This is something you won't hear online very often: a blogger wants a good email list more than your blog traffic.
Yup, this is correct. Email Subscribers = blogger value. blogging, and email marketing go together like chicken and chips.
Here's how I can list them in a blogger's order of importance:
First, you write Your content + Your email list = Your blog traffic
The blog material is the cornerstone. Blogging will help you gain online exposure, create credibility, and help you rank high in the search engine.
Email marketing is an essential ingredient that does make everything work. When you've got your blog, add email marketing flavour. You're building a relationship with your visitors with email and keeping them back for more. Further updates, further traffic, and services/products.
Personally, email marketing is important if you take content seriously. So in the spirit of good food and good blogging, here's our full email marketing guide for bloggers.
- Why did you need to care about email marketing as a blogger?
- 2. Hop into your audience and see why you send each email
- 3. Build a good and quality email list
- 4. The best Blogger e-mail marketing program
- Moosend - Bloggers' email marketing tool
- 5. Which kind of emails are you expected to send?
- Bloggers' e-mail marketing, the story as it stands
Why did you need to care about email marketing as a blogger?
Marketing comes in two simple ways: marketing with push or pull.
Push marketing is a constructive attempt to meet readers and customers. You do so by running pay-per-click ads or by calling people cold (as a writer you actually won't have to cold call-and thank you for that).
Pull marketing is a strategy that attracts consumers to you, that is, you drag them in. That includes working with SEO, your content, and email marketing lists.
Relationship-building paves the way for long-term success. The combination of push/pull and email allows you to nurture prospects, seek opportunities for collaboration, and get feedback to keep improving your blog.
Your visitor is essentially asking you to establish a productive and beneficial relationship with him by subscribing to your email list.
So how do numbers represent relationships? Creating connections, and having members help you to:
- Have high click-through rates: You are 10x more likely to get an email campaign click-through than you are from a tweet
- Become more effective at acquiring paying customers: Email is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter when it comes to acquiring customers.
- Get more views of the content: Email subscribers are 3 times more likely than visitors from other sources to share your content via social media
- Earn more money: 4.24% of email marketing visitors buy something, compared with 2.49% of search engine visitors and 0.59% of social media visitors
But it doesn't end here, other advantages come with creating an email list:
- You own your list: meaning you're not constrained by network platform rules like Twitter, Instagram, and others. To get viewership, you don't have to pay-to-play, you don't have to worry about algorithm changes, or compete with similar blogs. For your audience you have a one-to-one platform, so use it as you wish.
- Email lets you build your brand: give your emails a definite graphical look and voice tone that mimics your blogs, which helps create your brand and stands out from other bloggers' crowd. You give your blog a personality in this way, and the more you stand out, the more attention you draw.
- You create highly personalized messages: You tailor your emails to deliver a personalized message unlike billboards or social media posts. By name, you address individuals and send targeted emails to select subscribers. Yeah, and the best part, if you sell something (as many bloggers choose to monetize their blog), then Customized emails aim to deliver 6x higher purchase rates!
- Email marketing is easy to manage, refine, and scale: with stats such as open rates and click rates, most email marketing software gives you real-time notifications of your email results. These data will be used to customize and improve future emails. You'll also easily scale your email marketing as your email list expands, with no need to update complexly. All that you'll do is pay a little extra for your email provider.
How you can make the most of email marketing for your blog
We now know the greatest advantages of emails for your blog. But how do you grasp the advantages? You must make sure that you are correctly using the email. I'm going to cover every foundation and part of email marketing you will need to start as a pro.
1. First Polish your email content
You may have an entirely brimming email list of standard subscribers and opportunities but still don't make much headway of them. And with 100,000 people on your lists ... it wouldn't make a difference if your emails didn't appeal to them, you might just as well have none.
The good news is, that your email content can be easily polished and your emails optimized for conversion. You should take those measures that make your content very catchy and make accessing your email simple for the reader.
