter advertising services and the reasons that you should (perhaps) think twice before adding adverts into your email campaigns.

How to Add Adverts into an Email Campaign

How Email Campaign Ads Work

Once you’ve chosen an advertising service that enables email marketing advertising, the process for showing an advert in your message is usually as follows:

1. Your ad provider will give you a snippet of HTML to add to your email template.
2. When a recipient opens your email the email campaign requests an advert.
3. The advert provider typically provides an advert targeted at the subscriber.
4. The advert shows for the recipient (the advert shows with very little delay).

Should your subscriber click the advert you’ll get paid for the click.

Services Providing Email Campaign Ads

There are a few email advert providers out there. Their target markets (i.e. who they want as customers) vary as does the quality of adverts that they provide and the amount they pay you when a recipient clicks an advert.

Below are some of the more widely used email advertising providers. Some target large corporates (e.g. over 3 million advert views a month) and some target organisations with even small-ish contact numbers:

• Powerinbox
• Passendo
• LiveIntent

Reasons Why You Shouldn’t add Adverts into your Email Marketing

We know that we can add adverts into our email campaigns but should we? Organisations with large list sizes (over a million contacts) that send news to their recipients on a regular basis (e.g media companies) can certainly benefit from adding adverts. In my opinion it is important to answer (honestly) the following question before adding adverts to your email campaigns: Do recipients of the email campaign reasonably expect to see adverts in the email message they receive?

The biggest issues with showing adverts in an email campaign are:

1. As soon as you include an advert you are trying to make the recipient click to another website; usually in an email campaign we try to get the recipient to click to go to our website or otherwise view our products or services.
2. You have some control over the adverts that show in your newsletter but you must be prepared that there may be adverts seen by recipients that promote your competitors.
3. Having an advert in an email newsletter isn’t expected for most industries. Will your recipients unsubscribe or mark you as a spammer if you send adverts in your content?
4. If you don’t have a large number of subscribers that you send to frequently then you are unlikely to make any viable amount of money from showing adverts. Are the risks worth the tiny reward?

Ultimately it really does come down to your list size, frequency of sending and whether your subscribers reasonably expect to see adverts in email communication from you.