An Introduction to Email Marketing and Adult Content

• 13 Apr, 2023
• Adult Site Broker

In the adult entertainment industry, email marketing is a critical element in the overall marketing strategy for firms trying to promote new videos, models, fan platforms, games, and content types that intersect with commercial sex and consensual pornography. Adult Site Broker will discuss the importance of email marketing in the adult entertainment industry in this new blog post. We will share some essential tips and tricks and the top platforms for adult email marketing. 

What is Email Marketing?

What is email marketing in general? How does email marketing work? What is the point? We define email marketing as a form of direct marketing involving communicating with a target audience through email. Email marketing is a practice that typically aims to promote a particular product or service, increase brand awareness, or build relationships with potential and existing customers. 

A standard email marketing campaign can be personalized, targeted, and segmented to an existing audience. These factors are often based on characteristics such as demographics, geography, any brand interactions, consumer interests, and behavior, among other factors. Email marketers use this data to personalize the experience for the recipient through promotional content, event invites, surveys, newsletters, and different types of messaging that ultimately end in a transaction.

Careful planning, crafting clear messages and subject lines, generating engaging content and copy, and adding an unmistakable invitation to perform some action are all necessary for the success of an email campaign. Analyzing campaign performance and adjusting based on data insights is also vital for optimizing results over time. These basic principles of a successful email marketing campaign can be applied across many industries and messaging types.

Is Email Marketing Effective?

Broadly speaking, email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing strategies. There are several reasons for that. Email marketing is a low-cost method for reaching out to customers while engaging in a much more personal experience when sending promotional emails. 

Hard numbers don’t lie. According to The Loop Marketing, over 347.3 billion emails will be sent and received daily worldwide. Marketers can reach over 4.6 billion email users globally. 

As we alluded to about personalization, most business leaders say consumers will spend more money in response to a personalized email marketing campaign. Over a third of all marketers send weekly emails, and over a quarter send emails to their consumer lists multiple times in a month. And within the first hour of sending an email marketing campaign, about 22 percent of all campaigns will be opened with users interacting with links and content. It should be noted that subject lines are also essential. While we will write a blog post on the art of subject lines in adult entertainment email marketing in the near future, it is important to conceptualize copy that can beat spam blockers and elicit a response or interaction by the email user.

Email Marketing in Adult Entertainment

Email marketing isn’t just reserved for the “vanilla” and “mainstream” industries. Like porn sites and tube platforms, adult content can benefit significantly from email marketing. While there are challenges with most email marketing platforms, adult content marketers have generated millions in revenue for their clients through effective, thorough, and reliable email content creation and promo copy. 

Models, independent adult creators, producers, studios, fan site owners, e-commerce folks, and more can benefit from email marketing. However, we must consider several contingencies as we move forward with this blog post. Allow us to explain these a bit more in the following sections.

Acceptable Use Policies and Sexual Content

Email marketing platforms are called email service providers (ESPs). Services like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, two of the most popular ESP platforms in the mainstream segment, provide marketers with dashboards, design tools, data and analytics, and campaign management tools to send effective email campaigns. However, ESPs are subject to AUPs, or acceptable use policies. An acceptable use policy is literally what it sounds like a set of rules that govern the overall acceptable behavior of the user of the ESP. AUPs are practically the same thing as terms and conditions for sites of all types. AUPs are crucial in email marketing, especially in the United States, because large ESPs like Mailchimp don’t permit sexual content due to potential legal liability and other risks.

Upon reviewing Mailchimp’s acceptable use policy, a reasonable user will see “prohibited content.” According to Mailchimp’s corporate parent, Intuit, the term prohibited content includes “illegal goods and services” (e.g., escorting in jurisdictions where it’s outlawed or illicit content, including child sexual abuse material), “pornography/sexually explicit content” (legal and consensual porn), infringements on intellectual property rights, and “emails that violate the CAN-SPAM act or other anti-spam laws.” This company’s AUP is clearly outlined and prevents using its ESP platform for purposes that include legal adult content. With such a policy, it is necessary to locate a marketing platform that allows nude and sexual content in their AUP and is directly promoted to marketers in the adult entertainment industry. There are plenty of platforms that allow adult content. Still, these are small fish in an ocean of gigantic sea monsters, like Intuit’s Mailchimp platform, that dictate the market’s trends and the standard operating procedures for email marketing professionals globally.

ESPs Friendly to Adult Content

Email service providers that are friendly to adult content are out there. There are several, as we said. But, these types of ESPs are pretty rare compared to the dozens of mainstream options that present adult content due to various acceptable use policies. Luckily, some of the adult-friendly options come from trusted brands known to both mainstream and adult industry marketing folks.

Here’s a quick list of ESPs that are friendly to adult content.

YNOT Mail

YNOT Group, the Texas-based publisher of adult industry B2B news outlets YNOT and YNOT Cam, owns and operates the specialty email marketing platform YNOT Mail. YNOT Mail is an ESP that is focused on deliverable email campaigns for adult content providers, models, and producers. The platform is priced for scaling, with prices for plans starting at $25 per month. YNOT Mail allows its users to design, visualize, and send newsletters and promotional email campaigns to email lists. They also provide an in-platform audience segmentation tool, analytics dashboards, and more. Adult Site Broker has used YNOT Mail as an effective tool in our marketing kit.

Check out YNOT Mail by clicking here.

Postr

Postr is an ESP that provides services and product offerings to companies in dozens of industries. However, Postr made this list because this company prides itself on serving companies that are in industries that are considered high-risk. As you’d expect, these industries include porn, legal cannabis, online gambling, and mobile sportsbooks. Postr calls itself “the most permissive email marketing platform available” and says they regularly live up to that claim. Postr has scalable plans starting with a free option to full-spec enterprise plans for email lists with more than 450,000 addresses. Postr, like YNOT Mail, has in-platform design tools, audience segmentation, analytics dashboards, and several other features that are on par with the features you’d find at the leading mainstream ESP, such as Intuit Mailchimp or Hubspot for Email.

Check out Postr by clicking here.

Sendy

Sendy is a lightweight ESP and email marketing client that is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Adult Site Broker uses Sendy for our email campaigns to communicate to our global email list of over 900 our new property listings and updates from our team, led by our CEO, Bruce. Sendy is a tremendous platform for individuals who want to send emails at a fraction of the price of even the platforms we listed here. Sendy sells a license to use their platform for an affordable one time fee. Your only further cost is the small monthly charge to use AWS. This is a great option for email marketers who are experienced with AWS and enjoy the benefits of integrating platforms like SendGrid, Mailjet, and Elastic Email. Sendy has a built-in email editor, tools to segment data, and a very clean-cut analytics dashboard. One of the only issues with Sendy is that it can be a bit daunting for newbies in email marketing, especially adult industry marketers trying to beat the spam filters and avoid potential blacklisting. 

Check out Sendy by clicking here. 

Moonmail

The final option on this list is Moonmail. Moonmail is another lightweight ESP that runs on AWS. Like all of the ESPs described here, Moonmail allows adult content and is cost-effective compared to mainstream ESPs, such as Constant Contact. This ESP operates similarly to Sendy, but the user interface and the options for measuring campaign performance data are easier to learn and navigate. Moonmail starts at $21 monthly, with an open-source user option available.

Check out Moonmail by clicking here.

Read More About Adult Industry Marketing: 

What Are The Most Popular Fetish Niches?

What’s The Best Way To Drive Traffic To A Porn Site?

TikTok As A Marketing Tool For Adult Sites And Performers

Adult Site Broker thanks you for reading this blog post. If you’re interested in finding out more about buying or selling websites, please contact us here.