4 Short tips on email content:
- Keep your message concisely, to a point where it can not be further simplified
- Creating information hierarchy, first revealing the most valuable information (remember you are vying for the limited attention of a recipient)
- When you have a ton to say break up your post with your headlines into parts
- Organize your email with bullet points and paragraphs for a quick read, so people can absorb your message as quickly as possible
2. Create captivating, catchy subject lines
They say the most significant of these is the first experience. So your first thought for emails is about your subject line. It is no surprise that only on the merits of the subject line, 47 per cent of emails are opened. A catchy subject line will insist that your subscribers open the email.
4 Fast ways of improving topic lines:
- Keep it short, sweet and flavoursome, straight to the point
- If you have this information available, use the name of the receiver
- Keep around 65 characters long, the optimal length for a subject line
- Use catchy headlines but keep them targeted to your email content
3. Use call-to-action buttons which focus the attention of the reader
Typically, CTAs or Call-to-Actions are built as buttons that direct people to an offer page or a connection to your website.
Think of CTAs as the bridge between your blog and a receiver's inbox. Marketing by email drives traffic back into your blog. So the email's effectiveness boils down to that CTA button, and whether the reader will click on it or not.
4 Quick-win ways to make your CTAs better:
- Get your CTA as sensitive as possible (without making it upset)
- Verify that the reader understands that CTA is clickable
- Use simple words which inspire action in your copy
- Leave white space around CTA to contrast the rest of the email with it.
Make sure your CTA gets clicks and stands out of the way
It is equally necessary for a blogger to make your CTA stand out from the rest of the document. To distinguish it from the rest of the copy, use a larger size or bold fonts and contrasting colours. You should highlight text links or use buttons too.
5. A / B reviews your e-mails
A / B testing, also known as split testing, is the practice of experimenting with different email versions to see which is the best performing. Setting a metric and measuring whether variant A or B performed best against the metric is the way to assess performance.
A / B testing (and not just in emails) is your ticket to success over the long term. You challenge an assumption with each A / B test you perform and find out if it's true or not.
Similarly, you test various subject lines against each other with emails to check which one performs better when it comes to open rate. You then use the better one to convert to future communication.
You're also checking A / B CTA buttons on their copy, colour, and style to see what makes them more convertible.
Now you know the basic steps for optimizing attention and conversion of your emails. Also if your email is well-optimized to attract attention and energy, you still have to write to your audience in a way that resonates. The next step is to have your audience zoom in.
2. Hop into your audience and see why you send each email
Do you remember the time when you first came up with the idea for a blog? What did it feel like? Was it inspired by the problem of the real world? A personal need, huh? A moment of amazing creativity?
I'm asking, because it's important to know why you started your blog, it's the fuel that fuels the passion for blogging. If you know why you're in the game, you'll learn from every blog post you make.
On the other hand, you do need to know your target market well. Read about their tastes and dislikes, their interests, their pain points, and how they consume your material.
Once you get these insights into your audience, the odds of them paying attention to you, signing up for your email lists, and obliging you to make a call-to-action increase considerably. If you make the audience feel like you appreciate them, they're going to reciprocate through clicks and purchases.
To begin with, observe how people communicate with your material. Pay attention to your thoughts, opinions, and email responses. Just by observing these three events, you'll learn which topics your audience is resonating with.
You classify people according to the type of response they give and create general people (ideal customer profile) for each type of audience.
.
Segment the lists by behaviour and interest
Once you have a fair understanding of who is reading your blog, you are creating lists based on interests and activities. This allows you to personalize your emails to engage your audience.
You can, for example, segment lists to:
- Subscribers General
- People who have shown an interest in a particular subject
- People who came across Facebook, your blog or networking offline
- Visitors who have recently downloaded a guide or participated in your webinar.
- Potential customers/leads or customers who pay
This prevents you from spamming the entire list and engages readers by talking about their particular interests.
3. Build a good and quality email list
Picture a very simple scenario:
You're a blogged photographer and after blogging for a year, you've grown your email list to 10,000 subscribers. Most people ask you daily how you compose your pictures so you decide to create a short course on the composition of the pictures.
You are pricing it at $25 and telling all subscribers via email.
