Bonniers brands - Idenyt and VoresVilla are Denmark’s largest Home & Garden media, sending it's physical magazine 5 times a year to 1 million house holds. It's website has 750.000 unique visitors and a newsletter with 225.000 users. Idenyt and VoresVilla is part of The international Bonnier company Benjamin Media with a presence across 5 different markets and 60+ magazine brands.

1. ABOUT: Idenyt and VoresVilla are Denmark’s largest Home & Garden media,
sending it's physical magazine 5 times a year to 1 million house holds. It's
website has 750.000 unique visitors and a newsletter with 225.000 users.
Idenyt and VoresVilla is part of The international Bonnier company Benjamin
Media with a presence across 5 different markets and 60+ magazine brands.
CHALLENGE: VoresVilla and Idenyt's newsletters have historically been a
good revenue driver with Display ads as main product. Unfortunately display
in email has experienced the same journey as display on web - decreasing
Click Through Rates (CTR). Challenge was to "reinvent" this old medium to
again become a steady revenue channel.
SOLUTION: Native Ads in email & Passendo Email Ad serving & Native
Platform
How Two Bonnier Brands
converted their email business
into a serious revenue stream.
Publisher
Case Study

2. With a simple test, VoresVilla and Idenyt built and tested a few native looking ads and realized quickly that performance on CTR
was 1-2 x higher, more or less on most.
Now these placements were not fully integrated into the template, so decided to redesign the newsletter to make them more "Native"
looking. With that simple change, they increased it's CTR now in total with 2-4 times what they could see on Display.
What they also experienced was that to keep the CTR high, it needed not only relevant ads to the target group, but also a constant
rotation of new campaign messages. This would at least take a minimum of constantly having 20-40 different campaigns, and how
should they manage to sell that on CPM....?
So with a CTR averaging 0.35% they realized that they had a pretty steady click machine, which is precisely what advertisers seek -
Clicks. So after some calculations and figured that if they sold it per click (CPC) to the right price, they could actually realize an eCPM
that could compete with CPM. As long as the CPC was competitive with average CPC you can get from Display (€3-4).
With this attractive offer, it proved easy for them to sell packages of 5000 - 20.000 clicks per advertiser - and the advertiser even also
just had to send some text and an image.
Testing, testing, testing, ….

3. Build a responsive newsletter template, designed around Native Ads. They used
300x250 format as this fits perfectly for mobile and desktop. Launched first
newsletter with 6 native formats - Today they run with 8.
Started selling Native Ads on premium CPC (€1-2). Backfilling with premium
native Ads from Passendo's SSP
Create the native ads with Passendo Native widget in it's newsletters look and
feel. Eg, same font, font size, colour, etc.
Set up the campaigns in Passendo Ad Server to automatically rotate between
placements, optimzed after CTR, eCPM, etc...
Newsletter Launch
Ongoing testing: Number send outs per week, Number af ad placements, etc.
constantly closely watching CTR and Unsubsribe rates
Adding new subscribers to list at all time
How they did it - Step Guide
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Native Ad from Idenyt’s newsletter

4. 2 newsletters with a total subscriber list of: 225.000
Send frequency per month: 20
Open Rate: 30%
Number of Native Ads: 8
Average CTR per Native Ad: 0.35%
Amount of clicks generated per month in average: 37.800
Business Case
Combined with this, the native ad revenue from it's website is to be added and the large
number of new subscribers being added to the list every month.

5. Testing, Testing & Testing Big part of the success is that Idenyt constantly test on
different parameters to see Eg. How one more add influences the CTR, Sendout
frequeancy, Open Rates, Unsubscribe and sender score rates. They are also
testing the balance between amount of ads and "real" article text. Until now idenyt
has not seen any negative impact on either parameters and neither on article
clicks.
Long Term Strategy As the demand for native ads has grown so fast in it's
newsletters, Idenyt and VoresVilla has now build a more long-tail and integrated
strategy that also entails Idenyt website. This basicaly mean that the Native ads
can run across both it's newsletter and website - everything controlled from
Passendo.
Before Passendo, Idenyt and VoresVilla was using DFP as it's Ad Server to run
Display and Native Ads. As DFP is not able to work in email it means that you will
not be able to run complex and aggregated reporting on both email and
newsletter. Secondly Idenyt realized that the native builder in DFP was not a good
match in relation to its cross media native strategy. The time saved on moving all
native activity into Passendo, more or less saved Idenyt a full time position.
Taking email seriously

6. Testimonial
"In today's competitive media landscape, owned media is one of the only
channels left that we as publishers can control 100% - and email is one of
them. This is strategically a major focus area in order to survive.
Nothing comes without hard work and we are constantly testing and still
have a long way ahead of us in order to get the maximum value out of our
newsletters. Without Passsendo's top notch technology & professionel
approach and interest in making us a success is priceless. We would any day
recommend Passendo and the team to any newsletter publishers out there"
- Allan Schou, Head of Digital Business Development