• Break Through the Internet: How to Create a Blog Conversion Strategy

By prioritizing blog conversions within your content marketing strategy, you could be racking up high-quality leads and, eventually, quantifiable sales results. By optimizing your blog for conversions, you could also stay ahead of the competition. While there’s no one-strategy-fits-all model for increased conversion rates, Mirabel’s Marketing Manager will dive into key conversion metrics, how to optimize your blog for a high conversion rate, and more.

• Google’s ‘helpful content update’ Rolls Out: What Publishers Need to Know

Google has begun rolling out a series of improvements to Search to make it easier to find helpful content “made by, and for, people”, part of a broad continuing effort to bring more authentic info into Google Search. According to the search giant, the “helpful content update” tackles content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.

• Making Sense of Targeting Without Third-Party Cookies

Thanks to Google, making sense of a world without third-party cookies continues to be a challenge. And it’s hard to plan for the end when it’s so unclear when that will be. The already-crowded market for alternative ways to do this will only get more crowded. To separate the wheat from the chaff, here’s a primer on how the different alternatives are shaking out. There are exceptions and nuances, of course, but in general the alternatives tend to fall into one of three categories.

• Programmatic Advertising 101: A Beginner’s Guide for Advertising Sales Reps (Part 1)

Programmatic advertising, at its most basic, provides a variety of ways to automate the proactive efforts mentioned above. With that automation, opportunities abound to provide advertisers, publishers, and audiences only those quality ads that make sense. And with that quality comes ample opportunity for all to profit. With that inspiration, we present a glossary of programmatic ads terminology to help your ad sales reps get familiar with the terms and concepts that they will have to understand to sell programmatic ads.

• How to Optimize Your Email Sender Name to Boost Open Rates

In order to maintain deliverability, each campaign needs to be good enough to successfully pass through spam filters, be opened, read, and not marked as spam by your recipients. The best way to achieve this? By only emailing those who’ve opted in to your campaigns and optimizing elements like your sender name, subject lines, and content. For now, let’s specifically look at sender name best practices and optimizations.

• ‘Catering to your most engaged readers is worth the investment’: How Publishers Are Doubling Down on Engagement

Engagement metrics are considerably more valuable for publishers compared to page views and bounce rates. A new whitepaper by Poool looks into the most useful engagement metrics and also provides tips on building engagement backed by examples from a variety of publishers.

• ‘Making sure that we are reaching new audiences’: How Publishers Are Innovating With Audio

Audio is evolving rapidly. Going beyond podcasts, publishers are experimenting with audio articles, live/social audio, flash briefings, and so on. FIPP’s Innovation in Media report rounds up the exciting innovations happening in this area with informative case studies and valuable insights.

• How Publishers Publish: The Best Magazine Software in the Industry

When it comes to magazine media and digital publications, reliable software tools are a necessity. From publishing CRM and magazine design, to circulation and subscription management, this ultimate guide to magazine software is an overview of the most popular software tools in the publishing industry.

• 7 Email Newsletter Templates to Inspire Your Next Campaign

One of the most important factors to consider when formulating your newsletter campaign is the template you choose. The best email newsletters should remain relatively consistent throughout each edition you send, be easy to read, and feature intriguing headlines and visuals. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of our favorite email newsletter templates and explain the advantages that come with each design. By the end, you’ll have a better idea of not just how newsletters can look, but how your company can benefit from implementing specific features that will be most effective for your business and your target audience.

• Publishers: A Deep Dive on Google’s Topics API

The Topics API is part of a series of browser APIs Google has introduced to Chrome to help ad tech companies adapt to the deprecation of third-party cookies. More precisely, the Topics API is designed to support behavioral targeting approaches, which have historically relied on third-party cookies. Rather than sending identified data (cookies) along the ad tech chain, Topics uses the browsing directly from a device to assign users to categories, known as “topics.” These topics are then exposed directly to ad tech vendors via the API, without ever requiring an identifier to leave the browser. Google Chrome believes this will enhance the privacy of its end users.

