CPM Mail Drops – Better Alternative To Solo Ads!

• Posted on March 5, 2016
• /Under List Building
• /With 0 Comments

If you are reading this blog post there is a very high likelihood of you asking yourself what the heck are CPM Mail Drops? I have never heard of this thing before!

Don’t worry… They are rarely talked about. In fact no one is talking about them nowadays.

I wonder why?

If you guessed that the reason is that the really successful marketers, those making hundreds and hundreds of thousands, want to keep them all to themselves…

Well, than I would say you might be right! Because they work like a charm when it comes to growing lists, but I would also say that you are probably wearing a tin foil hat…

There is a much less sinister reason for it, when you take a look at their history (and finally what they are) it becomes rather obvious.

What are CPM Mail Drops exactly? And why have I never heard of them?

They are the older brother of the solo ad, when solo ads became all the rage they were basically forgotten by most average marketers, even though the top dogs in our industry are still using them (with great results I might add).

They work the following way, the advertiser pays a fixed amount of money for an email broadcast send out to the portion of a list usually owned by a big publishing company.

The fixed amount is usually payed for every 1000 subscribers the broadcast is send to, hence the name CPM Mail Drop (Cost per Mille=Latin for thousand).

The main difference to the solo ad is that you aren’t guaranteed anything, no number of clicks nothing.

So how are they better than solo ads then?

You just have to take a look at how solo ad lists are build nowadays!

In the past solo ad sellers were usually marketers, who only sold solo ads when they had nothing else to promote. Those marketers were also super picky to whom they sold and only did so once or twice per month…

The endorsement they gave to another marketers list and the trust passed on was huge back in those days. That’s why solo ads became so popular back then, because they used to work much better then today!

But with decreasing earnings per click from “traditional” marketing emails people actually started building whole businesses around selling solo ads. Doing no “traditional” marketing at all.

They didn’t get their list to know, like and trust them in the first place so there is nothing that can be passed on when buying from them…

Even more worse is the fact how they usually (there are always exceptions to the rule) build their lists.

Guess how they do it… They buy solo ads until they reach around 500 subscribers. After that they start doing ad swaps with other people that are also doing the exact same thing, classic circle jerk.

This way the email subscribers usually end up on dozens of solo ad sellers lists getting relentlessly bombarded with freebie offers all day. Good luck standing out with your own marketing and making sales under those circumstances.

Now with CPM Mail drops this is different!

For one there are usually no individual marketers selling these. They are usually sold by large publishing companies that put out hundreds of different newsletters.

These companies are professionals when comes to gaining their subscribers like and trust. Plus their subscriber base is far less likely to already be bombarded with offers and ads.

Therefore they yield tremendously better results than solo ads, at least nowadays. Of course this is only true if you are able to craft a compelling marketing message…

But they have further advantages.

To name just one, imagine you wanted to sell to doctors or lawyers making a $100.000 a year plus only. Good luck finding a solo ad seller that has a list of doctors… But with a CPM Mail drop this kind of targeting is actually very easy.

Those big media publishers usually know almost everything about their subscribers, it’s their job to do so!

This gives us the possibility for super narrow targeting, which results in significantly higher conversion rates and user engagement.

Where can you buy CPM Mail Drops?

Almost all companies that publish a regular newsletter offer this kind of advertising, for example you could buy a CPM Mail Drop from Fox News. Unfortunately most of these companies ask a small fortune and aren’t suited for your first few trials.

Seriously, don’t try to run before you can walk here! You might end up losing A LOT of money

Instead if you want to try this traffic source for the first time you may go with one of these two sources:

Nextmark

Arcamax

However, I would recommend to look for smaller ezines (=email newsletters) that sell CPM Mail Drops, because you will be able to buy them at a much cheaper rate and advertise to an audience that has been exposed to far less advertising and marketing!

You may find a huge list of smaller ezines that offer this kind of advertising opportunity inside Charlie Pages product called Directory of Ezines:

Link to the Directory of Ezines

In the future I will do a more detailed post on solo ads, which I will link to here: Why you probably shouldn’t buy solo ads.

Have you ever used CPM Mail Drops?