Dotdash Meredith scales native email inventory and revenue with ease using Native Ad Blueprints

Background

Over the last 119 years, Dotdash Meredith has engaged readers across the entertainment, food, lifestyle, parenting and home categories. It has since become the leading magazine operator in the U.S., boasting leading brands, including People, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle, Allrecipes, Real Simple, Shape, and Southern Living. Dotdash Meredith leverages its email newsletters program to deepen relationships and provide readers with the content they crave.

Goal

Dotdash Meredith sought solutions to broaden their newsletter media offering to diversify the revenue generated by their ad sales program.

Solution

One immediate path that Dotdash Meredith identified was to expand their email inventory mix to include native ads. By adding a native format to their email newsletters, Dotdash Meredith could take advantage of the increased engagement that native advertising drives and offer a premium option that aligned visually with their newsletter content. Traditionally, native ads in email are made possible by manually hardcoding an advertisement into the email template. However, with an extensive cadre of publishers under its umbrella, Dotdash Meredith required a turn-key solution to integrate into their existing process.

Native Ad Blueprints would allow Dotdash Meredith to get the best of both worlds – the ability to easily add native email inventory and do so at scale. With a handful of publications in mind, the first step was to build blueprints for the respective brands. Even though Dotdash Meredith’s individual brands have their own look and feel, the flexibility of Native Ad Blueprints allowed them to create blueprints that would best meet the visual needs for each newsletter. These blueprints would define the native ad slot layout and ensure each brands’ colors, fonts, and overall styling was upheld, preserving the reader experience.

While premium inventory that blends nicely with content was enticing from an ad sales perspective, Dotdash Meredith wanted to ensure that this new inventory didn’t adversely affect their email engagement. To determine if their native ad slot was diverting clicks away from their content, Dotdash Meredith set up A/B tests with their Allrecipes and Food & Wine brands, segmenting a portion of each audience to receive the native ad and a control group.

Once the blueprints and the Native LiveTags in their newsletters were linked, Dotdash Meredith was ready to monetize their new native email inventory. They began by opting into LiveIntent’s Native Curated Packages program, which granted immediate access to vertically-aligned demand from LiveIntent’s roster of premium advertisers. Dotdash Meredith could also use their native ad slots for their own direct deals, allowing them to utilize their native inventory holistically across their ad sales program.

Results

After implementing the native email inventory, Dotdash Meredith saw a 15% increase in newsletter revenue in just the first 60 days. Their native ad slots also saw 10x greater CPMs than the display ad slots in their newsletters, as well as a 44% higher click through than their display ad units.

Speaking of clicks, what about Allrecipes and Food & Wine’s A/B test? The results of Food & Wine’s test showed that the new native ad slot had no negative impact on newsletter content engagement! In light of their success, Dotdash Meredith has continued to scale native inventory across their additional newsletter brands.