Let's say you open your email with 2,500 of those ten thousand. From 2,500, 5% agree to purchase your course. 125 People just purchased $25 each for your course. That is $3,125 in immediate income!
And if you keep blogging, there'll be more people signing up for your newsletter and more people buying the course.
This way you'll build a good, drip, steady revenue stream.
Now, this is just one example of a committed mailing list. You also guide traffic to your site, post updates on your life, sell merchandise, or any other innovative uses you collect. You have an audience that can listen to what you have to say and connect with it.
And how can you get more people to subscribe to the mailing list?
Building a mailing list begins with great content. If you consistently post quality content on your blog, people will not have problems signing up for updates.
You just offer them to keep them updated to capture email addresses, preferably on multiple blog points.
But use sign-up bonuses or "lead magnets" to improve those opt-ins. That is content that visitors can only access once their email address is shared. Now, remember, if you offer them valuable content they think is worth the exchange, people will be far more inclined to sign up.
You offer opt-in content. lead magnets, like
:
- Ebooks (for starters, your best tips for [fill out your niche])
- Infographics available for free
- Vouchers discount
- Podcasts
- Resource list (for example, a newbie checklist [fill in your niche],
- Recipes
- Tutorials
- Courses by email
- Sessions on coaching
- Webinars
- Surveys
Often, you can use the interactivity factor to get people to sign up. People love the content that includes them, you create this kind of content by offering:
- Contests
- Giveaways
- Mini-games
- Quizzes
Quick advice
If this is the first time a lead magnet is created, the easiest way is to offer an update of content. You write a list (10 best ways to lose weight, 15 small business tactics, etc.) but add additional tips that can only be accessed if a reader shares their email address.
Check out this article on 42 ways to build your email list to learn more about how to build your mail list.
Backlinko people tried this strategy and enjoyed an increase in conversion rates of 785 per cent!
You may not be witnessing such results on your first go but the important thing is to continue testing and see what content upgrade offers (or any variations in the lead magnet) perform best.
Now if you have any or all of those types of content, where and how are you going to use them to get email addresses?
Optional placement in the form
Place forms at the right places on your site and blog to maximize sign-ups that lead to magnets. Its possibilities include:
- A pop-up form: get a visitor's attention when they enter a page or are on the site for some time (timed)
- Enter the box of intent or when you are about to leave your blog
- A scroll box if you want a noticeable but not intrusive form of your opt-in
- An embedded type when the opt-in offer complements the content of this page
- A top bar that you want to show prominently for time-sensitive or seasonal offerings.
- A landing page for tourists coming from specific campaigns
What form functions best?
The highest performing opt-in forms have been the pop-ups according to the study. For the Top performing pop-ups, they have an average conversion rate of 3.1 per cent to 9.3 per cent. Even on average, 2 points above the next performing option: landing pages.
Amazed? Do pop-ups not find themselves intrusive?
Pop-ups have a poor image and if they are misused they get in the way, but they are also the best tools to catch attention and convert.
Plus you can now build pop-ups to be less disruptive and more user-friendly. An exit-intent box for example is a pop-up that only appears when the visitor is about to exit your site.
You also have the option of creating pop-ups that will only appear when a visitor has been on a web page for a certain period. Therefore you can quickly gauge their level of interest and send them a pop-up for a deal that is important to the page they are searching for, making the pop-ups less intrusive.
It can be difficult and time-consuming to build opt-in forms on your own. You can use lead selection and opt-in form software such as Mailmunch to build highly convertive opt-in forms to save yourself time.
Promote your content now
First, you have to get people to notice your content to get your lead magnets’ attention.
There's a fair chance you never met your target audience on your blog. You know they would like your content but never heard of you. What are you doing, then?
You are promoting your blog and directing people toward your lead magnets.
You can choose 3 common and efficient methods to do this.
- For keywords relevant to your blog you run pay-per-click ads on Google. You might run an ad for the keyword 'photo design course' by taking the example of a photography blog. This way you will draw people who already have a strong interest in studying the design of images.
