Email marketing is a crucial part of digital marketing strategies. In fact, how can a digital marketing strategy be complete without it? Email is still the most efficiently reliable way to reach your target market and drive sales. It takes your campaigns where it needs to go because many conversions happen via email marketing.
Email marketing helps you communicate with your target market, promote products, and reach marketing goals without the high costs of PPC campaigns or social media ads.
Blogging also strengthens SEO strategies, although SEO is not just about blogging. It is why additional strategies like email campaigns can be a powerful tool for bloggers to increase brand awareness, engagements, conversions, and revenues.
Here are some factors why email marketing is the king of marketing:
- The revenue for email marketing is up to $52 for every dollar spent
- 82% of B2B/B2C companies frequently use Email marketing
- Automation for email marketing is utilised by 95% of companies
- 73% of consumers prefer email as a marketing channel
It is proof that businesses and marketers know the importance of email campaigns to the success of their marketing strategies.
Table of Contents
Definition of Email Marketing
Email marketingis a very effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to leads and customers. When done right, it can turn leads into customers and turn onlookers into loyal supporters of your brand.
Emails can be used as a regular point of contact with the market niche. It can also be used for brand awareness, as well as product placement, instant feedback, and communication with subscribers.
Statista notes that there are now 3.7 billion email users worldwide, and it is projected to increase to 4.1 billion by 2021, and almost 5 billion by 2024.
Because of the big market that can be tapped through email marketing, it also yields high revenues at 28.5%. More than half of marketers note that it is their biggest source of ROI.
Surprisingly, email marketing beats SEO, affiliate marketing, and even social media as a marketing channel. It can be a phenomenal way for bloggers to promote their content, grow their subscribers, and get leads for more conversions.
How Bloggers Can Start an Email Marketing Campaign
Bloggers need to take advantage of the power of email marketing. All the high-quality content you are producing gets launched to another level of increase with the right strategies.
Campaign Monitor notes that email marketing delivers 89% success in marketing strategies.
The goal of every email that bloggers send should hit the most critical targets of email campaigns: get conversions, increase click-throughs, and grow the email list. Here are some pointers on how bloggers can hit those targets and jumpstart their email marketing campaigns.
Get an Email Marketing Platform that works well with WordPress.
If your email marketing platform works well with WordPress, you can easily integrate strategies with your website.
Different email marketing plugins are great for this purpose. The most popular plugins for email include:
- MailChimp: an all-in-one solution for email marketing that helps you grow your email subscribers list, write better newsletters, and build opt-in forms that help you reach many users.
- OptinMonster: an all-in-one marketing plugin and pop-up builder that helps you increase email subscribers, sales, and, ultimately, your business.
- It promises to turn 70% of visitors that may never return to subscribers and customers. The plugin aims to give you growth results in as little as a day.
- Sumo List Builder: the only mobile-optimised pop-up plugin that has easy integration with Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Aweber, and Constant Contact. It grows your user email listing, helps you convert one-time visitors to permanent subscribers, and is very user-friendly with drag-and-drop build features to help you make beautiful emails like a pro.
Having the right email marketing plugin for WordPress helps you generate leads, segment your contacts more efficiently, and nurture subscribers into customers, which leads us to our next point.
Create, Develop, and Nurture Email Subscribers List
Create
Beginning anything is sometimes the most challenging. Where do you begin and how do you start building your email subscriber list?
You can start by adding a sign-up option on your website. Include a compelling Call-to-Action (CTA) that can be included in our home page, a specific landing page, About Us page, and Contacts page.
It can come as a pop-up, a banner, and the like, as long as it can be easily seen without obstructing your design or disrupting the browsing activity of your users.
Below is an example of a simple sign-up button right on one of HubSpot’s landing pages for CRM:
Clicking the CTA button leads you to this landing page:
The process is simple and straightforward. If you make the process complicated, visitors might find it too cumbersome and drop out of the subscription process.
Develop
You can conduct A/B testing on your CTA buttons, landing pages, and sign-up forms, so you know which one gets the highest number of sign-ups. It is a crucial stage because this may be your first and only chance to connect with your visitor if you do not have a solid subscription strategy.
Once your visitors sign up, you can send a short but straightforward welcome email. Do not delay. Automate this message, so you do not miss a single subscriber.
Nurture
Your email subscriber list gives you direct access to your audience. Through email marketing, you can really build a successful blog.
Nurture your growing subscriber list as well. Personalise emails with their first name because it connects you more with your subscribers. Your emails need to be responsive as well, so subscribers can view your email at any device without distortion.
Your goal is to establish a good connection without being spammy or annoying because there will be no stopping those subscribers from clicking the unsubscribe button.
Release email campaigns consistently, at best once a week. Saturday evening is a perfect time to schedule your emails. It will not be overwhelmed by other emails flooding people’s inboxes through the week. People are also more relaxed on weekends, and therefore can browse a little bit longer. Posting on Sunday night, for instance, will make your email come at the top of the queue on a Monday. Checking emails are one of the significant activities people do as they get back to work from the weekend.
Practicing these simple email marketing strategies will help you grow your subscriber list and keep the ones you already have.
Personalise your email messages.
Using the customer data that you get from your subscription list, you can customise your email settings so that you can send personalised emails to your subscribers.
You can greet customers by name, for instance, to increase personalisation and customer satisfaction.
Brand recommendations make up for 35% of product sales, so if you are selling any product or service through your blog, it is best to personalise your messages to stand out among other brands.
Emails should give a preview of your most recent content.
