The Whitelist

3 Ways a Blog Can Make Your Email Marketing Easier

Keeping a blog can give a seriously large lift to responses from your emails. Maybe you know this, but you’re just too busy for blogging and email marketing.

Actually, you’re probably not. Write blog posts, and you’ll find your email campaign is taken care of. A blog can actually bring in subscribers, provide ready-made content for your emails and even lend your campaign a personable tone.

A Source of New Subscribers

Blogging means that with every post, you’re adding fresh content to your site. Search engines LOVE fresh content.

Stale, out-of-date content disappoints searchers, so search engines are designed to always provide something new. If you’re continually posting new content on your site (especially if you supplement with keywords), it’ll rank higher so searchers find it.

When those searchers get to your site, they’ll be able to read your fresh content. They’ll also be able to read that sign-up form in your sidebar (you do have one, yes? If not, go set one up, then come back and finish reading.)

And there, they can sign up to your list.

Instant Email Content

Once someone’s on your list, they probably won’t come back to your site often. For the most part, they’ll expect to stay updated through your emails.

That means you can use your blog posts as email content. The easiest way is to set up a blog broadcast, which pulls any new blog posts directly into your email template as a new message. (Like this.)

If you want to have a greater hand in making each email more unique, you can take bits and pieces of your posts and weave them together, writing a message about all your topics together, and drop in links to the various articles as you mention them.

And a Personable Tone

When your email content comes from blog posts, it’s most likely less formal than the average official company broadcast. With this more personable tone, subscribers can get to know you and feel more comfortable with your brand.

And when we’re comfortable with the brand, we’re more comfortable whipping out our wallets.

Easy, Right?

So you see how by adding a blog to your to do list, your list actually becomes shorter? List building, email writing and even traffic generation are scratched right off (or at least require far less time). Turns out, you’re too busy not to blog.

- Amanda Gagnon writes about email marketing for AWeber, a leading email service provider for small-to-medium businesses. For more email marketing tips from AWeber, you can subscribe to their twice-weekly emails here.

ClickMail is proud to announce that the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal has ranked ClickMail Marketing as one of the top 50 fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley. This is the second time ClickMail’s growth has been recognized by a major publication in recent weeks. Previously, Inc. Magazine ranked the email marketing vendor 2,109 on a list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies. ClickMail will be recognized by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal at a private awards event on October 13th in Mountain View, CA.

“We are continue to build our reputation in the email marketing industry as the vendor-agnostic ESP alternative, helping clients to gain more ROI from their email marketing programs,” said ClickMail CEO Marco Marini. “This additional recognition by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal is a welcome validation of the effort we are putting forth and the need clients have for our type of end-to-end email marketing services. Without the clients, we wouldn’t have this explosive growth.”

ClickMail is growing rapidly by bringing the latest in new services and email technology to our clients, who are also benefiting by increased growth and success in their email marketing campaigns. From building an online tool for selecting a new ESP to acquiring the Bay Area’s Strategic Design Group, we have been creating new tools and offering new services that help our clients keep pace in the fast-moving email marketing industry. With over a dozen ESP systems in our portfolio, we offer the nation’s largest selection of ESPs so that we can ensure the best match is made for every client. We also pride ourselves on our excellent support team that works with our clients on fulfilling their specific email marketing needs, from increasing email deliverability to achieving maximum ROI.

Let ClickMail Marketing help you with all of your email marketing needs: contact us today!

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.
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