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How Email Marketing Can Improve Your Content Promotion: A Quick Guide

Forbes Coaches Council

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in sales funnels, targeted traffic and website conversions. 

Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective channels for content promotion.

As a digital marketing consultant, I believe that email marketing can help your content reach, engage and impact more people. Both B2B and B2C marketers cite email newsletters as the top method to nurture audiences and secure leads.

If you want to build a loyal audience and promote your content, you should consider leveraging email marketing.

Let’s find out how emails can help you with content promotions.

1. Create sharable content.

First things first: You should create content that is of high quality, is relevant to your target audience and provides value to them.

For example, most of my subscribers are looking for content related to marketing advice, business growth strategies and the dos and don’ts of online marketing.

If I were to publish and share content related to traveling or food, they’d be likely to unsubscribe from my list. That’s why creating content that caters to the interests and needs of your audience is extremely important.

You can use social listening tools and resources like BuzzSumo or Quora to identify the top-performing topic ideas in your niche.

2. Build a list of subscribers.

You should focus on building a list of subscribers who are actually interested in your brand and the content you create.

You can do this by adding a “Subscribe to my blog” button on your website. You can also leverage exit-intent pop-ups to encourage visitors to sign up for more updates from you.

I have a well-curated list of 12,000-plus subscribers that includes CEOs, founders, marketers, entrepreneurs, business development executives and other marketing professionals.

Remember, your subscriber list should align with the demographics of your target audience if you want to improve your content promotion results.

3. Design engaging, mobile-friendly newsletters.

A majority of people access their email via their smartphones. That’s why it is essential to design mobile-friendly newsletters to promote your content.

However, this isn’t enough. You should also follow other tips to create engaging newsletters, including:

• Write a compelling subject line that generates curiosity and encourages people to open your email.

• Write concise and crisp email copy that engages your recipients and makes them want to learn more.

• Include a visually pleasing graphic to keep them on the page.

• Add links to your blog posts or the content you want to promote to drive traffic.

• Include a clear call-to-action (CTA) button and copy that stands out from the rest of the content.

• Add social sharing buttons to make it easier for people to share your content within their circles.

You can get royalty-free images from sites like Unsplash and use design tools like Canva to create awesome newsletters.

You can also personalize your email content for different audience groups to generate more clicks and engagement. Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Finteza can help you track traffic sources and see which of your emails, CTAs and links are performing well.

4. Experiment with subject lines while retargeting.

When you run an email campaign to promote your new blog post, not every recipient is likely to open and read your email. In fact, emails have an average open rate of just 17.8%.

What about the other subscribers on your list?

You can retarget them using the same newsletter content. You just need to change the subject lines. This tactic can help you improve the open rate and click-through rate (CTR) of your newsletters. You can easily generate more clicks, visits, traffic and engagement on your blog posts.

For example:

To promote my post about Grammarly alternatives, I designed a newsletter and sent it to my subscribers. Out of 12,000-plus recipients, only 1,061 people opened the email.

By using Mailchimp’s “exclude last opens” feature, I launched another email campaign, targeting the remaining recipients with the same newsletter but a different subject line. This time, 779 more people opened the email, increasing the reach of my content.

5. Send newsletters weekly.

I believe that promoting your blog posts only once is not enough. You should think of ways to create even more value with your content.

One way to do that is to curate a newsletter that features your top-performing content every week. In your weekly newsletter, you can promote different types of content pieces, from blog posts to videos and podcast episodes.

Even if a subscriber missed an update from you, they can find all of your content pieces in your weekly update.

My weekly newsletters often get more clicks than the newsletters promoting individual posts.

6. Commit to an email marketing schedule.

One of the biggest mistakes email marketers make is to send emails randomly.

If you want people to actually open your emails and read and share your content, you should develop an email marketing schedule. You should let people know when to expect your emails and what kind of content to expect.

I have a set schedule for my email campaigns. I promote my blog posts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to keep my audience engaged.

Ready to get more exposure for your content?

A well-written article isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t reach the right people. You need to plan your content promotion and distribution strategy to ensure that your content gets maximum exposure.

One of the best strategies for content promotions is to leverage emails. You should build a list of subscribers, write compelling subject lines and email copy and promote your blog content. This can help you generate more site visits, article views and engagement.

These tips will certainly give you some idea of how to improve content promotions with email marketing.


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