Content creation is only half the battle. Most content online gets zero traffic and zero backlinks.
Content marketing is an effective way to engage with your audience and drive organic business growth. Publishing quality content helps establish your brand as an authority and increases your visibility online.
When it comes to marketing your business, you can’t afford to ignore email marketing. For every dollar spent on email, you can earn an average of $42 — that’s a high ROI compared to other marketing channels.
Email is more than simply sending promotional messages. It can also be used to complement your content marketing and deliver better results for your business.
Here’s how you can integrate your email marketing strategy with your content strategy.
1. Segment your email list
One way to make your emails more effective is with segmentation — the process of breaking up your list into smaller segments. For example, you can divide your list into segments based on age, location, interests, purchase history, and more. Why should you segment your list?
Segmenting allows you to deliver more personalized content to your audience. If subscribers have expressed interest in a particular topic, you can provide them with relevant blog posts and other products that resonate with them. You can even segment by languages and translate content. Or sort by demographics and interests. The options are nearly endless.
The good news? Segmenting your list delivers a 760% increase in revenue over taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
If you blast one email to your entire list, some subscribers will find it useful. But others may feel left out because it’s not relevant to them.
Online users today are bombarded with information from multiple channels. If your subscribers continue to receive content that’s irrelevant to their interests, they’re likely to unsubscribe.
But if you continue to deliver content that aligns with their interests, they’re likely to stay subscribed and may even recommend your newsletter to others.
2. Deliver value with your content
Your subscribers are made up of people who have signed up to your list. They’ve expressed interest in your company and want to hear more from you.
Take this opportunity to share your best content and impress your subscribers. If you publish content on a regular basis, you can compile a weekly newsletter with links to those articles.
For instance, JoyOrganics does this with its ultimate guide content. Turning and repurposing existing content into in-depth email exclusives drives value and loyalty.
Another approach is to compile a list of popular articles on your site. Here’s what visitors on the rest and success article on Sleep Junkie see.
Linking to popular reads would be great additions to your next newsletter. Subscribers can click through to the articles that are relevant to their interests.
It’s important to choose the right content to deliver. Otherwise, you risk people unsubscribing from your email list at a high rate.
Send out surveys to your list to ask subscribers what type of content they want to receive. Then use those responses to segment your list accordingly.
How often should you email your list? Research shows that 49% of consumers say they would prefer to receive emails from brands on a weekly basis.
Whether you’re an e-commerce store selling dog treats or a SaaS brand offering marketing software, don’t be afraid to send promotional emails.
3. Turn your links into buttons
Click-through rates are a valuable metric in email marketing. They help you measure who is clicking on your links and following them to your site.
If your click-through rates are low, it could be because your links aren’t grabbing attention. Turn your text links into call to action (CTA) buttons — prompts that are commonly used on landing pages to get visitors to take action.
It may seem like a minor change, but it helped Campaign Monitor increase their click-through rates by 28%.
Just changing a text link to a button generated more traffic to their linked pages. Buttons work because they have a number of attributes that text links don’t.
The CTA button in the example above is in a different color, which draws more attention to the link. It also includes a clear prompt that tells subscribers exactly what to do.
Just adding a button to your emails won’t necessarily increase click-through rates though. It’s also important to ensure your copy is optimized.
Include a short description in your emails and highlight a clear benefit to entice subscribers to click through.
4. Add videos to your emails
Videos offer an attractive way to market your products or services. They are important digital assets you can include on your landing pages, and even upload them to video-sharing platforms like YouTube.
Take your videos even further by integrating them into your emails. Instead of reading through an article, subscribers can watch a video.
One issue you may run into is embedding videos in your emails, but there are some workarounds. For example, you could include a thumbnail of your video and include a link that directs subscribers to a landing page where they can watch it.
This is a strategy I’ve seen used by TimeTackle, who actually directs users to a landing page video embedded via YouTube.
Alternatively, you can also include a text-link or CTA button with a link to your videos.
On the landing page, make it clear where to watch the video and how it will help the user. For instance, take a look at this landing page. The video is highlighted and labeled with “here is how a barcode system can help you.”
This is critical for engagement and increasing video plays. Adding a video to your emails is a great way to engage subscribers. But remember to focus on providing value and keep them under two minutes.
5. Promote your social media profiles
Content strategy is all about leveraging different content formats and channels. It allows you to increase your reach and drive even more traffic to your pages. Because the truth is: 98% of content online has no backlinks and no traffic.
Email and social can help you change that. Combining these methods helps you achieve two things — it lets subscribers know what platforms you’re active on and it gives them an opportunity to share your content.
Let your subscribers know what social platforms you are on and what they can expect with each one. Consider having a contest where subscribers can win a free product by liking your page on Facebook.
Promoting your social media channels gives people on your list more opportunities to interact with your brand. It can also increase your reach as subscribers may share your content with their own followers. Collect user feedback and iterate for improved results.
Note that this works the other way around too. You can promote your newsletter on your social media to build your email list.
6. Upload your email list to Facebook
Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most popular social networks with well over 2.7 billion active users. That figure is only expected to grow. That kind of user base makes Facebook a powerful marketing tool. You can create a page and share updates about your business to build a following.
Another way you can leverage Facebook to grow your business is with Custom Audiences — an ad targeting option that allows you to reach people who have interacted with your brand. You can use the Custom Audiences feature by uploading your subscriber list. Facebook uses a process called “hashing” to find profiles and keep customer data secure.
Once the process is complete, you can reach people on your list with a retargeting campaign as they browse Facebook. For example, if a subscriber on your list abandons their shopping cart, you can bring them back to your site with a retargeting ad.
You can even create a Lookalike Audience to find people who share similar interests with your existing customers. This is an especially useful feature as you can create targeted ads on Facebook and drive more traffic to your pages.
7. Add a signup form to your content
Struggling to build your email list?
Add more subscribers to your list with a lead magnet — an incentive you offer on your site in exchange for email addresses. A lead magnet can be a downloadable template, an ebook, or a white paper.
Offering a lead magnet not only helps you build your list, but it also helps you generate targeted leads that you can slowly nurture with an email series.
But for a lead magnet to be effective, you should offer something of value.
What kind of content can you create that helps them solve a problem? This is where research from your content strategy will come in handy.
If you create your content in Google Docs, you can export it into a PDF. You can also use Wordable to export your content directly into WordPress where you can password protect a blog post that’s only accessible to new subscribers.
A good place to add mobile-optimized signup forms is in your blog posts.
There are a number of email platforms like Mailchimp that come with a form builder, too. Use these tools to easily create lead capture forms for your site.
Email is a highly lucrative channel. You can build relationships with your list and establish your brand as a go-to resource for valuable information.
But email works best when it’s used with your content strategy. Implement some of the strategies here to make your email marketing strategy and content strategy work together.
