Email marketing is one important tool in your online customer communication arsenal. It’s also essential that you have a well-designed website that’s easy to navigate. Another must these days is a constant social media presence, as most companies have an employee or marketing partner that posts articles and news, and responds to queries and comments on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
What you may not have considered as a useful way to get your audience’s attention, educate them, and move them to action is blogging. Think blogging doesn’t work? You’re reading our blog article right now, aren’t you? For the ultimate reach, however, consider taking it one step farther and integrating your email marketing and blog.
Curate Personalized Content
Curating email content is the ultimate way to make prospects and current customers feel as though you’re talking directly to them. While it’s important to share articles, videos, and information from other sources to add variety and a diversity of perspectives to your messaging, the use of blogging and email marketing allows you to inject your company’s thoughts, as well as let your audience know about exciting news or upcoming changes to your services or product line.
The benefits of blogging and promoting your posts via email don’t just end at keeping your customers in the loop, however. Blogging also helps boost your organization’s credibility in the eyes of your contacts. Write enough high-quality content and you’ll quickly become a go-to resource when they need info pertaining to your industry. Another plus? Keeping an up-to-date blog can help boost your SEO; websites that keep up their blogs have 434 percent more indexed pages than those that don’t.
Utilize Your Email Marketing Tool to Distribute Your Posts
Once you’ve got a beautifully-written, interesting, and informative blog post, the next step is to get it out to your audience. Thanks to email marketing platforms, this is easy to accomplish. Tools like MailChimp, Feedblitz, and AWeber, for example, all feature RSS campaign functionality that makes pushing new blog posts to your contact list a simple process.
Just as with sending any other email, make sure you’re including attention-grabbing subject lines that will entice your contacts into opening the message and taking a look. Include a sentence or two to tell them what the blog is about and pique their interest in reading further.
Create an Editorial Calendar for Blogging and Email Marketing
One of the most challenging aspects of combining blogging and email marketing is coming up with new blog post ideas on a regular basis. To move this process along, create an editorial calendar so you always have blog post fodder at hand.
The first step in creating an editorial calendar is to play the “Is It for Us or for Them?” Challenge. Think about your target audience and the types of topics they’d like to read about. With this in mind, come up with about five major topic categories that are applicable to your audience’s interests. (Broad categories could include things like “Cybersecurity” or “Technology.”) Next, make a list of topics that fall into those categories. (“How to keep your company from becoming a victim of ransomware” could fall under the “Cybersecurity” category, for example.)
Your next step is to determine how frequently you'll post new blog articles. No matter if you opt for weekly, every two weeks, or monthly, it’s important to be consistent. Set up a calendar and mark it with any important upcoming events, product releases, or holidays — those will all be fodder for blog topics. Then fill in the rest of the schedule with topics from your list, mixing it up to keep things interesting.
As you write about a variety of topics and encourage your readers to interact in the comments, ideas for new blogs will automatically be generated; add those to your calendar, as well.
It may sound complex at first, but once you get it up and running, the process will become easier. By creating an editorial calendar -- which you can do with a simple spreadsheet -- curating content that’s specific to your audience, and using email marketing tools to simplify the process, you’ll soon have your blogging and email marketing running hand-in-hand.
Want more blogging and email marketing ideas? Help launching a blog or email program? Contact us today!
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