Article Contributed by Anurag Gupta
If you’ve valuable, relevant and rewarding content on your website, it must reach the targeted beneficiaries. And what better than email as a channel to draw in the audience and subtly drop them to the doorsteps of what piques their interest. These days, the email marketing rules are fast adapting to complement content marketing campaigns and trends.
Traditional email marketing, which focused heavily on sales pitch, has evolved to a subtler variant that pays greater attention towards engaging the audience and building a relationship by taking them to value added content. It is a permission-based communication with subscribers that have already shown interest in what you offer.
Here’s a rundown of actionable tips on how you can use email campaigns to improve your content marketing.
Choose Relevant Content to Promote
Here’s a path – your subscriber opens the email, gives a cursory look to your message and then decides whether to pull back or head to the content you are offering. All this happens virtually in a flash, so you have just a second or two to give a compelling, direct reason why they should go to the content. If you handpick and promote valuable, relevant and rewarding content in your email, chances are strong you would be helping your content marketing immensely.
Engage in Dialogue with Email Campaigns
Bombarding the audience with a batch of emails, an approach widely adopted by marketers, is flawed. Although, your email lands the inbox it barely initiates a dialogue. Design your email campaigns to launch a conversation and draw in the prospects to “talk it out” with you. Encourage them to participate and include social share tabs in your emails, prompting the audience to build up the dialogue on social networks.
Plant Crisp & Inviting Call to Actions in Email Newsletters
Once you have figured out the content to be promoted and the manner in which it will be done, you need to find inviting ways of including links to pages on your site. This can be achieved by planting crisp, appealing and strategic calls to action. Keep the language simple and straightforward with an aesthetically appealing design to draw in the audience to the target page. For example, a clearly identifiable “Read More” call to action, directing subscribers to a weekly roundup of popular articles, could be a good way to drive traffic to content.
Let Stats Tailor Your Email
As part of your content marketing strategy, you might be creating dozens of articles, blog updates, social media feeds and other sharable content. But not all of it fits the bill for your subscriber list. Instead of serving whatever you create, focus on key statistics such as where on website prospects spent most of their time, how many visits a particular genre of content received, degree of engagement, etc. This insight is vital for subscriber segmentation and eventually tailoring of emails to propel them towards the content.
Segment Your Audience
If you combine the prospects’ behavioral data with traditional segmentation, you can customize the emails and offers to fit their needs. For example, knowledge of who opened the email, what they downloaded on the site, etc. provides you with a clear line about what kind of content you should drive them to. This specificity boosts your content marketing efforts.
Employ “Mix & Match” Strategy
If you have a high frequency of email campaigns, you run the risk of getting monotonous in styles and methods. To avoid putting off the prospects with recurrent patterns, maintain a big basket of email components such as content angles, surveys, offers, delivery days and others, and mix and match them as need be. The novelty factor makes it easier to keep your audience engaged.
Tap the Potential of Automated Emails
Automated emails such as welcome messages, invoice, notifications and receipts often go without any glimpse to your content. Sticking to the context of the communication, you can slip in links to your best posts or other useful content in these emails. It will be a handy addition particularly for new subscribers while you can expect higher traffic.
Set Up an RSS Email Feed
By setting up an RSS email feed, you can send automated updates to blog visitors whenever a new piece of content is published. This is no-effort method to drive traffic to your latest content. To the advantage of your prospects, they only need to check their inbox to stay abreast with your content offerings.
The above-mentioned steps lay down a roadmap for integrating your email and content marketing efforts. When someone is signing up for your email, make sure you reach out to them from time to time, informing them how your new content could be a good read. If you stick to the tips discussed here, you can expect more visitors, more leads and more new customers.
Author Bio
Anurag Gupta is a budding entrepreneur with stakes in WeblinkIndia.net an acclaimed Web Designing & Development Company, headquartered in India. He also happens to be a keen writer, sharing insights, tips, and tutorials on subjects related to the ever evolving landscape of Web Designing and Development.