With a business, there’s a product or service offered on a website.
This amplifies the number of opportunitiesto reach the website, seek out desired products and/or sign up on a mailing list. However, when the main purpose for a site revolves around blogging, email marketing both become more difficult and more essential.
When a websites main objective is content promotion and not selling products, then you’ll have fewer opportunities to connect with readers through email marketing campaigns. Let’s think about it for a second…
When your promoting content then collecting a reader’s email address is more difficult because you’ll need to entice them to fill out your opt-in form. With e-commerce it’s easier because a customer purchasing a product will be automatically added to your mailing list. With that said,
Follow this guide to run and build a successful email marketing campaign for bloggers.
Take Advantage of an Email Service Provider (ESP)
Taking advantage of an ESP provides many benefits not available otherwise. When blogging, you several ways to collect emails, for example through landing pages and directly requesting the address on the site itself. From experience, the best way to do this is with the aid of an email service provider.
An email service provider, such as MailChimp, makes it possible to use pre-crafted newsletter templates and email messages. It’s also free for entry-level users, which is excellentfor anyone just starting off on their blog.
Email marketing will help grow a blog, even on a small budget. Starting a blog doesn’t require much financial investment. Outside of the cost of a domain, there’s little else a blogger needs to pay for. While there are dozens of available marketing options, email provides the greatest return on investment.
According to Hosting Facts (2017), email marketing provides a $40 to $1 return on investment. The next best marketing tactic? Search engine optimization, which is $22.24 per dollar spent.
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Expand Promotions to Social Media
Social media provides some of the most beneficial promotional tools a blogger can use. It shouldn’t just function as a source for uploading blog posts. It needs to provide followers with additional content while building an email list.
Social media provides one of the best ways to collect subscribers by allowing users to promote their link on the social platform. The link will lead directly to the sign-up form.
Placing a link directly into the profile helps keep it readily available and present, no matter what the last content uploading to the social platform. For some social media platforms (like Instagram), the location for an active link is in the profile description.
This is a Breakthrough advertisingmethod aided by social media platforms, where sharing content, according to Kissmetrics, will double a blog traffic. By posting a blog post on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ three times over the course of a week, a blog will receive 43 additional interactions.
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Guest Blogging
There are a several benefits associated with guest blogging. While the initial traffic does go to the other writer’s blog, in the end the traffic will help the current writer’s own blog growth. When publishing a guest blog, it’s important to your branding information. For example, your blog name, author bio and a link back to an email sign-up form. This information will appear at the end of the written post, so individuals who enjoyed the guest blog can easily navigate over to the sign-up form.
Make sure you target the right guest blogging websites. You need to make sure the guest blogging website is relevant to yours so the traffic coming is of value to you too.
According to The Social MS (2016), a writer published 44 guest posts and received an additional 20% Internet traffic over the long term. It also helped boost their SEO and email subscriber list. So whether the guest blog post includes e-commerce product videos or is written on a singular idea, as long as the post provides meaning to the reader, it will build the blogger’s exposure and email list.
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Offer an Incentive
Everyone likes something for free. Especially when you’re getting something for free without doing much. Entering in an email address doesn’t require much time, however many people still don’t feel comfortable subscribing to your list. It could be their afraid of spam or have had a bad experience in the past.
You can offerincentives for signing up to your email list. By providing access to a free online course, providing a free eBook or a free trial offer make signing up for an email list all that more attractive. However, it is important for the incentive to offer some sort of value to the potential reader
According to Privystats (2017), providing a general offer increases email newsletter subscriptions by five percent, yet providing a chance to win a giveaway increases email newsletter subscriptions by 15 percent. The better the incentive, the larger the subscription increase.
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Stay Consistent
Email marketing runs a fine line between bombarding a recipient with too many messages and not sending enough messages. If someone signs into their email account and sees one or two messages a day, they may end up unsubscribing due to the heavy flow of content. However, if emails come in irregular times and without warning, the recipient may simply forget about the blog. The entire purpose for email marketing is to remain consistently present and in front of readers. That’s why it is crucial for a blogger to send out messages during regular intervals.
Sending out emails once a week, on the same day and around the same time helps build consistency. A recipient will identify the trends and may even look forward to it. Email service providers can help set up a newsletter schedule to keep the blogger on track.
According to Act-On, there are four key attributes to a successful newsletter. Beyond providing something of value and offering exclusivity, the most important point of concern is maintaining consistency.
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Mobile Friendly Email Templates
It is important to continually build your list, but it is all for nothing if the recipients don’t read the content. That’s exactly why it’s important to create mobile-friendly emails.
More emails are now read on mobile devices than on traditional desktop computers. This means non-mobile friendly emails are not easily viewed by more than half of all readers. If a person is unable to view the email properly they likely won’t spend the time pinching, zooming and scrolling on the page.
To avoid any loss of emails from the list and to keep subscribers interested, it’s necessary to send out mobile-friendly emails.In fact, according to Silent Blast (2018), around 18 percent of emails are now opened on desktops. On the other hand, just over 50 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device. This demonstrates the clear importance of making all email newsletters mobile friendly.
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Segment Emails
As Campaign Monitor points out, there are a number of reasons why a blogger needs to segment their email list. It increases the email list quality by 66 percent, boosts conversion rates by 56 percent and pushes the click-through and open rates up by 38 percent. It takes some extra work with the email service provider and setting up the segmented lists, but it pays off in the end.
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In Conclusion
Blogging should never become a hassle. When writing about a passionate topic, the writer can thrive. Even the marketing and outreach, when done properly, shouldn’t prove difficult. By successfully crafting an email list and reaching out to current readers through email marketing, it becomesmuch easier to generate traffic for the posts while building influence in the sector.