When you think of content marketing, what immediately comes to mind? Your website? Blog? E-books? Social Media? If you picked one or more, then you’re on the right track. These tactics are what will help you market your business, increase traffic and convert visitors into leads. But, don’t stop there! Otherwise, you’d be missing a significant component to your content marketing strategy: email content.
First things first, let’s define content marketing. Content marketing is the strategy of using remarkable, relevant and consistent content to attract, engage and convert prospects into customers. Email marketing IS content marketing because it’s an extension of your overall content marketing strategy. In other words, instead of thinking of email only as an opportunity to send promotions and special offers, you should also use it to share the remarkable content you’re creating.
So, how do you get started?
First, segment your list into buyer personas and lifecycle stages. If you need more help on how to grow your list, check out our top tips here on how to build your email list here. Think through what content would be relevant to them at the stage they are at, and ask yourself the following:
- What questions do they have?
- What information do they need to move them towards a purchasing decision?
- How can you make your email interesting and helpful?
- What types of content are they looking for?
We find examples always help, so to demonstrate how content and email marketing intersect, consider this example:
You create a blog post you know your target audience will love. At the bottom of your post you include a call to action with an invitation to sign up for your company’s newsletter. You publish your blog post, and also share it on your social media channels to encourage additional engagement and conversation among your followers. When preparing your next newsletter, you round up a collection of your best blog posts, videos or other interesting links and use this as your newsletter content. You distribute your newsletter to your email subscribers, and send any new subscribers (generated from your blog post, or from other sources) a welcome email with additional remarkable content and exciting offers.
This is just one example of how content and email marketing work together, but you can see when you combine the two you extend your reach and get results!
Speaking of results, what results should you expect to see?
Great question! With email, you have the ability to segment your content, send automated emails and trigger emails based on specific actions. This means you have endless opportunities to get the right content, in front of the right person, at the right time.
Also, consider these impressive numbers:
- 64% of people prefer rich text emails;
- Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue; and,
- Three-quarters of companies agree that email offers “excellent” to “good” ROI.
By harnessing the power of your content, and incorporating it into your email marketing campaigns, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, you’re simply using the remarkable content you’ve created across multiple platforms. A win-win!
And now it’s your turn! Tell us: how do your content and email marketing efforts intersect? Any other tips you would add? Lessons you’ve learned? Please leave us a comment below, and let’s discuss!
