Source: DasFort Media
Blogging helps you build authority, gain visibility for your business, and boost your search engine rankings.
However, apart from organic search results, there are other avenues to promote your blog posts and boost the growth of your business.
These include sharing your blog posts on social media, paid advertising, and email marketing. Among these options, email marketing is the most effective way to build a lasting relationship with your readers and keep them coming back.
When you can reach your readers directly in their inbox, you nurture a close connection that engenders loyalty and loyal readers can be more easily converted to paying customers.
If you remain unconvinced about the advantages of email marketing, this article will show you 10 reasons blogging and email marketing is a winning combination.
Emails Are Used By Everyone With An Online Presence
Email marketing gives you a level of reach unmatched by any other marketing channel. By 2024, it is estimated that will be over four billion email users on the planet.
Source: Alpha InfoLab
This level of email adoption means it is safe to say all your customers use email.
Many of your readers also access their email on their mobile devices. According to Hubspot, 46% of email opens occurs on mobile devices.
This combination of the accessibility of mobile devices and email marketing gives you a direct line of communication with your audience.
By simply clicking “Send”, your email will be sent to the pockets of your readers and you immediately establish the possibility of a two-way conversation with your subscribers.
Email Marketing Is Much Cheaper Than Digital Ads
According to Hubspot, email generates $38 in sales for every $1 spent on email marketing. That’s an astonishing rate of return on your investment.
Source: Salesforce
Not only do emails generate a greater rate of return, but you can also run an email marketing campaign for free. Many email providers offer free plans for up to 500subscribers and for a small business, that’s a good place to start.
Also, your customers prefer emails to digital ads. A study by the Content Marketing Institute shows that 70% of potential buyers prefer to learn about a brand and its products through email content instead of digital ads.
With email marketing, you can reach out to your audience through their preferred means of communication for less than pennies per message.
Emails Help Strengthen Your Relationship With Your Audience
Readers will only subscribe to your email list when they are convinced you can provide them with helpful and informative content. This means a level of trust exists and you already have a solid footing to build strong relationships with your readers.
Instead of using your email list solely to promote your products, you can build a strong relationship with your customers by sharing helpful and informative content.
Email marketing also lets you personalize your email messages to each recipient. This is typically done by including the name of the recipient in the subject line of the email and the body of the email.
Source: Pinterest
When customers see their names in emails, they are more likely to take the time to go through the email’s content. Research shows that adding the name of your reader to the subject line of an email will increase the chances of it been opened by 20%.
However, personalization goes beyond adding the name of your reader to the email subject line. You can boost engagement with your blog readers by personalizing your emails with the following techniques:
- Audience Segmentation: group your subscribers into different groups and send blog content that is tailored to the interests of each group
- Personalizing The Sender’s Name: people trust content from sources they know and trust. You can personalize blog emails by using the name of a company staff your customers regularly interact with as the sender.
- Behavioral Triggers: set up trigger emails that will send relevant and timely content to a customer after the customer has completed a purchase on your website.
Email Marketing Will Boost Traffic To Your Website
Email newsletters tease your published article, and readers still need to click the link and visit your website to read the article. This will increase traffic to your website and will boost your search rankings when combined with visits from organic search traffic.
Even if you have just 50,000 contacts on your email list, and only 10% regularly click on your email links. That’s traffic from 5000 dedicated readers every single time you publish and promote your content with email marketing.
Email marketing tools also come with social share features that help you increase the reach of your emails with social media. You can share your emails to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn from your email marketing software.
Source: Constant Contact
Email Marketing Grows Brand Recognition
Email marketing allows you to customize your emails and add the logo and colors of your brand. This will strengthen brand recognition and grow your brand further when readers share your content with their friends.
All email marketing software tools come with templates, and these templates are easy to use.
Source: GetApp
Email Marketing Gives You Greater Control Over CTAs
Social media companies and digital ad platforms control the entire marketing process on their platforms. Email marketing, on the other hand, gives you greater control and lets you direct your readers to where you want them to go.
Source: Aweber Blog
You can include any type of CTA link in your emails including:
- Blog Post CTA Links: include links to your blog posts within your email newsletters
- Survey Links: you can use emails to find out more about your readers by sharing links to a survey or a poll
- Social Share Links: you can add social share links to your emails to encourage your readers to share your email content with their friends on any platform
Email Marketing Creates Room For Audience Segmentation
When you promote your content on other marketing channels, you are reaching out to a large audience with limited personalization in your messaging.
However, with emails, you can segment your readership on a granular level and choose what to publish to each group of readers.
You can target readers based on location, demographics, interests, website behavior, and more.
Some popular types of audience segmentation are:
- New Subscribers Group: these are readers that just signed up for your email newsletter within the past month. You can focus on sending helpful content that will help them solve problems, and this will help you convince them to trust your brand.
- Loyal Subscribers Group: these are subscribers that not only read your emails but do so consistently. They are also likely to be paying customers. You can focus on sending them content that helps them better understand and use the features of your products.
- Inactive Subscribers Group: these are subscribers that gave you their emails but have never bothered to open your email newsletters. Focus on sending emails with catchy headlines and content that address their most pressing pain points.
Email Marketing Helps You Build A Dedicated Audience
Readers that take the time to open your email newsletters and click the link to your website, do so because they are legitimately interested in your content. This is a level of personal connection that is not easily achieved through ads and social media.
This level of personal connection cannot be achieved with social media or digital ads. Emails also let you have private conversations with your audience.
Subscribers can contact you directly and ask questions or provide feedback. This is more impactful than the comments system that exists on social media platforms.
Emails also provide a private space to share personal information with your audience. You can share a bit about yourself and build a deeper and more emotional bond with your readers.
The public nature of social media makes it more difficult to share personal information.
Email Marketing Let’s You Own Your Audience
Search engines and social media platforms own the audience on their platforms, and constant updates to their algorithms mean strategies that work today may be obsolete tomorrow.
With your email subscriber list, you own your audience and your relationship is not influenced by algorithm updates you can’t control.
It is that control that lets you maximize the many advantages of email marketing. Some of these advantages include:
- The ability to control when you send your emails – you can’t really control when you send your social media posts. Once you post on social media, it goes public.
- The ability to personalize your emails for each segment of your audience – you can’t personalize your social media posts.
- Also, another email marketing advantage is that you can create automated emails according to behavioral triggers.
Email Marketing Facilitates Sales
Your loyal subscribers are your biggest fans, and they are the best audience to promote your products to. Readers that willingly invited you to their inbox and regularly consume your content, are more likely to buy from you than your followers on social media.
Social media is a great channel for customer engagement, it is not a good place for sales. With email marketing, you can promote your products to customers with whom you already have a strong relationship because of your content marketing efforts.
Source: MyMalls
Email marketing also helps you monetize your blog. You can choose to ask customers to pay a subscription fee for your email newsletter or sell ebooks.
Conclusion
This article has shown you the value of combining email marketing with your blogging efforts, and now it’s time to set up an email newsletter subscription on your website.
With the regular output of quality content and a coherent email marketing strategy, you will get greater engagement from your readers and more sales in no time.
