It's a good idea for law firms to consider advertising "niche" practice areas in email newsletters targeted at prospective clients of those practice areas. For example, if a law firm specializes in representing private equity firms or hedge funds, it might consider placing an ad in PE Wire (reaching over 40,000 private equity and related industry professionals on a daily basis) or Hedge Fund Daily (reaching over 95,000 hedge fund and related industry professionals on a daily basis).
When inserting an email newsletter ad, the ad should link to a landing page that offers visitors the chance to download something of value (e.g., a white paper) in exchange for providing some basic contact information (typically name and email address with phone number optional - remember to keep the form short to maximize conversion rate). If the firm even gets a few solid leads, the investment may be recouped many times over.
In terms of newsletter ad formats, there are two options - a graphical banner or button ad (typically positioned at the top of the newsletter or in the right margin (a/k/a skyscraper)), or a text ad (typically positioned among the newsletter articles). Which format will perform better? It probably depends on the industry and readership, but most people's "gut" reaction seems to be that visually appealing, "cool" graphic banner ads - with nice colors and animation - will attract far more interest than dull looking text ads.
Well, that wasn't the case with a client who recently placed both banner ads and text ads in PE Wire and Hedge Fund Daily. The text ads outperformed the banners ads by more than 2 to 1 in terms of driving traffic to the landing page where the client offered a white paper.
Why the difference? Could be the "Google Adwords" effect. As some of our readers may be familiar, Google has long offered website owners the option of displaying blocks of text ads on their sites. Called "Google Adsense," the program automatically crawls the content of website pages and delivers ads that are relevant to the site's audience and content. While Google now offers image ads, text ads have remained the most popular. The reason seems to be that the text ads are often so well integrated into the sites that display them that visitors often mistake the ads for part of the site's content and click on them (generating more revenue for the site owner).
Seems the same effect is at work with newsletter text ads. Well-positioned among the newsletters' articles, the text ads seem to more easily catch readers' attention as they peruse the core newsletter content. Whereas it seems readers may have conditioned themselves to ignore the fancy banner ads in the margins as they focus on the content. Our theory, anyway.
Of course, as noted, results may differ in different newsletters targeted at different audiences. But the lesson learned is don't write off text ads because they aren't as "fancy" or "cool" as graphic banner ads. You have to test both formats and see which works better for the newsletter selected.
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