• Capturing, Activating and Managing First-Party Data for a Cookieless World

For businesses of all kinds, standard operating procedures are at risk. After cookies vanish, the job of monitoring website traffic, collecting user data to improve product and digital experiences, and delivering, measuring and attributing targeted advertisements will be affected… Effectively leveraging first-party data helps ensure strong outcomes for campaigns, user experiences and customer relationships. By successfully utilizing customer insights provided by the customers themselves, marketers are carving out a new competitive advantage for their organizations.

• A Sales Rep’s Best Friend: Why Integrated Marketing Tools Are Crucial

If you work in ad sales and depend on your CRM, some tools are absolutely essential. At the bare minimum, you will want your CRM to integrate with your email account. After all, if you spend all day in Outlook or Gmail, why not take advantage of it? However, there are plenty of other marketing tools out there that a publishing CRM can offer. And just because you aren’t using them now doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be.

 

 

• 16 Proven Ways to Build and Leverage Your Customer Database

Developing and leveraging your customer database is vital to digital marketing teams. A growing database of customers means more potential engagement, buying decisions, and more. The information you get from your customers is also incredibly beneficial to guiding your sales and marketing strategies for lead generation. Knowing so much about your customers allows you to properly use those insights to create and adjust strategies. If you need a refresher on how to build and how to leverage your customer database, Mirabel’s Marketing Manager has a few ideas.

• 82% of Users Prefer Lighter Ad Experience: How Publishers Can Recover Revenues Lost Through Adblocking

“Publishers need to cut through the marketing pitch that adblock wall vendors give them and really listen to what users want,” Marty Krátký-Katz, co-founder & CEO of Blockthrough, suggests. “Users install adblockers to avoid interruptions—and at the very basic level, the pop-up messages triggered by adblock walls are a disruption in the browsing experience. So, as a solution, adblock walls perpetuate the very problem that they intend to solve.”

• ‘Lack of commercial incentive’: Google’s Third-Party Cookie Delay Is a Flip to Procrastinators

The biggest winners in the protracted end of granular tracking in Google’s Chrome browser: procrastinators. Barely a week has passed since the announcement that the third-party cookie’s execution has been stayed further and there’s already evidence that ad executives are using it as an excuse to slow down post-cookie preparation plans.  In fairness, it’s sort of understandable. The further away a problem is, the less inclined someone is to tackle it — least of all marketers. Simply put, extended deadlines are an anathema to urgency, as the discourse over Google’s decision makes clear.

• Digital Ads in 2022: The Challenges of Transitioning Your Team to Digital

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  You hear that warning a lot when you plan for the future. I know I heard that plenty when I was a publisher helping ad sales teams transition from a print-focus to digital. As far as business expressions go, there are few that I disagree with more than that one. Its dismissing message bears no reality on what I experienced in helping salespeople and advertising teams make the leap to digital ad sales. So let’s dispel this oft-repeated phrase, once and for all.

• 7 Best Practices for Successful Email Subject Lines in 2022

With spam filters constantly advancing, digital marketers need to know what triggers spam filters in order to increase email deliverability and land in inboxes. That’s only half the battle, though. Email marketers also need to stay on top of subscribers’ behaviors and interests in order to continue getting opened, because engagement (clicks, forwards, and replies) affects deliverability. Both avoiding the spam filter and getting a campaign opened relies heavily on your subject line. It’s the first thing your subscriber sees in their inbox.

• Publishers: Always Be Optimizing…

The use of algorithms to optimize ad performance has provided tremendous value for digital advertisers over the last decade. Publishers need to demand similar technology to optimize their performance, too. The major benefit of optimization algorithms in content recommendation ads is their ability to analyze thousands of ad-to-content combinations. This enables publishers to run ads that will generate the greatest revenue while providing advertisers the highest conversion rates and users the best experience.

• The Downturn Ad Economy: A Tale of Two Narratives

There are two competing narratives on advertising at the moment. They sit uneasily with each other. But both are correct. Ad dollars are being spent, but they’re also being cut. Yes, these two things can be true at the same time. No, the latter perspective doesn’t make the former any less valid or vice versa. Really, it’s a matter of perspective.

