Turn Blog Content into Great Email Marketing Campaigns

All good marketing professional understands that inbound marketing is essential. For some time, the strategy to create good and relevant content was only seen as “nice to have,” but in the year 2016, inbound turned into a must-have. Inbound marketing can be easily defined as content that gets the audience’s attention. It is an invitation to an ongoing dialogue in which you can communicate with your customers. It can also improve the reach of brands by letting customers share the content within their professional or social circles.

Inbound marketing has basically two directions: social media marketing and content marketing.

When we consider content marketing, blogging comes to mind. The logic is very simple: helpful and relevant blog posts are designed to drive traffic to the website’s company ultimately. The main focus here is to create leads and generate business opportunities, or in other words, make people recognize your product or brand and make them read to purchased it.

But the question arises that how to use your blog content to nurture leads and create selling possibilities with your email marketing campaigns. Keep reading the blog and find out.

• Content marketing, where everything begins
• What about the email marketing content?
• how to use your blog in your email marketing campaigns
• Repurposing blog contents
• Four benefits of sharing your blog posts on email marketing campaigns

Content Marketing, Where Everything Starts

Let us begin with the basics. How do people actually find your website page? To make it simple, there are two methods: they type your company name or website name into the research web page or into a browser. This is not quite interesting, and it does not really help you get leads since they already know you; or you can pay for ads, which can be really costly and will not going to keep your website on their radar for long, after all, once you do not have more money you will probably no longer have that particular audience.

So what is your way out? Content marketing! The purpose of content marketing is to be so appealing that your lead will eventually purchase your service or product. Nonetheless, to do that, you need to draw their interest, maintain reader loyalty, and increase page views. There some ways to achieve that, and blogging is one of them. Eventually, your blog post can inspire, educate, inform, and/or entertain.

Marketers which prioritize blogging are thirteen times more likely to acquire a positive ROI

If you create relevant content, not only you will have more pages that are going to be indexed by search engines such as Bing and Google, which means more possibilities of being found by your audience, but you can really engage your customers if they like what they are reading. And it is not only that. Take a look at some advantages of blogging:

1. Improve your social media strategy: blogging can also help you with social media strategy. You can always share your blog into your social media accounts and produce more traffic to your website;
2. Convert leads: If you put call-to-action buttons in your blog content and invite your reader to perform some action, like downloading an ebook/pdf or ask for a free trial, for example, you can ultimately convert some leads into customers;
3. Be a reference: if your content is suitable and helpful for your customers, they will always come to you for guidance and answers. Be certain to answer possible questions about your service or product in your blog content and your customer will feel confident of keeping coming back for more information;
4. Engage your readers: make your readers and followers engage with your blog posts by raising discussions and asking questions at the end of your blog posts. This will keep them engaged in your company and will assist you in building brand awareness;
5. Inbound links: attractive content can also be helpful to you with inbound links, a significant resource in SEO (search engine optimization techniques). If your blog is being seen as a reference, your blog posts links will also be shared on other website pages, and, as an outcome, your website traffic will progress.

Do not forget that blogging is a continuous process and will bring results in the long term, so keep your attention on producing high-quality content. By providing exclusive material, you will naturally grow your website traffic, improve your customer’s loyalty, and finally improve your sales rate.

What about Email Marketing Content?

Email marketing may not be regarded as part of an inbound strategy, but producing relevant content for subscribers can improve your brand awareness and your lead conversion once you will be viewed as trustworthy.

As stated by the Email Experience Council, the success of a good email marketing campaign depends on three things: content (forty percent), audience (forty percent), and images (twenty percent).

This means that when creating an email marketing campaign, you have to consider whom you are talking to and WHAT you are talking about. When learning about the WHAT, the number one word to consider its importance.

Relevance means targeted messages. Your message should be beneficial for your customers. Research from About.com showed that seventy-one percent of consumers trust brands that provide valuable information without trying to sell them something. Your customer is most likely to buy a service or product from you if his buyer’s journey goes through editorial content rather than advertising.

Forty-Five percent of marketers say blogging is their number one most important content strategy.

But apart from relevance, what makes the content good? Emails are assumed to be an individual experience. Before setting up a campaign, ask yourself several questions: What kind of benefit will they get from that? Whether my customers will read this email? Is it shareable so that they can show it to family and friends?

