11 Reasons to Love Email Marketing
When you hear about email marketing as a blogger, it might sound boring, complicated, or like one more thing on your growing to-do list! However, this strategy is a great way to connect with your audience and, ultimately, grow your blog and revenue.
Here we’ll share more about the benefits of email marketing for bloggers. Find out why you’ll love integrating this tool into your blogging business!
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a method of communicating with a subscriber base. Subscribers must opt-in to your email list, which is a database of voluntary sign-ups. They will usually do so in exchange for a product (often a freebie!) or a series of content.
Bloggers can—and should—communicate with their email lists regularly. (Read more about “What is an Email List” here). Whether weekly, monthly, or some other frequency, bloggers can use this tool to build trust with their readers, directly deliver value to their inboxes, and advertise the value of their brands.
Email marketing is unlike social media platforms because it can deliver content directly to consumers. It stays relevant in spite of the ever-changing social media landscape. And, it is a tool to bring readers to your website.
Messaging your readers can be an intentional, cohesive part of your blogging experience—whether it’s sending notifications of new content, promotions, or repurposing your past work.
11 Reasons to Love Email Marketing
Don’t let an email marketing strategy remain a looming task that keeps you from growing your blogging business. In this list, see the pros of growing an email list and expanding your content reach to your readers’ inboxes!
1. Direct Access to Your Readers
This might be the most obvious and important reason, but with a list of email addresses, your messages are conveniently delivered right to your readers. When you have content to share, you don’t have to just post it and hope for the best. You can market your blog content and share your knowledge directly with those who have opted in to hear from you!
2. Readers choose to receive your content
In the same vein, marketing to an email subscriber base is affirming because you already know that your readers have signed up to receive your content! Readers see value in the content and resources you share and want to hear more.
Nurture that connection by communicating with them regularly and encouraging them to correspond with you. Take these 7 ideas to help you with your nurture email sequence!
3. Quickly get information out to your audience
With social media content, there is a cycle of posting, waiting, … and waiting some more for someone to see it. Many times you have to go through the process of trial and error as you apply the latest tricks and techniques in hopes the algorithm (of whatever platform) favors you. Alternatively, emails will land right in inboxes, and you can still receive data and metrics through an email marketing platform.
4. You own your list
Social media platforms are always changing in terms of how they operate. Many content creators have had the unfortunate experience of losing entire accounts that have been locked, banned, or shut down for no other reason than by “accident.” This is always a credible concern when you don’t own the platform or control your access to followers.
An email list is a database that is entirely yours. Even if you move to a different platform or provider, you can take your list of subscribers with you.
No matter whether you experience technical issues, software hacks, algorithm changes, or if Google decides not to show your content anymore, you will still have email as a line of communication.
5. Build a relationship and trust with your subscribers
Through continuous email messaging, bloggers have the opportunity to deepen relationships with their subscribers and establish expertise in their niche.
These readers chose to be here, so now you can get to know them at a deeper level than you might post on your blog. Additionally, your communication doesn’t have to be just one-sided! Ask for feedback, encourage subscribers to hit reply, and offer valuable content in response that will build their trust in you as a resource.
6. Be able to track stats and data
With most email marketing platforms, you will receive automatic features for tracking analytics. Not only can you see how many people open and click within your email, but you can also track who clicked different items. This allows you to target groups of your audience according to their interests.
With this feedback, you can stay informed on what your audience likes or wants to see more of!
You can also use this information to maintain a healthy list of active email subscribers by sending emails that will actually get opened.
7. Drive traffic right back to your site
Your emails can be a significant driver of traffic to your blog!
An email can contain any number of links to helpful content on your site—both new and old. Whether you include featured posts, post-roundups, or past content rotating by season or theme, including links can increase pageviews and invite your readers to explore more of your value.
8. Increased likelihood of content being seen
When something valuable lands in an inbox, people are more likely to see and engage with it than they are when scrolling social media. (This is especially true of emails that have an aspect of personalization!)
Sending content directly through email is a better guarantee of generating traffic to your blog than posting and playing the ever-changing social media game.
9. You can share beyond your niche
When publishing content on your blog, it’s important to stay on topic so that Google (and other search engines) knows your site well enough to rank it. However, with email, you can get more personal and share things of interest to your audience that might not neatly fit into any one category of your blog.
This would also be a great place to include other valuable links, such as affiliate products or sponsored content that might vary from your norm.
10. Loyal audience ready to buy
Once you’ve built an engaged audience that trusts you, they will usually be interested in your sales offers. They are also more likely to buy something from you when the time comes.
Email is a great place to market these offers as recent studies have shown that over half of “online shoppers in the US prefer email channel vs. other options.” In fact, “people are three times more likely to make purchases from email marketing than social media.”
11. The future of monetization
As third-party cookies are phased out, bloggers will need other ways to gather essential information about their audiences. This information is necessary for planning how to best serve your audience and for monetizing through targeted advertising.
It’s important to create an email marketing strategy that can collect information without the need to rely on third-party cookies as an automatic option.
Get started with email marketing
We encourage every blogger to start building an email list from the moment their sites go live! Explore more that we have to offer around this topic, such as how to start an email list and tips for creating email sequences.
As you begin your email marketing strategy, it’s a given that you will see a positive impact on both your readers and your blog. Find your own reasons to love email marketing as you hit “send” today!
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