Email marketing basics for publishers

Emailing your advertisers and prospects is one of the most direct ways to stay their media expert rather than just their ad rep. You can remind, sell, notify, or simply be useful.

Most publishers we work with are somewhere on the spectrum between "we send a newsletter when someone remembers" and "we run segmented campaigns off the advertiser record." Wherever you are on it, the vocabulary is the first barrier, so start there.

The terminology, plainly

Sent. Every email that left the outbox.

Delivered. Every email accepted by the recipient's mail server. Note that "delivered" covers the inbox, the spam folder, and whatever promotional tab the provider files it under — it does not mean "seen."

Bounced. Emails the receiving domain refused. Usually the address does not exist. Bounce rate = 1 − (delivered ÷ sent)

Opens. Every time a delivered email was opened, including the same person opening it four times.

Unique opens. The number of recipients who opened. Each person counts once. Open rate = unique opens ÷ delivered

Clicks. Recipients who opened and clicked anything linked.

Unique clicks. The number of recipients who clicked, counted once each. Click-through rate = unique clicks ÷ delivered

Some teams also track click-to-open rate (unique clicks ÷ unique opens), which tells you how compelling the message was to the people who actually saw it.

Unsubscribed. Recipients who asked to come off the list.

That last one is worth dwelling on, because people work hard to avoid it and should not. An unsubscribe is a far better outcome than a spam complaint. Unsubscribes do not blacklist you; they just shorten a list that was not going to convert anyway. But if you bury the unsubscribe link or make it hard to click, some of those people will hit "mark as spam" instead — and that damages your domain's ability to reach every future inbox, including the advertisers who do want to hear from you.

One caveat on opens specifically: open tracking has become materially less reliable since these metrics were first standardised, because several mail clients now load tracking images on the recipient's behalf whether or not anyone read the message. Treat opens as a directional trend and put more weight on clicks.

Benchmarks move, so treat published averages as orders of magnitude rather than targets. When this post was first written, cross-industry averages sat near a 23% open rate, a 3.8% click-through rate, a 0.2% unsubscribe rate, and a 0.02% spam rate. Your own trend line against your own list is the more useful comparison.

The two things that actually matter

Reaching the inbox

Everything else is downstream of this.

• Send from a real person at your own domain — name@yourpaper.com, not a generic no-reply.
• Never buy lists.
• Clean the list regularly. When an address bounces, take it out.
• Write like a person. Avoid all caps, keep subject lines short.
• Watch the ratio of links to text. A wall of links reads as spam to filters and to humans.

Writing something worth opening

• Make it personal. Send from a name, not a company. Personalise the greeting and, where it makes sense, the subject line.
• Give people something to engage with. Images and video outperform a wall of text; formatted email outperforms plain text for most publisher sends.
• Make the subject line do work. Action-oriented language earns the open; a subject line that describes the email rarely does.

Where this connects to the rest of your operation

The part publishers usually underestimate is what happens after the send.

Composing the email is the easy half. The hard half is building the right list and getting the results somewhere useful. Typically the person who sent the campaign checks the numbers every few days, and there is a gap between what they see and what the sales team knows — so the advertiser who clicked three times never gets a call.

That gap is the reason AccountScout's email marketing works off the advertiser record rather than beside it. Lists are segmented from data you already maintain — dormant advertisers, past advertisers in a category, prospects by industry — and campaign results come back into the same record, so a rep can see engagement without learning a second system. Personal Email Tracking covers the one-to-one sends reps make themselves.

Tools like Mailchimp remain a good place to design and send. The integration exists precisely so you can keep using them without maintaining the same list in two places.

If you would like help getting set up, call us on 303-791-3301.