• Conquering All Media: The Best Ad Sales Software in Every Industry

At its most basic, an ad sales management program can track all stages of a sale through a customer relationship management (CRM) system. At its best, it’s a proactive tool that ensures work is done efficiently, effectively, and in step with every move that both your team members and your valued clients make. What’s important to remember is that these systems are a means for your business. In this article, we’ll go industry by industry to spotlight not just the systems that are available, but also the traits and capabilities you should look for and count on.

• Why Your Email Sender Reputation Matters, Especially Now

It’s easy to avoid common email deliverability problems, but coming back from a poor sender reputation is tricky. It’s a longer-term process that requires an organic increase in email deliverability. Take a few email marketing strategies from Mirabel’s Marketing Manager on how to improve your email deliverability and sender reputation

• Smaller Publishers Risk Missing Out on the Benefits of AI

Investment in AI doubled in 2021, but the technologies are not a priority for smaller publishers. Faced with the day-to-day challenges of revenue generation and content creation, it is understandable that smaller publishers see emerging innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) as being low on their priority list. But in avoiding new technologies, they risk missing out to competitors who are working to understand the benefits of AI.

• How Brands Are Responding to the Increasing Cost of Marketing

Inflation isn’t just making goods and services more expensive; it’s also pushing up the cost of reaching the market. Everything it takes to get a message out — paper, postage, transportation and ad space — has become more expensive in 2022. And that isn’t likely to change any time soon.  For most marketing professionals, these are uncharted waters. However, brands are adapting to a world where it costs more to do business by evaluating their existing marketing efforts, refining their offers and leaning on reliable partners.

• The CRM Shopping List: 8 Key Qualities to Seek in a Publishing CRM

One of the easiest ways to streamline everyday tasks is by implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) software. If you’re in the publishing industry and looking to optimize your processes and boost profitability, read on. Here are the key qualities to seek when looking for the best publishing CRM.

• Marketing 2022 and Beyond: Predicting and Preparing for the Future of CRM

CRMs began as an addition to current software, evolving into browser extensions and apps to complement existing tools. Today, most companies rely on SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) cloud-based technology for this marketing necessity. However, the next generation of CRM will include AI capabilities. According to recent IDC projections, “Intelligent CRM applications will account for 20 percent of the AI applications market.”

• Up to 33% of Subscribers Are Lost in the First 24 Hours: How Publishers Can Reduce Churn

Think loyal users drive conversion? The data indicates a more nuanced reality. According to Piano’s latest Subscription Performance Benchmark Report, nearly 30% of subscription conversions happen after 10 active days – in the first year of a subscription business. In year two, over 40% of conversions happen on the first day of engagement.

• The Expansion Is Over: Ad Economy Recedes for First Time in 16 Months

The U.S. ad market contracted 3% in June, marking the first decline since February 2021, according to a MediaPost analysis of data from Standard Media Index’s U.S. Ad Market Tracker. The contraction follows a steady deceleration of the U.S. ad market’s expansion coming out of the COVID-19-related advertising recession. Relative to June 2020, which fell 23.1%, June 2022’s ad market index actually expanded 36.6%.

• The 5 Myths of Digital Flatplanning, and How to Overcome Resistance

The resistance that some production managers have in opening up their flatplans to the rest of the company is widespread. And it does easily boil down to an overall resistance to change. These are easily dispelled myths that can be addressed head-on for the better of the publication, the people who make it, and the process overall.

• Why Google Analytics Is Best for Data-Driven Content Marketing

When it comes to organic or paid content marketing, it’s about figuring out how to use data to enhance and optimize your digital strategy. Utilizing this data has never been easier, thanks to the king of search engine analytics: Google Analytics. Understanding Google Analytics helps you produce content that your target audience wants to see. The platform provides actionable insights, like click-through and bounce rates, time spent on page, and more. It’s a must-have in every marketer’s toolkit. This article will explain what is content marketing and how to use available to enhance your Google Analytics marketing strategy.