- Run ads on both Facebook and Instagram. Let's say after weeks of research, you just uploaded a blog article on the killer. You want people to know about it. On Instagram and Facebook, you'll set up an ad, filter audiences according to their likes and demographics, and wait for the traffic to come in.
The setting up of stand-alone landing pages is a smart idea when promoting the content.
. Build them in a way that they deliver on what you promise in your ads and you can see your conversion rates increase
If you don't have money to spend on ads, you can still promote your content by enhancing the visibility of your blog:
- Work on that SEO. This method is free and will bring you great results over the long term.
SEO helps rank you on Google. The higher your rate, the more traffic you are attracting to your site, for any specific search word. The easiest way to rank your blog is to write great content and then get backlinks for a keyword for which you want to be found.
For example, if you want to rank for the 'college stories' keyword (if you're blogging about college life), you'll be looking for other websites to link you to that keyword. You either reach out to websites directly to inform them that you have content that is important to their audience, or you write guest posts that link back to your blog.
SEO expert offers these additional tips to crank up your SEO:
1) Include images in your posts, and optimize them. Make sure alt tags and relevant captions are used (including keywords). Structured data experiment to increase the chances of appearing as a featured fragment or information graph.
2 ) Make sure you are smart about internal linking, but also link it to the relevant resources. Building a solid portfolio of backlinks to your posts will help you rank your blog higher.
3) Check your on-page SEO to improve the speed of your site, adjust the meta descriptions, and monitor your content to remove broken links and keep your page safe.
4. The best Blogger e-mail marketing program
Just collecting emails isn't enough. To get the most out of email marketing you need your blog's best email marketing software. You may have heard of Mailchimp but in competitive email apps, there are plenty of choices. We have narrowed down some of the best alternatives for bloggers via Mailchimp. All of the following email marketing services offer key features you need including:
- A newsletter editor to drag & drop
- List of E-mail models
- Statistics of email campaigns with classic KPIs in email marketing (open rates, click-throughs, location, devices, etc.)
- Smart email automation, enabling you to send welcome emails, autoresponders and email retargeting
As a blogger, you see, it's easy to think that because all of the email marketing services offer key features, any of them will work for you. But that is not the case at all. Some systems focus only on e-commerce and webshops while others are targeted at B2B.
I've listed three of the top email marketing tools, which are very affordable and have a free version so you can try them out and look at them yourself.
The difference between these email marketing services is how each role is handled, the additional features, pricing, and customer care. And what's the best Bloggers email marketing software?
Moosend - Bloggers' email marketing tool
You get a superb drag-and-drop email builder with Moosend. Segmenting is very straightforward. The Automation Builder is, however, easy to use and suitable for any program.
They have the most common automated blogger email campaign templates as pre-built "recipes," which is helpful for you. And automation is a little more advanced so that even things like sending a "thank you" to your most active openers/clickers can be done.
All in all, for bloggers who want an easy-to-use option with free email newsletter templates, automation, and segmentation, Moosend is an inexpensive, nifty alternative. And while on a budget that's shoestring.
Outstanding features of e-mail software:
- The builder of drag-and-drop emails is very good.
- An RSS to email feature
- Automation is advanced
Support via: Live Chat, telephone, and email, also in a free plan forever.
Pricing to Moosend:
Moosend's free plan is up to 1000 contacts free forever. You can subscribe here today. When it comes to emails or which apps you can use, and how you can use them, the free plan is without limitations. From $10 after that pricing.
SendinBlue - Bloggers' email marketing software
Another top blogger email marketing tool is SendinBlue. They have a free version that you can sign up for today for forever.
SendinBlue has recently revamped and redesigned its entire platform and is constantly introducing new features. You can submit your email newsletters easily, based on templates and their editor for drag and drop.
The landing page builder is an interesting addition that allows you to create stand-alone pages without leaving the application or creating a separate page on your site all the time. You get additional features with the paid plans to take your marketing up a notch including SMS, a live chat function for your website, and Facebook Ads.
Automation features are perfect for simple automation; emails like welcome and birthday but nothing too advanced
. We have some extra features like 'send check email' to make sure that before you hit the send button, you have no errors in there.
