Hello E-con users.

I am looking for a consultancy or agency that can help me build a commercialistion programme for my organisation's email real-estate.

We are planning to sell space within our email newsletters to our key sponsors who come in three flavours (let's call them gold, silver & bronze).

Some of our emails are very widely read and have very good metrics, others are more niche and perform less impressively. This lends itself to some initial price banding, though at what level is yet to be established.

I would like to find out how we can set price levels/expectations for our email real-estate considering that we currently do NOT have any commecialsation of our email content to base this on. We would look to be selling this  real-estate in newsletter sponsorship-style packages over set periods (annual or more).

Any ideas or suggestions would be gratefully received. There does not seem to be a wealth of info on the web in relation to this subject (that i can find at least) or possible suppliers/advisors.

Thanks

Please partly ignore my last message as it did not focus on the price levels/expectations setting aspect of things.

It is generally hard to estimate price and expectation levels but I've found that some of the most popular ways of doing this is to look at:

• what others are doing in the same market and
• to potentially do a discounted pilot or initial offer kind of thing to investigate the levels of response you receive

I hope this helps.

regards,

Denis
www.naxtech.com

Hi Howard,   Given that your bidding process is every four years it would be hard indeed to compare with other sites.  I've come across portal sites which used the same principle as you but not for advertising lasting such long periods of time.   In their case I used an online bidding system and that included the payment side of things too.  Now, I don't know how exactly you do things at your end but I hope I can help.   Regarding maximising the return from your email advertising real estate, there are many different approaches and they all seem to work.  For example things that you could think of  (these are not suggestions.  just food for thought).

• package up good-performing and bad-performing real estate and sell the package
• price based on number of recipients/emails
• provide trasparency in the results to be expected and price accordingly
• price based on the sections/topics covered in each email or page

Management of such real esatte can get tricky depending on your existing platform and its architecture, but generally speaking integration between your banner management, email marketing, crm or accounting systems is one of the the best ways to go and can really simplify things in the long term.  And if you need assistance in the whole system implementation, we can certainly provide this service.   As for game theory and some more relevant reading on auctions, etc..here's a couple of interesting links:

1. http://www.beyonddiscovery.org/content/view.page.asp?I=3685
2. http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/nonzerosum06.pdf  (especially the second half which focuses more on bidding)

I hope this helps.   Kind Regards,   Denis www.naxtech.com

Howard

I'm sure you've already thought about this, but for other readers in a similar situation, one thing to check first is how these people opted into email communications initially.  It may be that part of the email real-estate is not available for direct marketing purposes, and this will affect the scale of benefits and how such a programme is developed and implemented.

If you choose to include other people's content, served from elsewhere, in your own messages, you should understand there are some risks with that.  For one risk, see the E-Consultancy Limited blog posting and discussion about how malware can be distributed (the post's title relates to Google, but the risk is generic):

http://econsultancy.com/blog/3181-google-adwords-used-to-distribute-malware

Regards

Colin Watson
Technical Director
Watson Hall Ltd for website security

Hi Howard,

If you're the same Howard Blanchard that worked with me at Haymarket we certainly learnt some relevant lessons developing the Healthcare Republic email bulletins.

I run an independent consultancy now, if you fancy a chat about what you're doing drop me a line; david@evisible.co.uk

Cheers,

Dave.