Your emails must give subscribers a preview of what your most current blog is. It should be creative and compelling enough. It must have that right balance of content where you can give substantial information in that one email while getting your subscribers interested in clicking through your website to know more.
You want to do this because your email content needs to lead your subscribers to your website, to matter in terms of organic search and SERP ranking. It helps you generate more engagements on your blog, and keep subscribers coming back for more.
Make sure that when email subscribers click through your website, they find high-quality content that solves problems. If your content does not bring value to them, subscribers would not care to go to your website and will suffice with what you send through email. Worse, if subscribers see that your blogs are not as valuable to them, they may opt-out of your subscription list as well.
Ensuring high-quality content both in your emails and the blog itself establishes continuity, which is a trust element that nudges your subscribers further into investing either their time or their money with your brand.
You can also include a social media post to your email campaign, so your subscribers know that you are also active on social media. Social media is an integral part of digital marketing campaigns. It boosts website traffic and helps you grow your blog even more.
Create Mobile-Friendly Emails
It is important to optimize emails for mobile phone users. Users get turned off easily by non-responsive content because page formats get distorted on mobile devices. It will affect sign-up possibilities from your blog if users will just keep abandoning your site.
With the number of unique mobile phone users rising to 5.19 billion this year, any blogger who does not create mobile-friendly content in all platforms will not be optimizing
Make a well-written email copy
Get creative and write high-quality email content. It cannot be too long so you need to be straightforward and straight to the point. Use relevant keywords that you also used in the blog posts you are backlinking.
Other factors to consider when writing is to provide value to your subscribers. Write short or manageable sentences and keep paragraphs short. Wherever possible, use bullets and text styles strategically to highlight certain keywords or key phrases you want your subscribers to remember about your content. This is particularly helpful since most readers skim through content first before pouring time to read on.
Include compelling CTA (Call to Action) on your email. Readers want to be guided with actionable steps, so they know what to do next without the guesswork.
Double-check your work repeatedly and read it out loud so you can check for yourself if your content is an easy read or not.
Make your content dynamic as well. Provide some artwork, an image, or a short video. Using multimedia helps readers consume your content better and gives your subscribers a better idea about your content and your style.
Videos can enhance your email campaigns.
Video is a widely used and highly effective channel if you want more engagements from your content. More than 72% of customers prefer to watch a video of a product before purchasing an item. It will enhance your email campaign if you produce a video for your content.
When you insert the word “Video” on your subject line, the chance for click rate is higher by 13%. Just make sure it is of high-quality, mobile-responsive, with the right duration, and will not lag your users’ devices. Create an exciting and compelling thumbnail to entice users to click.
Social sharing and linkbacks improve your email marketing strategies.
You can also include social media share buttons while you are at it. If you shared a video that is also on your YouTube channel, then it would be easy for subscribers to share your content when they like it.
Integrating your SEO and social media marketing strategies with your email marketing strategies is a smart way to optimise all channels available to you.
Adding social shares and linkbacks nurture your click-through leads and encourage further engagement, increasing linkbacks to your site.
You can also include affiliate marketing links, and other email marketing offers you have. Even if the results of email marketing are not reflected on SERP, it can still indirectly affect your blog site’s SEO through backlinking and social media engagements.
Always test your emails before launching your email campaigns.
It alwayspays to double-check your email content before launching it. There is nothing more jarring to most subscribers than typographical errors, grammar issues, and unattractive format mistakes.
Also, test your email first to ensure it is not going to spam. If a considerable number in your list are not opening your emails, it can affect your status with Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Your email might start registering as spam, so prune your email list right away.
Email testing tools can automate this process for you. You can use any of these email testing tools:
- Litmus: usually used by enterprises, this is the most popular email tester and often used by most corporations. It allows you to edit code on the platform and preview your emails on different channels.
- Mailtrap: performs all its testing on a fake server to prevent accidentally sending out test emails to your subscribers. You can conduct different email tests on your email, including preview testing, and you can check your HTML if it works properly with various email clients.
- Preview My Email: just like Mailtrap, bloggers can double-check code on multiple platforms and different clients with this tool. Preview My Email can give many ways to test emails, like copy-pasting your email content and direct uploading of files.
Send Emails at Prime Time
The best time to send emails is around 8 pm to 12 midnight. Emails sent within this time registered the highest open rates. More subscribers get to open the email campaigns before their inboxes get flood during regular work hours (9 am-5 pm).
You can opt to have split email lists if you are sending emails to subscribers from different time zones.
Emails that sent on weekends also get more open rates. People are more relaxed on weekends and tend to browse their emails longer.
Conclusion: Bloggers Should Optimise Email Marketing
Email marketing still has the strongest social influence, according to SocialTwist, that checked 119 referral campaigns from leading brands and companies over 18 months. SocialTwist found out that email still leads in conversions and getting new subscribers. It is in contrast with the most powerful social media platforms, Facebook, and Twitter.
That may be surprising for millennials who flock social media. But companies and professionals still prefer the stability and reliability of emails.
Email may be an older method of digital communication, but it is still a valuable marketing channel for customer engagement. Bloggers must not ignore email marketing because it remains a powerful marketing tool.
Author’s Bio
MAYLEEN MEÑEZ
Mayleen Meñez worked for seven years in TV and Radio production, and also as a Graphic Artist/Editor. Finding her true passion, she devoted 15 years in NGO and community development work, where she experienced being a coordinator and teacher, travelling both in the Philippines and countries in Asia. She homeschools her three kids and reinvents Filipino dishes in her spare time. Writing has always been a hobby and pursuit, and she recently added content writing with Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand up her sleeve, while preparing for her next adventure in the nations.
