Learn how you can turn your emails into revenue streams.

3 ways your emails can generate income without direct sales:

1. Become an affiliate (and use an affiliate-friendly ESP).
   
   Affiliate and referral programs are designed to reward participants who recommend their product or service. Essentially, if you know of something that you use and love and you share that love with your audience, you can be rewarded—whether financially or with complementary items—based on the number of people who sign up.
   
   Search for the products, goods, and services you use regularly to see if an affiliate program, discount codes, or referral links are available. Incorporate them into your emails or link them in your template for a simple way to earn rewards or generate a side income.
   
   And then, start telling your audience, and sending timely reminders, via email! Please note that some affiliate and referral programs and some ESPs have strict rules about affiliate marketing. We highly recommend to you check before you send to ensure you’re in full compliance with both the affiliate program and your ESP’s terms of service.
   
   At FeedBlitz, we don’t restrict your mailings associated with affiliate programs. As long as you’re compliant with your individual affiliate program’s policies, you are welcome to send as many emails including affiliate links as you’d like.
   
   
2. Insert ads into the emails you send.
   
   If you’ve put ads on your site, why not in your emails? Both your site and your emails offer coveted space, are viewed by your audience, and are opportunities to generate revenue.
   
   When it comes to inserting ads in your emails, there are two main categories:
   
   1. Selling space in your email and manually inserting ads based upon an agreement you have secured.
   2. Ads that are inserted automatically into your emails through an integration with an online ad service.
   
   Either option is a viable way to earn income from your emails without directly selling to your audience.
   
   FeedBlitz offers a one-click advertising program to automatically insert ads into your emails and you get to determine where the ads are displayed. Our clients typically see ad earnings run between $2 to $3 (USD) per 1,000 opens for US-based readership, depending on real-time ad markets and available inventory. If you mail frequently and to a large audience, this can help to offset the costs of your email marketing or used towards another endeavor.
   
   If you’re monetizing your website by showing ads, but not taking your emails into consideration, you could very well be leaving money on the table.
   
   Highlighted Box: Want to learn more about FeedBlitz’s one-click advertising program? It’s quick and easy, and all ads are G-rated. (We work directly with the ad company to ensure any political or inappropriate ads are quickly removed from inventory.) Check out our monetization program or enable ads in your account.
   
   
3. Sign up for your ESP’s affiliate or referral program.
   
   An email service provider is a service just like any other. And many services offer their own affiliate or referral programs to reward clients who tell their friends and network about them. With some ESPs, you may automatically be enrolled, and with others, you may need to manually sign up to get started.
   
   FeedBlitz offers a robust referral program, now in place for all clients, with no caps or limits, with members earning a revenue share every month while the referral’s account is in good standing. The referral program works on a 2-tier basis and is a great option to generate another stream of side income while you are mailing your list. Details about the program and tier reimbursement details, are outlined in great detail here.

Nurture your audience to grow revenues.

The options offered above heavily depend on the sending habits you currently have (i.e., frequency and open rates) and the relationship you have with your audience. With minimal setup and minimal ongoing efforts, the highest potential of earning comes from an active audience who regularly open your emails.

However you choose to monetize your mailings, we highly recommend your priority should be sending high-quality email content that offers value to your readers. This not only builds a foundation of trust but leads to increased open rates. Whether selling something directly or indirectly, both are ideal when it comes to earning revenue online.

Are you ready to start earning revenue with your emails? Learn more about our free trial and reach out to us on our Support Page to contact us via email, chat, or even over the phone. Live support is available Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern.

       

More hassle-free set it and forget it email campaigns at your fingertips.

Greater flexibility for your automated campaigns.

Previously, automated campaigns were restricted to a specific day a week for weekly emails or only one, select day a month for monthly emails.

But as of now: Mondays and Fridays? Can do. Weekends only? Check. Daily, except for weekends? Ask and ye shall receive.

And it’s not just for multiple days of the week. Interested in the 1st and 15th of the month? Way ahead of you:

You create the content, we deliver it to the world – on your schedule.

No longer the one-size-fits-all approach to automated emails, this update moves FeedBlitz clients one step further towards fully customizable RSS-to-email campaigns.

Maintaining regular contact with your list – automatically by using the new content added to your website – not only works to keep your list healthy and your subscribers engaged, but it allows your content to work double-time. Simply post to your site and the email campaign sends it to your list, without the need to login and create the campaign each time, so you can focus on other tasks at hand.

Let’s get started.

These scheduling options are available for every FeedBlitz client, beginning with your free trial. For questions, reach out to us on our Support Page to contact us via email, chat, or even over the phone. Live support is available Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern.