Remarkable features of email marketing software:
- Good price for newbies and writers who want to submit newsletters
- Deposit Builder
- More channels and features are available as your needs increase
Support: everybody's email support and phone and chat for paid accounts.
Pricing by SendinBlue:
Pricing SendinBlue is based on the number of emails you send and not the contacts. The price for 40,000 emails a month is almost unbeatable at $25. The free email plan is good for trying out the software, you can send free up to 300 emails/day.
Try Sendinblue for Free or read a more detailed Sendinblue review
Mailerlite - Bloggers' email newsletter tool
MailerLite is completely easy to use and has enough features to be one of the best blogger email marketing tools (on a budget). Want to send newsletters or just email campaigns? If you are looking for a straightforward e-mail device, Mailerlite is a good choice.
MailerLite also has some cool features for bloggers and publishers like auto-resend (to non-openers), and click maps in campaign reports to see where your subscribers clicked exactly. And of course, it includes RSS email campaigns.
Remarkable features of email marketing software:
- An RSS to Email feature
- Car send back to non-openers
- Tags and groupings based on which link they clicked
MailerLite e-mail formation
Using the drag and drop editor, you can create newsletters from scratch, or use one of their free email newsletter templates. Each phase and description videos are available with support text if needed. Set-up is fairly easy.
Mailerlite's RSS-to-email campaign feature lets you automatically send RSS feed campaigns to our subscribers for our blog posts.
Pricing for Mailerlite
MailerLite has a Forever Free plan providing you with the basic features for 1,000 subscribers and 12 K emails. It's one of the cheapest apps on email marketing you can find.
Up to 2.500 subscribers, $15. For $50 / month, 10,000 subscribers. When you pay monthly, you will also get a 30 per cent discount.
Support: email support is included with all payment plans, and chat support 24/7.
Try free Mailerlite
5. Which kind of emails are you expected to send?
During different times, various kinds of e-mails are in handy. As an author, you enjoy every kind of e-mail:
Hello emails: Once they have been recorded, the people are most open to your contact. This is clear from the fact that 91.4 per cent of welcome emails are available. You use this attention to introduce yourself and guide people on your blog to the relevant resources.
The "How can I help you?" is a great welcome example of the email. "Facebook." Facebook. It's the kind of warm email you can send to your subscriber. It does not look transactional and it allows you to build real relationships.
Trigger emails: Automated emails are triggers. When a guest completes a certain task, they are sent out. They also have an open rate of 70.5 per cent higher than commercial emails or newsletters.
These kinds of emails come in handy when a customer leaves their cart or you are looking for feedback from the company.
Promotional emails: If you have a large email list and sell products, promotional emails are really useful. As with a photographer's example, you can create promotional emails to speed up your sales with a clear call to action.
Newsletters: Newsletters are a perfect way to bring daily traffic to your blog and prove you are involved with your subscribers too.
.You can send them out weekly, biweekly, or even monthly. It depends on how much content you are putting out.
Retargeting emails: Retargeting emails are perfect for people who may have missed your emails before. You use these to re-engage subscribers and return them to your blog.
Bloggers' e-mail marketing, the story as it stands
As a writer, at one point you are wearing several hats and it needs you to become a master of all trades. Email marketing is one important trade skill for any blogger.
As a blogger, using email marketing in the right way can increase your audience, traffic, and revenue. Please email:
- Create awareness
- Have a strong interaction with the audience
- Tap into your blog
- Personalize your contacts
So, to make the most of your email marketing, it's important:
- Know who you blog about. The more your audience understands, the more you involve them with your material.
- Build content specific to them, thus offering enough perceived interest in return for content to make it worthwhile for the reader to trade in their email address.
- You can use several opt-in methods to gather email addresses, put them all over your blog, and let the emails roll in. Of course, check the hyperlinked post if you have the correct type of opt-in form for maximum conversion.
- Promote your content to draw new customers to your target market, and push people to your lead magnets.
Practice all these things on your way to being a blogger of superstars,