This article is a complete guide to email marketing applied to a blog. We will start with an email marketing checklist so that you can plan and execute a strategy that is effective and functional. And you will learn how to build a mailing list for your blog.
Many bloggers know the email lists, from almost the dawn of the blogosphere, under the name of “newsletters” and have used various tools to distribute regularly, among their readers, a summary of updates to your blog, from the file Rss. Many of them, not knowing they were doing email marketing.
The “newsletter”, therefore, is for most bloggers that message, obtained automatically from the RSS, and sent to those users who prefer to receive it comfortably in their inbox. This saves them the use of applications to access the contents of their favorite blogs, to be aware of whether the publications are promoted on social networks or to constantly visit the URLs of the sites to see if their authors have published a new post.
An application to carry out this task, and that only the oldest of the place, they will know was FeedBurner, a tool that fell in disuse, following that Google decided to give shelve to Google Reader, its aggregator RSS.
FeedBurner offered statistics of use of the RSS file of your blog, but also a function to send this automatically to the visitors of your blog, and that they registered writing their email addresses by means of the corresponding form.
How did the email marketing get to the world of blogs?
However, and even though the companies used the postal mail in their sales strategies long before the Internet existed, at the time of FeedBurner no blogger spoke of email marketing.
In the initial blogger culture, and in a scenario in which positioning in the first places of the results of Google was very easy, there were mainly other purposes for which one fought. namely:
- Have many RSS subscribers. These were the ones that read you through an RSS feed (like Google Reader, especially). At that time, it was wrongly seen not to provide an RSS file with the full posts. That meant less traffic in your blog, because fewer people accessed directly to your URLs, but in that culture predominated to fidelize RSS readers on all things.
- Have many subscribers by email to that RSS. In that scenario, together with the anonymous subscribers of the RSS, it was valued very much to the users who wanted to receive your posts by email. They were readers with name and surname and, moreover, absolutely unconditional.
Sending an email to your subscribers with updates to your blog, was AND IS a very effective way to get faithful readers.
Can any blogger do email marketing?
Little by little, bloggers who were looking to monetize their blog, realized that they could also commercially squeeze those lists of faithful readers and apply the techniques of traditional email marketing. Digital marketing professionals put the theory and right now no online marketing strategy is conceived that does not include blog (content marketing) and email list (email marketing). An example of a normal BMI Calculator web that use EMAIL Marketing for maximum outreach.
You do not need to be a company to take advantage of email marketing. Just imagine, you know a topic well, you write an ebook and you want to sell it on Amazon. With a blog and email list, consisting of thousands of subscribers (say from 1,000 subscribers can start to get performance), you can launch a campaign of emails whose purpose is to send the link to the Amazon page.
Actually, it’s basically the same email marketing strategy that companies do, as we’ll see later.
Currently, an email list, on your blog, is not only good for loyalty readers, but also to attract traffic and sell.
- Loyalty readers: offering exclusive content. Today you should not only offer the RSS summary of your blog but the sending of articles with content that is useful and valuable to your subscribers.
- Attract traffic: including links to the contents of your blog.
- Sell: The main purpose for companies, but if you are particular you can promote a cause, a project, a infoproducto or just your personal brand.
Conclusions
Having a newsletter and applying the techniques of email marketing in your blog is the first step to launch it to success. Don’t leave it for later and point it on your priority tasks.
I hope you get the most out of it. If you have experiences about it, or you want to transmit any other tip that you have not collected in this article, do not hesitate to write them in the comment system.
Do you have many subscribers? What kind of newsletter do you send, RSS or exclusive content? Do you give something in return for the subscription as a “lead magnet”?
Please share your experiences with us to help others.