Have a blog? Whether your blog is personal or an extension of your business, mastering email marketing for bloggers isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s vital. Like most people, you might put most of your marketing efforts into social media. Social media platforms are one of the easiest marketing platforms but they take a lot of time and require constant attention because of the rapid pace. Social media trends, evolve, and sometimes grow out of style within days, if not hours (what are we calling it X? Meta? What challenge is popular today? Who knows at this point!). One thing is certain, email remains a constant through it all. That’s all to say, don’t rely on social media, rather, use those platforms as leverage. Email is your strongest platform for connecting with your audience, email! You own your email list, while social media could shut down at a moment’s notice. Successful bloggers and business blogs have a strategy behind their email marketing, and they use email marketing software like Buttondown. Newsletters are a powerful marketing tool that can grow readership and revenue.
Grow readership through relationship-building
Email marketing is a direct way to communicate with your audience. They opted into your email list because of your unique insights and perspectives. If you think about it, people are picky when sharing their email. With everyone asking for emails, people aren’t giving their personal information willy-nilly. This shows that they trust you and want more of you. Keep their trust by deepening your relationship through authenticity. They came for you so don’t be afraid to be yourself. Sincerity leads to loyalty, which can lead to increased revenue and brand awareness. Provide anecdotes and stories. Show them who you are and why they should stay subscribed to your email list and interact with your content. As you build your community, your readers will ask you questions that give you more ideas for engaging topics and themes they’d like to see you tap into. You can also directly ask them what content they’d like to see by including surveys in your emails. Surveys add value because they show that you care about your subscribers’ interests and value their readership, which is true!
Craft relevant content using automation tools
When subscribers sign up to hear from you, they want to receive interesting and relevant messages. Automation features can assist you with:
- Personalization: While some emails should be general, it should not be the standard for all emails you send. Marketing automation allows you to deliver content optimized for individual contacts and audience segments. Remember, you are making connections. No one wants to be bombarded with insignificant content. Spamming leads to unsubscribing which you do not want. You want engagement so that traffic to your blog posts increases. This is done through personalized content. With automation, you can segment your subscribers with tags so that they receive interesting and relevant content you have a subscriber who displays more engagement with your pop culture posts, than DIY content. You can set your automation tool to place a “pop culture” tag so that they will receive blog posts with cultural content. The goal is for them to want to read your posts and join your budding community. The more they engage with your content, the more likely they will share your blog with friends or on social media.
- Sequencing: Maintaining consistent communication is very important in email marketing. Don't leave them guessing. You want to stay in contact to stay at the top of their mind. If you are a sustainable fashion blogger who creates a thriftflip series…..you should stick to that schedule! It would be confusing for your subscribers if they received a Thrift Flip Thursday newsletter on a Tuesday because you couldn’t find the time to send the weekly newsletter on schedule. Blogging is a lot of work. With automation, you can save a lot of stress with the scheduling feature. Make your content in advance when you have a burst of creative energy, and pop it on the schedule. Now, you can keep building your community without worrying if you’ll make your deadline or if anything slipped your mind. Those are the worst feelings so why risk it?
- Analytics: Metrics are great because they provide a more holistic view. Analytic tools provide a broad array of insights regarding subscriber behavior. These helpful insights allow you to improve your marketing plan. Notable metrics to monitor are:
- Click through, open, and read rates
- Subscribe and unsubscribe rate
- Devices, email providers, or browsers used
Whether you just started a blog or have been blogging for years, this is your sign to push email marketing to the forefront of your marketing plans. Email marketing is an underutilized tool that has the power to positively impact your blog and increase revenue. Starting a newsletter is a breeze with the right email service provider. Buttondown offers an intuitive interface, powerful tools, and superior customer support. Our affordable prices start at$9/mo.
Buttondown is trusted by multiple bloggers including:
Mandy Brown, a work coach and strategist with more than a dozen years of experience leading resilient, diverse, remote-first teams. Mandy is also a writer and blogger. Mandy’s blog,A Working Library, is organized around her reading. While she writes about books, she also writes about reading, altruism, work, technology, time, necromancy, family, capitalism, gender, and a lot more.
Stefan Judis, a Berlin-based blogger with a background in frontend engineering. His blog,Web Weekly, started as his way of getting involved in the community in Berlin. Web Weekly sends out weekly quick-to-read resources that web developers won't find elsewhere. Each Web Weekly edition includes something Stefan learned. He believes there is value in sharing nerdy details and fundamental web dev facts and his thousands of subscribers agree.
Sam Rose, the writer behind the blog,Load Balancing. His blog is an amazing visual essay on various load balancing approaches. Sam writes about topics like load balancing, memory allocation, hashing, and retries, but in a way that people can actually understand. The visual and interactive nature of the posts is the big differentiator. His use of 2-D animation makes these complex topics easier to comprehend and visualize. Load Balancing aims to help people get their footing, and then give them enough of a taste to want to explore on their own.