Placing advertising in a third-party e-mail newsletter may be a more favourable option than traditional banner advertising. If the content of the newsletter is well-targeted to the audience, then engagement will be high, and it is arguably less easy to avoid an advert in an e-mail newsletter. Combined with the right creative and offer, the clickthrough should be significantly better than with traditional banner advertising, which is in single digits.

Banner adverts will vary in format according to the newsletter format. Adverts in text e-mails are generally less easy to ignore than those in HTML e-mails, where the adverts are more consistent with traditional banner adverts. This, however, depends on the impact of the banner advert, which is determined by its size, animation and colour contrast with the remainder of the e-mail. E-mail newsletters with informative content are also often printed for reference, so consider the impact of the advert in the printed version. Other factors that will affect the impact will be the number of advertisers, your position in the newsletter and the ratio of copy to adverts. If there are more than three advertisers in a newsletter you are bound to have less impact than if you are the only one in a newsletter.

To consider your options for positioning and costs of advertising, view the media kit for one of the main opt-in list suppliers. For example, at the time of writing, for ListUniverse (list-universe.com/ media-kit/) the following options are...