One of the major advantages of e-zine advertising is the lifespan of your ads. E-zines that are delivered to email addresses are read by the recipient and sometimes saved for future reference. Many e-zines archive their issues with the ads intact. Advertisers have received responses to ads that are several months old!
When you place an ad in an e-zine, you see it in a relatively short period of time, perhaps the next day or the next week, depending on how often the e-zine is published. Most traditional magazines close out their ad space months before the issue is available on the newsstand.
Your ad in an e-zine is also much more likely to be noticed because there are so few of them. In a traditional magazine every second page is an ad, whereas e-zines have a much greater focus on content and far fewer ads.
When your ad appears in an e-zine, your customer is just a click away because your ad is usually hyperlinked to your Web site. This brings your customer that much closer to being able to purchase your products and services.
Another advantage of e-zine advertising is that they are often shared with friends and associates. Most e-zines use viral marketing effectively, encouraging readers to send a copy to a friend. Your ad might be passed around a number of times after it first enters the mailbox of the subscriber. You are being charged for the ad based on the number of email subscribers. Therefore, the extra viewers of your ad cost you nothing.
One of the most tangible advantages of e-zine advertising is the relatively low cost, due, in part, to the low overhead for development, production, and delivery. E-zines need to fill all of their available space. If an e-zine advertising section has empty spaces, the publisher might be willing to negotiate. Some will even barter with you—advertising space at a discounted price in exchange for their e-zine promotion on your Web site.
E-zines provide a very targeted advertising medium. People subscribe to various e-zines because they have a genuine interest in the topics covered. This provides a major advantage over other advertising mediums. E-zine ads have been shown to have very high response rates due to their targeted nature.
Because they are distributed via the Internet, e-zines reach a far wider audience geographically than most traditional magazines. It is not uncommon for an e-zine to have subscribers from all around the world.
Another advantage is the link for search engine ranking purposes.
There are thousands of e-zines out there. Most e-zines have thousands of subscribers. When you couple the low cost to advertise in these e-zines and the many e-zines that might reach your target market, it is no wonder many companies are allocating more and more of their advertising budgets to online activities.