Was it night-time skiing? Or partaking of certain vision-enhancing activities that happen to be legal in Colorado?
No! That’s not what’s keeping publishers up at night – it’s the top business challenges that they grapple with, and that the executives attending the Digiday Publishers Summit 2015 in Vail, Colorado almost unanimously lamented:
- Monetizing mobile
- Fighting or friending Facebook, Google, and other platforms
- Over-relying on advertising
- Content is not king
- Maximizing existing investment in technology partners
The Lyris team including myself were at the Summit listening, sharing, and learning alongside the larger numbers of digital publishing execs there. We’ll explore each of their top challenges in a five-part blog series, starting with this one:
Challenge #1: How to better monetize the mobile channel
By far the biggest challenge that came to light is how to better monetize publishers’ mobile channels (e.g. apps) since display advertising CPM fees are just one third that of the fees that publishers can charge for their regular website.
Brian Morrissey, editor-in-chief at Digiday, dubbed it, “Mobile is eating the world.” Just about every publisher listed it as one of their top two challenges.
No wonder. For most publishers, the majority of their audience has shifted to using mobile devices. So the low CPMs threaten to decimate publishers’ incomes. Yet, the call for how to get the CPMs raised remained unanswered.
How Lyris helps publishers address the challenge
Publishers, you are looking in the wrong places! Guess what is the number one activity that consumers engage in on their smartphones? It’s checking email!
Marketing Land: Email is Top Activity on Smartphones, Ahead of Web Browsing & Facebook
Publishers in-the-know take advantage of email to engage their audiences while they are on their mobile devices. These publishers drive additional advertising revenue both within the emails and on their regular, mobile-first websites when more readers click through from the emails.
Lyris recommended DOs and DONTs:
- DO take advantage of email – the channel that marketers every year consistently rate as the top channel for driving marketing ROI, far above social media.
- DON’T merely blast email newsletters at your audience – nobody likes to read static newsletters.
- DO partner with your email marketing provider and request their assistance to optimize audience engagement for you with the help of best practice audience messaging programs, e.g. welcome programs, preference centers, triggered updates, retention offers, and win-back.
- DO maximize the relevancy of messages to each individual recipient by taking advantage of automated content personalization that intelligently assembles and delivers the exact content for each recipient that he or she is most likely to engage with.
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Cross posted from the Lyris Connections Blog
