Intro To EMail Marketing for Bloggers

In a recent post discussing the power of  Guest Blogging to Explode your traffic, I put out the offer for bloggers to write guest posts on my blog. I had a number of responses and this will be the first guest post ever on TBE.

Guest posting allows you to tap into the vast resources that the blogging world has to offer. Too many bloggers try to “fake it’ if they don’t know something about a particular topic, but I would rather tap into the readership here and see if we can mutually benefit each other.

We’ll see how it works out for all of us right here on TBE.

Over the next few weeks, Erica DeWolf will introduce us to the world of email marketing and show us how we can incorporate this valuable tool into our blogging endeavours. I have been contemplating this very topic and I am looking forward to hearing from Erica all about the world of email marketing.

Take it Away Erica. 

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Email marketing has been around since the 1990’s, so if you were to compare it to more modern marketing tools such as social media and/or RSS feeds, then it is hardly new. Despite its’ maturity, the use of email has done nothing but increase since its initial introduction, so it’s only natural that email marketing would keep that pace as well.

WIFM – What’s In It For Me?

According to eMarketer, a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey found that 91% of all Internet users between 18 and 64 send or read email. We could also look at it like this, if your visitors are savvy enough to sign up for an RSS feed, don’t you think they’d be using email regularly, as well? I’d be willing to bet that percentage approaches 100% when it comes to the blogging world.

If these visitors use email anyway, why not take advantage of that medium to produce another source of income for your blog. Many of you monetize your feed but don’t give your email a second thought. Maybe because you don’t know how? Well keep reading, that’s why  this article is here.

I am not talking about giving them the opportunity to sign up for an RSS feed via email (you should already be doing this). Email marketing would involve giving your readers a little something extra for allowing you to put an un-obvious marketing message directly into something that they check daily.

Many bloggers use a free giveaway to entice readers to sign up for their email marketing list. An ebook or a list of blogging tips can be invaluable to newbie bloggers and they will be quite happy to sign up for your list. We’ll discuss these more in a future article.

What Makes Email Marketing Effective?

• Users are more likely to open and read emails, and then visit your site daily, than RSS subscribers.

• Trackable: discover who opened, read, and clicked through your message to visit your blog. You’ll then know exactly who needs more convincing.

• Personalized emails will make it more likely to convert readers into paying customers, RSS subscribers, and daily visitors.

• Email allows you to personalize emails in a way that RSS doesn’t have the capabilities for.

• Email can incorporate subscribers’ names, company names, titles, and past purchase history into the message to become an extremely relevant message, and therefore more effective.

In a recent post, Argument for Email I discussed how a recent Stumbler and I got into a disagreement on the effectiveness of email marketing in today’s social media society. However, I’m a strong believer that email marketing is here to stay, so bloggers might as well use this medium, as well as those they’re already utilizing, to market themselves and their products most effectively.

Stay tuned as I expand this topic and discuss email marketing for bloggers on Blog Entrepreneur, in which you’ll learn the advantages and disadvantages of using an email campaign management tool (ESP), how you can grow your mailing list to as many permission based subscribers as possible, and tips and tricks to increase your conversion rate and deliver more effective email marketing messages.