The Challenge

“We recognize that every channel is unique, so we look for opportunities to test and leverage everything from search and social to native and display to reach our target audiences,” said Laila Husain, a Channel Manager at The Fool. “Getting the right mix is important because each channel is so unique. Even social to social, the user demographics can be so different, so you really have to know your audience and where they are.” Looking to add a unique new channel to its digital mix, The fool started looking for the proper solution to help them with their digital challenge.

The Solution

The Motley Fool began using Jeeng AdMarket to place native and display ads within email newsletters. “We’d tested other email advertising networks in previous years, but we saw strong performance with Jeeng, especially considering its flexibility,” Laila said. “It’s incredible to see the performance we’ve had with Jeeng; especially with native ads — the results have been really strong.”

The Results

The Motley Fool’s funnel works like this: When users click on their Jeeng ads in newsletters, they get routed to an advertorial or video sales letter, and if they chose to enter their email address in a form-fill, they’re added to The Fool’s special offer email series. Recognizing most users aren’t immediately ready to subscribe to financial services on the first touchpoint, The Fool’s email series nurtures users with a variety of previews into their subscription offers.

“Being in an email inbox is not necessarily a foreign concept, since The Motley Fool first began as an email newsletter, so placing ads in email newsletters makes sense for us and our audience seems to agree.”

Jeeng AdMarket Hits the Target

In fact, for The Fool’s target audience—age 55 and up, the Baby Boomer generation—a recent Jeeng survey found that nearly half subscribe to email newsletters, and 57% click on ads they see in emails if the content is relevant.

“With Jeeng, we’ve seen very good targeting to reach our demographic, and Jeeng has helped us get placements into not only qualifying financial publications but also publications like the Readers Digest and others targeted to our age bracket,” Laila said.

All of this has helped to optimize The Fool’s Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and drive hundreds of new subscribers each month.

“Our CPA goals are based on our internal cost per action formula which account for a mix of leads and sales,” Laila said. “We aim for a specific CPA goal each month through Jeeng and we’ve consistently come through under that goal.

We also aim for 50% expected margin. We want our CPA to be great, but we also want the margin to be good in the long run. Jeeng has helped us achieve that goal.”

User-friendly Platform Fuels Efficiency

Laila says one of the biggest advantages to the Jeeng platform is its ease of use. With daily creative report emails, she is able to pair it with internal reporting to gain complete visibility to see in aggregate how a campaign is performing based on sales, leads and expected margins. This added element of ad-specific performance allows her to make changes to specific placements, headlines or copy to improve response.

“It is a channel that gets that daily maintenance, but it’s great that we’re not in the dark about how things are actually working,” Laila said. “One of my biggest concerns was relying on someone else to do the ad upload in the UI, but the Jeeng team has been great, and ad ops has been wonderful.”

In fact, because The Fool operates on a higher volume of leads compared to sales, the Jeeng team helped to optimize the CPA/CPL goals with oCPX bidding: direct, automated targeting that allows the bid to fluctuate by publisher, while staying within those goals. This has helped to increase the daily budget, get the effective spend up and increase performance, without requiring so much hands-on adjustment.

“This allows us to focus on a campaign as a whole without worrying about constantly checking on specific CPC bids on any given day or time,” Laila said, which adds to management efficiency as volume increases for this team.

Jeeng: Powerful Relationship & Performance

Overall, Laila says email advertising, and Jeeng specifically, can be a very effective solution for companies who know their target audience.

“A lot of times, I think its easy to gravitate towards the newest tools or trends, but if you know your audience and their affinity for email, then it is a great opportunity and space to advertise,” she said. “With Jeeng, we’ve been happy with the overall experience, and I like that we’re not siloed with one specific type of ad. There’s a great opportunity here for us to try push notification ads, display and other new publisher whitelists, so we’re looking forward to that.”