       

Win the Inbox with eye-catching email campaigns and save time when it comes to design.

Sleek lines, bold colors, content boxes and buttons in your email templates? You’re covered.

Fully customizable, FeedBlitz’s email templates were designed to be visually appealing, and to cut your time investment by already containing some of our most popular content blocks, appealing fonts and button styles right out the gate.

Gone are the endless rabbit holes of color-matching and element placing to get your template just right, before you begin adding content. Search the library to find templates offering groups of product images, large background images, matching call to action buttons, social icons, and subscribe icons.

Use the templates as they are, switching the text to match your own messages, or use the layouts as a base to kickstart your own design. Either way, rest assured, all email templates have been reviewed and tested on a variety of email platforms, and devices, ensuring they render properly on desktop as well as mobile.

Highlight your content in new ways.

Our growing library of email templates includes a variety of simple newsletter templates, along with advanced templates set up to easily promote email courses, online challenges, product updates, and more. (Yes—we really do mean and more!)

Whether it is imagery, video, text, or multiple products – there is a template available for you to highlight your own unique content to stand out in the inbox.

Easily sort by categories or quickly search by keyword to find a template that works best for you. If, by chance, you don’t see a template that fits, simply contact support and let us know. Our team is releasing new four new templates each month and is always open to suggestions or requests.

Available for every FeedBlitz client, beginning with your free trial. Getting started really is as simple as choosing your template, tweak it (if necessary), add your content, hit send, and your email’s out the door!

Interested in checking out a free email template or two (or 20 or 30)? Get started with your free trial. For questions, reach out to us on our Support Page to contact us via email, chat, or even over the phone. Live support is available Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern.

       

Standing Out from the Promotions Tab Crowd

This matters because gmail owns the bulk of consumer emails right now, and so being able to stand out within gmail itself is a huge competitive advantage for mailers.

To help you do that, FeedBlitz will find the featured image from your blog, newsletter or email, and ensure that if your email appears in a gmail app’s promotions tab bundle, your featured image will appear. This makes your email stand out from the clutter, encouraging opens and downstream engagement.

Since a picture says a thousand words, here’s an example from a client:

See how Lisa’s email stands out? That’s because (a) it’s been bundled on the gmail promotions tab, and (b) FeedBlitz built the email to be bundle-ready, so that an engaging image pops out.

That’s neat and easy – and, as of today, zero extra effort for FeedBlitz clients. If you send an email using FeedBlitz, it just works.

So what is a gmail promotions tab bundle anyway?

Depending on what gmail knows about the subscriber, it may group an email at the top of the promotions tab as part of a “bundle” – the recipient sees it highlighted as “Top Picks,” “Top Promotions” or similar text (the copy varies depending on what gmail thinks the email is about).

If an email ends up at the top of a bundle, it is typically followed by maybe one more bundled email, and then by a couple of google ads (aha!, says my inner cynic, way to emphasize those, Google).

Still, a bundled email appears at the top of the promotions tab even if other emails arrive after it, so it’s a way to maintain visibility and stickiness for your messaging.

Bundling, though, is neither guaranteed nor predictable — sometimes we’ve seen an email arrive and be positioned normally, then refreshing the promotions tab (by dragging down and releasing it) caused the email to be bundled. (I personally would like the app to behave consistently and do that without mystery manual intervention.)

There aren’t any guarantees that your email will be bundled, and it clearly varies based on the individual recipient. (Also be aware that the Inbox tab doesn’t bundle – it’s only the promotions tab, and only on gmail’s apps).

Nonetheless, this is an important development that gmail is rolling out, so I’m going to explore it a little further so you can work on taking advantage of it.

What are the benefits of gmail promotions tab bundles for email marketers?

Back in the day, the email marketing community was very worried about bulk email and newsletters being siphoned off by gmail to the promotions tab. The fear was that open rates would suffer, with consequent drops in open rates and revenues. That didn’t really happen, and the promotions tab is just a handy pre-built folder to find non-personal mailings.

When your email gets bundled, however, things get a LOT better for an email marketer.

• Your email gets pinned to the top of the tab and becomes temporarily sticky.
• You can stand out by having images and deals highlighted without the email being opened.

Both of these encourage opens and engagement, and these are good things. This is an interesting, engagement-based feature, and although the extra image and deal highlighting is currently limited to gmail’s apps (not, as far as I can tell, their web browser interfaces), it is an opportunity for every business, large or small, to strive to make their email marketing better.

Being bundled – and making the most of that when it happens – goes further, though. It helps establish a virtuous cycle: the more bundled an email gets, the more engagement it will garner, making it more likely that future emails will also be bundled. It’s an accelerant for good email marketing and organizations that do email well. To the winners, the breaks, as it were.

