Email Marketing Demystified: Your Top Questions, Answered!
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Let’s talk about email marketing. Email marketing is one of the best strategies to gain a loyal following for your blog. And that’s important to know - your aim with your blog (if you want to make money - and have more time) is to focus your attention on your current subscribers or customers. They are the ones who already trust you and want to hear more from you - meaning they’re ready to purchase more from you.
Or you can waste your time and energy trying to gain a bunch of traffic to your site, only for 20% of them to take action. This is known as the 80/20 principle - which is an important lesson to learn in business. If you’re interested, you can learn more about it in Timothy Ferris’ book called “The 4 Hour Workweek.” This is by far one of the best books I’ve ever read. It taught me all about entrepreneurship (which has substantially helped my blogging career) and it taught me a valuable lesson on how to work less and get paid more - which has part to do with the 80/20 principle!
So why email marketing? I’ll let these stats do the talking…
2023 Stat highlights:
There are 4 billion daily email users.
37% of brands are increasing their email budget.
77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
Smartphone users prefer to receive brand communications via email.
In this post, I want to cover the common questions I get about email marketing. This includes:
What is email marketing and how does it help your business?
Can I start email marketing for my new blog?
How can I use email marketing to promote my blog?
What are some tips to promote your blog with email marketing?
How can I improve my email marketing for blogging?
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a promotion strategy for the people who opt-in to hear more from you by subscribing to your newsletter. It is by far one of the best promotion strategies to implement in your business. With email marketing, you aren’t focused on trying to find people to promote to, they’ve already come to you!
Email marketing will help your business substantially. There are so many perks to implementing it into your business. But we will talk about that a little later in this post.
Can I start email marketing for my new blog?
Absolutely! Please do! I’ve read and heard countless stories from other bloggers and business owners talking about how they regret not implementing email marketing into their businesses from the beginning. You should focus on building your email list on day 1.
How can I use email marketing to promote my blog?
Just like with anything in the business world, consistency is key. You should focus on sending out an email consistently. How often depends on your audience. You don’t want to send it out too frequently, otherwise you’ll look spammy. Give your audience some room to breathe, but help them out as much as they’d like! This will take some time and research to find what works best for your audience - every audience is different. For me, I send out an email every two weeks. I’ve found that this works best for my audience, and I see the most results this way.
Another important note is to continuously keep track of what works best for your audience. As your business grows, your audience is growing with you. So you may choose to email them more frequently, or even a little less. You want to always keep up with what works best for them! Many people (like myself) are particular about who they allow to show up in their inboxes. Make sure you continue to provide valuable content and products to them (at an appropriate level) so they don’t unsubscribe.
What are some tips to promote your blog with email marketing?
In a way, your email prompts are similar to blog posts. Each email prompt should include some type of promotion, whether you are promoting a new blog post, a new product you launched, or utilizing affiliate marketing in your email prompts! This will get you the most bang for your buck. As always, make sure your content (including emails) is valuable to your reader. You never want to write something just to maybe get a few extra bucks.
How can I improve my email marketing for blogging?
If you’ve already got a list, let’s go through tips to make your experience better and improve results.
This will help you know what information would be valuable to them so you get more people to open and read your emails. And if you’re doing it right, get more clicks from your email as well. An easy start to this research: your loyal audience. Look at what you know about them. You want to understand their demographics but also take note of where they spend the most time on your blog. This will help you see where you can branch out - either creating more blog posts, or digital products to fully help them with the “problem” you want to solve for them.
Stick to a consistent schedule
This includes staying up to date of how often your readers want you to send an email as I mentioned before. I also mentioned that consistency is key. People appreciate when they can count on getting an email from you consistently every Monday (or whatever your schedule may be). We as humans are creatures of habit. When you can contribute to someone’s daily routine, it works wonders for your business. One of the best ways to help you keep a consistent schedule is to use Convertkit!
ConvertKit is an essential blog tool that will help you significantly boost your subscribers therefore boosting your income. They offer beautiful style options to choose from, help you build systems to maximize your reach across multiple channels, and automation tools (which by far is the best thing you can do for your business - saving you loads of time and help clear your brain so you can focus on more important things). They even offer landing pages which are great for increasing conversions.
Effectively grow your email list.
There are several ways to grow your email list - but let me teach you the best ways you can do this.
Offer free content.
In my experience, this is the #1 way to grow your email list (organically). People are more inclined to subscribe to your list if they get something in return - right away. Create a few digital products like workbooks, essential lists, mini-courses, etc. that you can give your audience for free when they subscribe to your newsletter.
Include your newsletter subscription on every page.
This should be shown on your home page or sidebar, or you can even include it in the footer of your website. This allows more people to see it and subscribe.
Make the description of your newsletter opt-ins enticing.
More people will want to subscribe to your newsletter if they know what to expect from it. The default description is usually something like “subscribe to the newsletter to receive news and updates.” BLEH, that’s boring. Instead, say something like “Become a VIP to receive exclusive deals and discounts, and get extra tips and tricks to becoming a guru at (your niche).” Now that sounds more enticing to sign up for, right?!
Share testimonials on your free products.
Ask people who have opted-in for your newsletter through freebies to give a review of the product! You can learn from the criticism and showcase the good to potential subscribers.
Showcase your newsletter opt-in on social media platforms.
More potential customers will see and maybe even opt-in to your newsletter if you showcase it on all your platforms!
Offer giveaways
This is a popular thing you’ve probably seen most people do on Instagram. Well, you can do it for your blog as well. Make sure that for people to enter the giveaway, they subscribe to your newsletter. Not everyone may stick around after, but you’ll still be able to find a good amount of subscribers that do!
Craft compelling subject lines & descriptions.
It’s one thing to automate and send your emails, but a whole other thing to actually have your audience click to read your email. How do you do this? You need to write compelling subject titles and descriptions. The subject title is the big bold title of your email, and the description is about a sentence or two showing your readers what they’ll get when they read your email. Use these to your advantage, and get your readers curious about what you’ll get when they read your email. Ideas of what to include in your subject line are:
“shocking questions” like “Is blogging dead?”
Showcase your freebies like “Get Your List of 200+ Affiliate Links”
Surprises like “Learn About (subject) and Open for a Surprise!”
A hot topic that everyone needs to know. Make sure it’s something that is valuable to your readers - i.e. “The Money-Grab Secret that Money Gurus Need to Know!”
How-To’s - pretty self-explanatory but make sure it’s something valuable to your readers.
How-I’s - like the how-to but it’s showcasing a sought-after action that you’ve performed.
Before you (action), read this! - “Before You Start a Blog, Read This!”
In the descriptions, give a short excerpt of what they’ll find - but don’t give anything away.
Create CTA’s in your emails
You want people to keep your emails after you’ve sent them, rather than it going to the trash folder. The best way to do this is to connect your subscribers with somewhere valuable to go, whether it be your latest blog post (that’s relevant to your email prompt), or your latest product. Give them several options or tools that they’ll want to keep for future reference.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that you should implement into your business (no matter what stage you are in). This promotion tool alone has increased my sales by 120%. Here’s a crazy stat you should know: for every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return (according to a study by Campaign Monitor). That’s NUTS!
Tell me in the comments below what your thoughts are on email marketing! Have you done it before? Did you learn something new? I’d love to hear from you!
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