Email Marketing

Setting up an email newsletter on your blog and inviting your visitors to sign up is a great way to offer added value to the content on your site, but also to build an ongoing relationship, maintain more constant and consistent communication with them once they have left, and provide them with links back to your site to increase your web traffic.

Here are some tools and tips that you can use to leverage email marketing to promote your blog and increase your traffic and readership:

Email Marketing Services

While you can always manage an email newsletter and/or email database manually, there are a number of email marketing services that help save you time and effort by providing you a fully customizable and automated email marketing management system.

These services will offer you a lot of different features, including the collection, management and segmentation of your subscribers, free HTML email templates to help make your emails look more professional and auto-responders to automate communication to your readers.

Here are a couple of the top services:

AWeber is a leading email marketing tool providing users professional email signup forms and auto-responder services making it easy for you to build your email list, stay in touch with prospects and manage effective email marketing campaigns.

Constant Contact is a leading email marketing, online survey and event marketing tool that helps all types of small businesses and organizations create professional-looking email newsletters and insightful online surveys and begin a customer dialogue.

Which Email Marketing Service Do I Use? I personally use Aweber for email marketing efforts and recommend it to anyone looking to get started; however, I would also recommend Constant Contact as another top email marketing service provider.

Proofreading

Above all else, be sure to proofread your email before sending it to your subscribers. If possible, ask a friend or colleague to look it over for both content, grammar and also, intrigue. A little feedback and a few corrections from simple proofreading can go a long way in making your email marketing efforts effective and successful.

Consistency

Being consistent throughout the entire process will not only help build a stronger brand for you and your blog, but also a stronger following, as your subscribers will understand what value to expect from you and when. Establish a schedule for sending out your emails and make sure that your writing style and tone are consistent to help familiarize your subscribers with your own unique voice and email personality.

Value

Always, and I mean always, contribute value in your emails. Don’t just send an email for the sake of sending one. Despite maintaining consistency as suggested above, try only writing to your subscribers when you believe you have something of value – advice, experiences, a special offer – to share with them. They will appreciate it and it will strengthen your brand and your readership.

Subject Lines

Use short, yet informative subject lines in any emails, manual or automatic, that you send out. It doesn’t matter when you send an email, your subscribers are only going to read it if the subject line catches their attention and draws them in.

Simplicity

Make sure that the design of your email is kept simple, including the formatting, the number of colors, the images and the fonts. The more visually distracting your email is, the less responsive and fully engaged your subscribers will be which could inevitably lose you readers, web visitors and potentially customers. Also, don’t add too much, if any, audio, video or Flash files into your email. Not only can these make an email take much longer to download or display, many of your recipients may not even be able to open or view them due to their email service provider’s restrictions.

Length

Keep your email concise and make sure your key points or calls to action are not buried deep within the body of your email. A great way to keep your emails short, but provide interested subscribers the opportunity to learn more is to link out to your blog or other resources directly from your email. This makes your email quick and easy to consume, but extends it into a much longer communication for those interested in learning more.

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