• Increase Subscription Conversion Rates: An Optimized Framework for Digital Publishers

Tracking overall conversion rates is valuable, but it isn’t suited to the publishing industry. Instead, it’s highly more effective to combine engagement and conversion to create a 5-step conversion journey, tracking the smaller conversions in-between each step. In this way, you work on making small improvements at each step of the funnel that will cumulate into a significantly higher overall user-to-subscriber conversion rate.

• Shifting to a Global Mindset, Agencies Are Preparing for a Cookieless World

In the face of third-party cookie deprecation and the loss of other once-relied-upon identifiers, leading agencies are throwing out the old marketing and advertising playbook and trying to wrap their minds around what audience understanding, targeting and measurement look like in a privacy-first world. While certain realities of a cookieless world have yet to take shape, there are approaches that global leaders have already started to master as they navigate the identity landscape of the future and chart their — and their clients’ — courses.  The first step is adopting a global mindset.

• The Great Recruitment: How to Hire Great Ad Sales Reps in 2022

Coming out of the last few years and following what many were calling The Great Resignation, perhaps there’s no better time to embark on what I’d like to call The Great Recruitment — an opportunity to bring great, available talent together with 2022’s promising opportunity for the good of your publication.

• Don’t Be Spammy: 10 Email Body Content Design Tips to Help Avoid Filters

In the hierarchy of email marketing importance, it would seem that body content ranks lowest, as this can only be seen once the sender name and subject line have successfully garnered an open. Spam filters look at everything, including the copy and visual elements in your email’s body content, prior to letting your message into inboxes, so it’s just as important to prioritize this. Let’s take a look at what you should and shouldn’t do with your content in order to bypass spam filters, maintain a solid email marketing sender reputation, and boost engagement (read: clicks).

• ‘Net-zero by 2025’: Pressure Builds on Publishers to Prove Sustainability or Lose Ad Buyers

Whilst over 130 governments worldwide have agreed to meet Net Zero carbon emissions targets by 2050, as well as employ a Net Zero Workforce, publishers are starting to heed the call for a more sustainable planet by bringing forward their own plans a few decades earlier. The incentive to do so isn’t just coming top-down from Governments but also from media buyers who, at the behest of brands, are starting to evaluate publisher ad inventory using rigorous sustainability criteria.

• ‘Advertising has taken a hit’: The Crypto Crisis Has Created an Advertising Vacuum

Don’t expect to see many crypto ads for a minute. The companies behind them are trimming down costs wherever they can, including advertising. It’s all they can do to weather a storm that’s been swirling since autumn. Since November, the value of the cryptocurrency market has plummeted from $3 trillion to roughly $900 billion, and analysts predict the meltdown will continue.

• The Best Magazine Software for Publishers in 2022

When it comes to magazine media and digital publications, reliable software tools are a necessity. From publishing CRM and magazine design, to circulation and subscription management, this ultimate guide to magazine software is an overview of the most popular software tools in the publishing industry.

• Construct and Convert: 10 of the Best Landing Page Design Tips

So, you’re creating a new landing page. That’s great! Landing pages are prime opportunities to convert your website’s visitors into leads. To increase your conversion rate, the landing page design needs to provide a smooth user experience. To get that smooth user experience, keep these 10 landing page design ideas in mind.

• The Increasing Value of Standalone Newsletters

Publishers are seeing newsletters as distinct products, driving engagement and revenue. Newsletter strategy used to be focused exclusively on driving traffic to publishers’ websites with click-through rates the all-important metric. Increasingly, however, publishers are seeing newsletters as more than traffic drivers, developing them as distinct, standalone products that will cement audience engagement and even generate ecommerce revenue.

• ‘The juice is not always worth the squeeze’: Publishers Evaluate Cost-per-Click Pricing Models in Their Commerce Businesses

The first quarter of 2022 wasn’t the most successful for some publishers’ commerce businesses. But a few media companies are hoping to avoid this downward trajectory with new pricing models for affiliate deals. Execs hope this strategy will help to bring in more retail partners and take advantage of their audiences’ changing online shopping habits.

• Cover to Cover: How to Start a Magazine in 2022

If you’re looking to start a magazine or pivot to digital editions, read on. We’re outlining the basic steps of how to start a magazine in 2022.