9 minute read time
Why Bloggers Need Email Marketing
Blogs have come a long way since their early inception and, while many still use them as personal online logs of their daily lives, many businesses have taken advantage of blogging to provide more to their consumers.
Blogging is a great way to reach consumers, build trust, and make your business a go-to source for your field.
But what about the people who want to turn their blog into a business?
Why bloggers need email marketing
Even if a blogger is creating exceptional content and interacts well with readers, keeping track of what content is working, how many people you regularly reach, and how many return visitors you see can get overwhelming.
Email marketing for bloggers is vital to your blog. It will help you strengthen your connection with your readers and ensure your content gets read by the maximum amount of readers possible.
And email marketing when done right is cost-effective and can actually save you time. You can get your content in front of more people and build relationships with your following, ultimately increasing your readership and your revenue.
Email marketing in a nutshell
A marketing strategy is vital to any business or blog looking to make a profit, and, while having content is excellent, it means nothing without proper optimization and a means of getting the information out to your following.
Many blogs take advantage of social sharing, which allows them to hit publish and send new off to their various social media channels. However, when it comes to reaching your audience, email is still the way to go.
As consumers, email is about 40x more effective than both Facebook and Twitter combined in terms of customer acquisition.
In fact, 33% of Americans alone check their email daily, with another 39% of Americans checking their email up to three times a day.
If we are looking on a global scale, over 3.8 billion people worldwide use email, and 281.1 billion emails are sent out daily.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Why do bloggers need email marketing?
Successful bloggers are already creating amazing content that readers want to get their hands on. However, they don’t always have the most effective ways of sharing that content or making sure someone who reads one post reads another, so email marketing can be a game changer.
But email marketing consists of more than merely copying your blog’s URL into an email and hitting send. If you want to see the results email is capable of, you’ll need a plan.
So, before jumping into email marketing, you’ll want to take the time to build an email marketing strategy for your blog.
Email marketing for bloggers begins with building a strategy
Bloggers, just like any other business owner, need to take the time to plan out and build their email marketing strategy before they start sending out mass emails to their followers.
Understand your audience
The first step in planning out an email marketing strategy is always identifying and understanding your audience. Having an in-depth, deeply personal knowledge of your audience is what will set your content apart from competitors, whether it’s for your blog or material for an email campaign.
When building your email marketing strategy, consider these questions:
- Who is my ideal client?
- Are they male or female?
- What age range am I targeting?
- Where do they live?
It may seem silly at first, but these questions are going to help narrow down your targeted audience. By the end of the planning process, you should be able to clearly picture an individual that would fall into your specific audience.
Content creation vs. content curation
Once you know who you are trying to reach, the next step in email marketing for bloggers is to decide on the type of content you’ll share.
For an established blog, you may already have a solid idea of what your audience wants to see from you. Blogs that are just starting, however, will need to decide on their niche and start creating or finding content that resonates.
The idea here is to provide readers with quality content that is relevant to their needs so they keep coming back to you and your blog as a resource.
Once you’ve narrowed down your content niche, you’ll want to start collecting and creating a variety of different content that you’ll want to share.
Then content creation and content curation will come into play.
They may sound similar, but they’re actually two very different things:
- Content creation: the process of creating 100% original content, such as a blog post, social media post, infographic, or newsletter.
- Content curation: the process of researching and collecting valuable content from a variety of sources and sharing it with your audience.
While having original, highly-ranked, and properly optimized content is vital, sharing other quality work done by others can also resonate with your audience.
One of the biggest reason’s bloggers will want to include both curated content and personally created content is that both will help their audience recognize them as an authority figure on their given niche.
Original content, such as a monthly newsletter, is a great way to keep your readers informed on what has been happening on the blog, while also sharing information on what is to come.
Source: Really Good Emails
When sharing curated material, you are also showing your audience that you understand your industry and are keeping up to date with it. If done right, you’ll also be growing your network because, as you share top leader’s information, you are sparking conversations that will help get you noticed.
Reaching out to the top industry leaders and influencers can also be highly beneficial to growing your blog and building up your readership. Considering swapping blog posts or asking those leaders to share your post in order to get in front of more readers.
Have the right marketing tools
When it comes to email marketing for bloggers, having the right tools is critical. Not only do they help simplify the entire email marketing process, but they help to provide more in-depth insight into what works and what doesn’t in terms of your email campaigns.
Your email service provider—such as Campaign Monitor—should include the use of email analytics to help users have a full understanding as to what is working and what isn’t when sending emails. Numbers worth watching include:
- Delivery rates
- Open rates
- Click rates
- Unsubscribe rate
- Bounce rates
These are the numbers that are going to tell you who’s opening what or whether your emails are being opened at all. From there, bloggers can reassess what is working and what isn’t, helping you refine your strategy and continuously improve the results you see from email marketing.
What else should bloggers consider when building their email marketing strategy?
There are a vast variety of other factors that should be considered when it comes to email marketing for bloggers.
Creating a healthy email list
Email list hygiene is essential for any email marketing strategy. The entire point of your strategy is to have your content be seen, and, if users aren’t getting the content or aren’t opening it for whatever reason, this is a clear indication that you need to reassess your strategy or your content.
Creating a healthy email list isn’t difficult; in fact, it’s been made simple now that law requires a user’s consent before businesses can send out emails to them. Email list opt-ins are a great way to gather a list of subscribers that want to receive your information.
When monitoring your email’s analytics, you’ll want to watch your overall bounce rate and see which subscribers don’t open your emails. These users, for whatever reason, have disengaged from your emails, so clear them from your list.
List segmentation
List segmentation helps you break down your audience list into categories. It can be by age range, gender, location, and more.
There are a few ways of creating segmented lists, including doing it yourself. However, as a part of your new email marketing strategy, you could send out a “get to know you” email that allows users to tell you exactly who they are and what they want to see from you.
Source: Really Good Emails
Though this email isn’t from a blog, you can send something similar to get to know your subscribers and send them the most relevant emails possible. After all, sending relevant content at the right time is what makes email marketing for bloggers so powerful.
Email automation
Once you’ve got your lists set up, automate as many emails as you can. While newsletters and other one-off campaigns are useful, setting up an email campaign that automatically sends out emails to individuals is a great way to stay in contact with your audience while requiring little time or effort from you after the initial set up.
When a specific person meets a given trigger—such as making a purchase or opting in for a free download—an appropriate campaign will automatically be sent to them, helping you nurture leads or introduce yourself to them so you see the maximum impact from their interaction with your blog.
For example, if you have a new subscriber to your blog, a great automated email campaign would be a welcome series. Once the subscriber has entered their information, they will receive a welcome email that will then lead them to either further material or next steps that should be taken.
Wrap up
Whether you are new to blogging or a pro, email marketing can help your blog do more and see more readers. But when you set up your email marketing strategy, there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind:
- Know your audience
- Have a variety of original and curated content at your disposal
- Have the right marketing tools from the start
Not sure where you look for quality email marketing tools? Let Campaign Monitor help. We’ve got the tools to not only help you create beautiful email campaigns, but also to monitor and test them.
