Below you’ll find an unedited version of a chapter from my new book, Email Marketing Demystified. To get your copy of Email Marketing Demystified, visit www.myemailmarketingbook.com.
In the list building chapter of this book, we discussed co-registration advertising from the perspective of an advertiser. As a mailing list owner that collects organic opt-ins from your website, you can also generate revenue by running a co-registration advertising unit on the “thank you” page that subscribers see after signing up for your mailing list. When a user signs up for your mailing list, they will be presented with a list of additional offers that they can also choose to opt-in to. If a new subscriber selects any of the offers listed, you’ll receive a small commission from the advertiser and the subscriber’s name and email address will automatically be passed on to the advertiser.
Co-registration advertising units can be wildly profitable if you receive a sizable number of opt-ins each month. On a normal page of your website, a display advertisement from Google AdSense or another network might yield between $1.00 and $10.00 for every one thousand people that view the ad. A co-registration advertising unit can make anywhere from $200.00 to $750.00 for every thousand views on your thank you page. Users that have just opted-in to your mailing list are extremely likely to engage with an advertisement because they have already demonstrated they are willing to take action by singing up for your mailing list.
The amount of money that you will make from co-registration advertising will vary depending on the niche of your mailing list and the number of people that sign-up for your email list on your website every month. Advertising networks that offer co-registration ads will often provide an estimate of what they believe that your website can make for every new subscriber. For lower-value and general-interest mailing lists, you might be able to make an average of $0.15-$0.25 for every new subscriber that sees your co-registration advertising unit. For some specific niches, like finance and investing, publishers make between $0.60 and $1.00 for every subscriber that sees their co-registration advertising unit. To calculate how much money a co-registration advertising unit could make your business in a given month, simply multiple the number of website opt-ins you get each month by the estimated amount of revenue you can make per view of your co-registration advertising unit.
While adding display ads to your website from a network like Google AdSense is a straightforward process, getting started with a company that offers co-registration advertising can be a more involved process. There are only a handful of advertising companies that offer co-registration advertising units and you generally can’t sign up for them by filling out a form on a website like you can with some advertising networks. Typically, you will need to contact a number of co-registration advertising companies and provide them information about your mailing list and the demographics of your subscribers. They will give you an estimate of what they think you can make per impression with your mailing list and will want typically you to sign a 12-month agreement to run their unit. Placing ad-code on your website for a co-registration unit is also a bit more involved than putting a display ad unit on your website, because you have to pass the subscriber’s information back to the network through your ad-tag. You can find a list of co-registration advertising companies in the list building chapter of this book.
If you aren’t collecting many opt-ins per month and co-registration advertising companies aren’t interested in you, you can also monetize your “thank you” page with a display advertising unit from Google AdSense or another display advertising company. Your thank you page should be a relatively empty page with little more than a thank you message and the display ad centered on your page. While a “thank you” page with a display ad unit won’t perform quite as well as a co-registration advertising unit, you will find that the ad unit on your thank you page can earn ten to fifteen times more than display ads on other pages.