Email Marketing ROI Can Improve When You Tap Into Blogs and Email Newsletters Both
If your company is blogging, do you still need an email newsletter? Yes, if you want to improve your email marketing ROI. There are several reasons for this:
One, this is the age of integration. (For proof of that, see our new 2010 guide to choosing an ESP.) Just because you are doing one thing (blogging) doesn’t mean you should not do the other (email marketing). The more marketing channels you have, the better. Plus blogs and emails are delivered differently. A blog must be found by a reader, and then subscribed to, to be read. An email newsletter can be part of your email marketing program, sent to people already on your in-house email list. You can actively recruit email subscribers via a multitude of channels. And people are less likely to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed than they are to your email newsletter. Using a blog in combination with an email newsletter simply increases your reach, and therefore your ROI.
Two, the one can refer to the other, so they support each other (and cut down on the amount of content needed). Let’s say you have an email marketing program, but you don’t do an email newsletter because you’re concerned about coming up with content and getting it pushed out on time every week or month. (And anything that takes more staff time admittedly impacts your email marketing ROI.) You can repurpose the content from your blog to create that email newsletter content. Pick a few of the best blogs from the last month and include a compelling sentence about each in the newsletter, linked to that blog. You will reach a different audience, your in-house email list, while driving traffic to your blog. Conversely, your blog can refer back to your email newsletter. That’s what we do at ClickMail. We publish a monthly email marketing newsletter, then summarize that month’s issue in a blog post, linking back to the newsletter now archived on our website.
Three, this is the age of choice for consumers, even if your audience is B2B. They can choose how to communicate with you, and how you can communicate with them. They might choose Facebook or Twitter or signing up for your emails or subscribing to your blog…or a combination of two or more of these channels. If they prefer email and you’re only offering a blog, you might lose the opportunity to build a relationship with them when they decide to simply skip it and you. And any lost opportunities mean a lower ROI.
Which leads to reason four, email as a relationship building tool. Blogging can’t replace email for relationship building. Nor can you effectively use blogging for specials and promotions, or even surveys! There are still certain types of content most appropriate to email. Just like you might miss out on a subscriber (i.e. prospect) if you only offer a blog, no newsletter, so might you miss out on marketing if you don’t have the email list and channel for certain types of messages.
Blogging and email: You need both for maximize email marketing ROI. And if you need help with the latter, you know where to go.
May 7th, 2010 at 9:34 am
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