Bear in mind that, if your customers have signed up to receive your emails, they are interested in being educated on some subject or need help to solve a problem. They are explicitly requesting more information.

How to Use Your Blog in Your Email Marketing Campaigns

A good way to deliver relevant and good content to your customers is by sharing your blog contents in your newsletter emails. By this, you can drive more traffic to your blog and your company’s website using your email marketing campaign.

Email allows you to efficiently communicate with readers on a more intimate level, establish trust with your audience, and provides you a tool for offering appropriate content to your audience.

But how to combine your email and blog content in an interesting way? Above all, copy and paste is not an option here. Let us give you some insights:

• First simple tactic: when you write a new blog post, send a link for it to your contact list. Create few magnet headlines and add the link to your blog posts so they can easily read it right away. Fresh content is the fuel that steers the blogosphere; it holds readers are coming back to your blog.
• Add signup at the end of your blog posts and offer some sort of incentive to the customer that subscribes — for example, updates, monthly newsletters, or access to exclusive content.
• Build an editorial calendar for your email marketing and blog strategy, so you can make them work together. This will support you when creating content for emails, for example, as you can see what is being published on your blog, and vice-versa.
• Promote your guest posts. If you have guest posts, why not let your audience know about that? By this, you can give them different insights on important topics and introduce them to new websites and writers that they might not know of. Once again, it supports to build your trust within your customers.
• Try to use old blog posts as magnets. Find some older but famous posts and use them as magnets to get some new subscribers. We will discuss further this later.
• Have you ever thought of creating an autoresponder series to leverage already-existing content? What you can do is use some of your old and famous posts for that. For instance, you can create and advertise some sort of free course using the content of specific posts. You will have just to copy them into newsletter templates and make it a long list of emails sent once a visitor subscribes to your newsletter.
• Create firm campaigns. Segment your list and send some blog that may be attractive for a particular group of customers — by doing that, you can build value for your content and catch customers according to their interests.

Recall that Sonia Simone in the Content Marketing Know-It-All) once said that blogging and email marketing assist different purposes, and a smart content marketing strategy will normally include both.

Repurposing Blog Contents

Consider repurposing your blog posts to create new, engaging email campaigns. You can always add some new information or reformat your content for different channels. Think of new plans that you can take on the same subject. Consider elaborating on the subject and then linking back to your old blogs. Produce other assets than text to communicate your message.

For instance, why not create email campaigns with infographics, webinars, or ebooks/pdfs from an old successful blog post? Does your research and find out which posts have been rated as highly and find new ways to share them with your new and current subscribers.

Four Benefits of Sharing Your Blog Posts on Email Marketing Campaigns

Many marketers usually use social media platforms to share their content, and although it may be the best strategy, sadly, it has some disadvantages. The major problem in social media sharing is that many of the time, your customers have to be online actually to see your post.

Take Facebook, for example, only two percent of your audience see your posts, and even if you promote them using paid ads, it is not guaranteed that it will reach to them. Email marketing does not face this problem. That is the first benefit of many:

1. The timing: your email will be just waiting in your customer inbox until he reads it, or until he removes it. Make sure to have great attractive content so that your customer opens your email
2. Target audience: your email list is filled with contacts that want to hear from you. Take benefit from that and send the most interesting content.
3. Ongoing audience: most of the time, people who come to your blog because of social media or search engines are usually just one visit wonders. But if you manage to make them subscribe to your mailing list, you can reach them whenever you like. Keep that in mind to give them valuable content that keeps making them come back.
4. Keep a record of your results: using email marketing, you can track your results like open rates, click-through rates, etc. So you can find out how your blog posts are performing, if the subject lines worked, if your audience favors images or textual content in newsletters, etc.

Do not neglect to use all your social media accounts to help promote your newsletters and blog posts. Your customer is much more likely to be responsive if he hears from you from different channels. Make sure your media accounts, email, and blog accounts speak the same language.

You can always generate different tactics to promote your content. After all, combining email marketing and blogging should be part of your marketing strategy. Keep in mind that creating and publishing the content is just the beginning of the journey, the hard work comes later.

The success of your blog posts will determine the success of your website and eventually will reflect on your sales. Do not undervalue the power of your cross channels marketing strategy.