[There is a catch to the images that show with a bundled email, however, and that is that if a bundle shows your email’s bundle-ready image, that image is cropped and letter boxed – only the middle sliver is shown.]

This leads to two questions, one specific to FeedBlitz, and one a more general email marketing question:

• How does my email get to be bundled in the promotions tab?
• How does FeedBlitz help?

Let’s hop to it.

How does my email get to be bundled in the gmail promotions tab?

It’s a gmail-specific algorithm, and clearly their goal is to only bundle or highlight relevant emails that have a history of positive engagement. Bundling is also personalized, and the app’s bundling decision will vary by recipient. In other words, your email may be bundled for some readers, but not for others. Clearly the way to increase the likelihood of your email getting to the top of the bundling heap is to double down on engagement and best practices, so that not only is your reputation as a sender / brand excellent, but also your engagement with readers is consistently positive.

How?

• Ensure your open rates are good by writing compelling subject lines and making the most of pre-header / preview text.
• Create good mixed content (text, headlines and imagery) to encourage time within the email.
• Have compelling and relevant calls to actions to click through from the email to relevant content, offer or other call to action, including secondary ones such as “join my patreon” as well as “20% off” (or whatever!).
• Keep your list clean by removing non-engaged subscribers, which will help move your open rates up.
• Have a featured-image near the top of the email that is at least 322 x 82 (even if it is rendered smaller on your email).

How FeedBlitz helps with gmail’s promotions tab bundles: Finding and Promoting your Featured Images

As of today, if your email contains a meaningful or explicitly featured image, FeedBlitz will do the work to ensure that if gmail bundles your email in an app, that featured image will be displayed with it.

It just works.

This is true for traditional newsletters, RSS-powered blog subscriptions, funnels and transactional emails we send for you. In other words, as a FeedBlitz client, you do exactly nothing more than what you’re doing right now, and it just works. Automatically! Our featured image algorithm is part of our service, and has been around for years, restructuring blog-based emails from “here’s a blog post in your email” to “here’s an interesting and dynamically restructured update from the blog” – this featured image detection algorithm is how we create post thumbnails or hero images on the fly.

For RSS powered mailings, that’s a good thing; the whole point of an RSS-driven email subscription service is to set and forget, after all. So RSS-powered campaigns are all going to be promotions tab bundle ready, and neither the campaign nor the mailing template needs to be changed.

For emails and newsletters that are built using our visual drag and drop editor, a.k.a. the Visual Mailing Editor (VME), the test email dialog now shows a preview of the featured image FeedBlitz found, and how it will (probably) appear if it’s bundled in the gmail app, like this:

If, however, there are other candidate featured images in the mailing, the dialog lets you cycle through them using the arrows, so you can pick the one you like best. The preview we show is a very good facsimile for what gmail shows, but it isn’t a guarantee – the developers at gmail like to mix things up and keep us email service providers (ESPs) on our toes.

When you’re building your email in the FeedBlitz VME, you can pick the image you want to highlight and set it to be featured as part of the image block’s properties, pre-empting the test email step.

How does FeedBlitz find featured images?

There’s a certain amount of secret sauce here, but basically we look for large images that stand out. Basically, our featured image algorithm is emulating what a human eye would immediately be drawn to when your email is first opened, and promoting that image up into the gmail bundle.

You can influence our algorithm, for both traditional and RSS-powered mailings, by attaching a CSS class containing the word “featured” to the HTML image tag you want to emphasize (if you don’t know what that means, that’s OK, remember that the algorithm works automatically, and is very, very good at what it does without any human guidance).

Once FeedBlitz has found a set of candidate images that could be featured, it take the first one with the “featured” CSS class tag, or otherwise the first one it finds. (A postscript here: If the algorithm is not consistently finding the image you want it to, please drop a line to support for advice).

       

Zoom in to discover where your emails are being read.

A new way to look at the behaviors of your subscribers, the maps and corresponding data show where your audience is when they open or click your emails. Take a bird’s eye view by looking at countries, or zoom in to drill down for specific regions and/or cities.

Working with this information can offer ideas for location-specific content or, broadly thinking about time zones for different countries, what times of the day seem best to send your emails.

The geographic data and mapping feature is available for all email campaigns sent after October 1, 2020, and any Monthly Insights reports for October 2020 and afterwards. After tweaking this feature in the first few weeks, the development team is looking to how and where else to can expand its abilities to other areas of the app.

Interested in giving this and all of our great features a try? Learn more about our free trial and reach out to us on our Support Page to contact us via email, chat, or even over the phone. Live support is available Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern.