As the owner of the WordPress website, you often create content on your site. Creating content is just as important as marketing content. And when it comes to free marketing, email is one of the best mediums to do that.
With email marketing, you can grow your audience, maintain it, value it, make profits from it, and build a long-term relationship.
Email marketing is out there for a while, and it’s the freest, most direct and most efficient way to connect with, nurture, and turn your leads into customers. Blogging and email marketing go hand in hand and, if you can do it properly, both are very powerful combinations and can drive regular traffic to your content and help you make a profit from your blog.
Most of the small WordPress websites focus so much on building their email lists, but don’t know how to get the most out of it at the end of the day. In this article, I’m going to help you understand email marketing and how to use it to its full potential.
What Is Email Marketing
Email Marketing usually entails sending messages or promotional updates related to your website/blog/business via email to one or a number of your users. It helps you to create customised and targeted communications that help establish positive relationships with your clients/audience.
Email marketing provides bloggers with a direct channel between them and their readers/audience, as well as a way of advertising their goods and services. The benefit of email marketing is that you don’t have to sell anything to use it.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
- Email marketing will help you establish relationship with your readers while driving traffic to your blog and social media.
- It allows you to connect more personally with your readers. A blog post feels more intimate as an email.
- Email marketing makes it easier to divide the audience into segments and send relevant deals to each group.
- Nice templates are provided by email marketing platforms to easily create, edit, save and reuse newsletter templates to suit your taste.
- Unlike social media marketing, email marketing gives you complete control of your recipient lists.
- Email marketing helps you to start monetizing your affiliate marketing blog.
- It lets you keep your list of subscribers up to date on your most recent posts or other related events. In essence, it generates a sense of community.
- By attracting fresh visitors and engaging the existing audience, email marketing will help your blog gain more popularity.
- On social networks, people tend to check their emails a lot more carefully than their timelines.
- Email marketing costs can be significantly lower than many other forms of marketing. No advertising fees, printing, or media space costs are charged.
- Your marketing list will consist of individuals who have actively chosen to receive email messages from you, so selling your products and/or services is much easier.
- Through word-of-mouth or viral marketing, it is easy for people to forward and share your email content, building your reputation. This may help influence new customers to become your brand’s followers.
- To ensure that your email content is as effective before you send it, you can test subject lines, calls-to-action, email copies, images, or messages.
- You can trigger emails to be sent to customers by automation based on an action they have performed on your website, such as sending a welcome email when a user signs up to your website.
- By giving your emails a tasteful look and tone that imitates that of your blog, email marketing lets you build up your brand, and the more you stand out, the more attention you get.
How to get your email marketing started
In just a few easy steps, you can start building a list and e-mailing subscribers.
Choose an Email Marketing Platform that integrates WordPress
The first step is to choose a platform for email marketing. Mailchimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor are popular choices.
For example, to capture leads on your WordPress site and sync them with your MailChimp account, you can use a plugin such as WooCommerce MailChimp Newsletter Discount.
Set Up Opt-In Form Placement
There will be no place for your readers to subscribe or sign up to your email newsletters if the opt-in forms are not present. The strategic placement of your email signup forms is important. You can place them as a redirect link on your Instagram page in/on your blog sidebar, footer, Underneath each blog post, About page, landing page created specifically for a different types of audiences, exit intent pop up form when they are about to exit your blog.
In your opt-in area, you need to make it clear that they also request to receive blog updates; this will make them expect your emails.
Popups work well, although some visitors to your blog can be annoying. It does a fantastic job to show visitors that you have an email list. Also, it completely grabs your visitor’s attention when they enter your page or have been on your blog for some time. It is difficult to miss a pop-up.
Set up Welcome Emails
Welcome Email from Airbnb
It doesn’t matter if there are 100 or 10, you need to send your first email to your subscribers. Asking them to introduce themselves by replying to the first welcome email is one of the best ways to do that.
To build a personal connection with them, it is important to know who your audience is and, in turn, this builds your engagement on your blog. People when they have freshly signed up are most receptive to your communication.
Segment Your Lists by Interests and Activity
Tools for email marketing lets you create multiple lists. Based on the interests, gender, and activities of your audience, you can create different lists. This can be learned by paying attention to comments and responses to emails. This way, by talking about their particular interests, you avoid spamming your audience and engaging them.
Promote Content
You have to get people to notice your content in order to get subscribers to your email list first. Maybe your target audience has never come across your blog. To promote your content, you need to run ads on social media and work on your SEO for organic traffic, which is the best.
Decide How Often You Will Email Your List
Email Frequency, Image Source: CoSchedule
It’s up to you to decide when you can send emails on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Pick one and stick to it.
Send Your First Official Email
It is time to begin sending out emails that will keep your audience hooked and help you sell your products and services after you have sent out your welcome email.
