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How to Use Blogs to Jumpstart Your Email Marketing

A quick, easy email marketing campaign you can use to get started.

Email Marketing

If you’ve been reading these blogs for a while, you know that there’s several reasons we love including business blogs in your marketing:

  1. Blogs help with your SEO efforts.
  2. Blogs can help you create compelling content.
  3. Blogs help jumpstart your social media marketing.

But that, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t all that blogs can do. Just as you can use blogs to get your social media marketing going, you can also use them
to jumpstart your email marketing.

As the marketing tactic with the highest ROI of any other marketing tactic (more than $40 for every $1 spent!), email marketing is a critical tool in any
business’s box. However, since email marketing does require a good bit of time and effort, many businesses end up skipping email
marketing or letting it flounder.

It makes some sense: if you’ve only got so much time on your hands, email marketing is a huge investment. However, if you’re already doing blogs, you can
start doing email marketing now, and build a foundation upon which you can grow your efforts.

Here’s how.

1. Create a blog digest email that sends subscribers the latest blog entry or entries.

Not sure what kind of emails to send in your email marketing? You can always set up an email that will regularly go out to subscribers with your latest
post(s). You can even do digests with different frequencies – send out once a week, collecting that week’s posts, or send out daily, as soon as you
update with a new blog post.

Besides creating an ongoing email campaign that you can just set up and then forget about, this is a great way to grow your blog readership. Not all of
your customers are going to be familiar with RSS feeds or follow you on social media in order to get the latest blog updates, because both of those
require more time and effort on their part. By offering blog updates via email, you make it much easier for them to consume your content.

2. Use your blog to collect email addresses.

The first step is great if you already have a strong mailing list of potential customers – but what if you’re starting your email marketing from scratch?
Don’t buy an email list; put a simple subscription form on your blog pages and invite readers to sign up to receive blogs right to their inbox.

Now, what we mean by “simple subscription form” is this: name, email address. You may want to split “name” into “first name” and “last name”, depending
on how you store this information, but that’s the extent of the contact information that you’ll need for these emails.

“But why stop there?” you ask. “This is my chance to start marketing to them – why would I only get the barest information from them?”

We’ll tell you a little thing about marketing: What you ask from potential customers must be equal or less than what you are offering them. In other words,
people are aware of how valuable their contact information is to you. They’re not going to give up all their info just for a few blog posts from you.
The more information they give, the larger the commitment. Maybe they’re not ready for a big commitment quite yet. 

And don’t forget what makes these email addresses so valuable: these are people who are raising their hand and telling you that they’re interested
in what you have to offer. And the thing is, once you have an email from these blog readers, you can grow that into further opportunities to get more
information from them.

3. Use your blog to promote other email-collection opportunities.

Do you have an ebook that visitors can download? Do you host webinars? Are you going to be at an event or trade show?

These are all opportunities to ask for more information from your blog readers. Because this information is more valuable than a short blog post, you can
ask for more information from the potential customer, such as their phone number, address, or business. Just put your download or registration behind
a form, and people who are truly interested will give you the information you seek.

But don’t just rely on social media posts or emails to tell people about these opportunities – include on your blog posts a written or visual call-to-action
announcing the opportunity and encouraging them to sign up for it. There are several options for how to do this: a pop-up lightbox that appears shortly
after someone visits a blog post, an ad-like call-to-action at the top or sidebar of the page, or a button at the bottom of the post.

You can also discuss the opportunities in the blog posts themselves: including an excerpt from an ebook in a post, video clips or the presentation slides
from a webinar, or discussing what you’ll be doing at the event or trade show, for example. Make sure to include the link to the opportunity throughout
the blog post, so that people can go straight to the form if they want to.

However you do it, sharing these opportunities on your blog posts just makes sense. People who are reading these posts are already interested in the information
you have to offer – why not see if they’re interested in learning more? If they are, that tells you something about whether or not they’ll be a strong
potential customer. And if they are, you now have more contact information on them, so you can start marketing more toward them.

You can create separate email campaigns for the contacts collected via this method, nurturing these leads with more information or special offers meant
to convert them into becoming your customers.

Again, all of this just from your blogs.

By starting with a regular business blog, you can create your first, straightforward email campaign; start building an email list of interested potential
customers; and promote other, more in-depth email collection (and therefore marketing) chances.

Do you see why we’re so thrilled about business blogging?


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