Follow the steps below:
- Keep your message short, straight to the point, and simple.
- Show the most critical data first
- Write with a personal subject line and a personalised message, as if you are speaking to one person.
- If your writing is lengthy, break up your content into sections with your headlines.
- Organize your email with bullet points and paragraphs for quick reading, so that people absorb your message as quickly as possible.
- Establish attention-grabbing, catchy topic lines
- Don’t be afraid to add links to the body of the email. Refrain from adding too many, however, because you don’t want your email to be categorised accidentally as spam.
- Create trigger emails because when a visitor performs a certain task on your blog, they are automated and sent
- When you have a sizeable email list and provide a service, you can generate promotional emails. When you send promotional emails, you can create a strong call to action to speed up your sales.
- As this is a great way to get regular traffic to your blog and also show your subscribers that you are active, you can send newsletters to your audience. Depending on how much content you put out, you may send them weekly, biweekly, or even monthly.
- You can also send a retargeting email to people who may have missed your previous emails, which is great. It is helpful for your subscribers to be re-engaged.
A/B Testing
To avoid unnecessary errors, it is important to split the test of any email you send to your subscribers. This will make sure what you do works for your company.
Optimize for Mobile
Depending on your target audience, product, and email type, mobile Internet usage is at an all-time high and mobile email accounts for 67 percent of all email openings. It can be fatal for your company to disregard your mobile users. Most mobile users get rid of an email if it is not mobile-friendly. It is essential to optimise your email for mobile users.
To make your email appealing to your mobile users follow the steps below:
- Use a font that is larger. Small fonts are difficult for mobile readers.
- To decrease load time, use smaller images.
- With a thumb, larger buttons are easier to tap. Use the big call-to-action button, then
- Don’t put two connections next to, or on top of, each other. So the user won’t tap the wrong one mistakenly.
- Keep the formatting straightforward (single-column)
- Do not use long subject lines because, because of its smaller screen, it can get cut off on mobile devices.
Master the CTA (Calls to action)
Call-to-Actions are generally intended as buttons, but they can also be written. This directs individuals to your website to an offer page or a link. They are gateways between the inbox of your reader and your blog.
That CTA button boils down to the effectiveness of the email, and whether or not the reader is going to click it to generate traffic and sales.
So it is important to:
- Make your CTA pay attention without causing it to rage.
- Let the reader understand that the clickable CTA is
- Use simple phrases in a copy to inspire action
- To make it different from the rest of the email, leave the white space around CTA.
- To differentiate it from the remainder of the copy, use a bigger or bolder font and a different colour.
- In order to get clicks, your CTA needs to stand out.
Give Stuff Away
Giveaways and freebies are sure ways to get your blog’s attention. Free stuff quickly generates interest, as everyone loves free stuff. Make sure the freebie is in line with the interests of your audience and should be of high value for your giveaway to operate and generate interest.
Things like eBooks, recipes, tutorials, email courses, coaching sessions, webinars can be given away.
Be Consistent
You don’t start something you can’t finish, you need to be consistent with it, pick a time, and stick to it for your email marketing to be successful.
Dos and Don’ts for Email Marketing.
- Your email’s subject line must not be deceptive.
- You need to tell recipients how they can opt-out of your receipt of future emails.
- By providing valuable content, grow your email list.
- Don’t buy an email address list.
- Do not copy content from anyone else.
- Avoid using your copy with all caps.
- Use a familiar name that your crowd will recognise.
- Avoid the email address ‘no-reply’.
- Ensure your URL matches your email address.
- Include a button with the call to action.
- Tell your beneficiaries where you are located.
- Include an easy way to opt-out of your messages for subscribers.
Recommended WordPress Plugin
WooCommerce MailChimp Newsletter Discount is a comprehensive WordPress plugin guaranteed to generate high-quality leads, increase user registrations, and boost conversions. It is flexible and versatile.. It can integrate with the best email marketing service providers including MailChimp.
Key Features
- You can use it as a popup form as well as normal form wherever you want using shortcodes.
- Double Opt-in feature to prevent subscribers from spam emails
- Exit intent available
- A ton of customization options, responsive mobile and opt-in forms optimised for conversion
- Page and category level targeting. To build a hyper-segmented email list
- Analytics and desktop notifications
Conclusion
Email marketing is an efficient way to get your blog posts seen and clicked on. And not only does it keep your readers updated, but it also encourages return visits and gives you the flexibility through affiliate links and offers to increase your revenue.
There is no formula for this; it’s all about what works best for you and the voice and style of your brand. It is time to strengthen your weak areas to see more subscribers and clients with everything you have read so far, and if you have been ignoring email marketing, it is time to re-evaluate your strategy.
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