Dalia of designs-express.com blog sent me an email inquiring about marketing her blog and if sending out Newletters were overkill. My answer to that was “absolutely not”.Email marketing is probably one of the best tools you can use to gain loyalty from your readers and keep them coming back. How many times have you visited a site and almost forgot they existed before you received a “What’s New On <insert site name here>” message from that site and clicked back on it for the updates? Newletters (if done right) keeps your readers informed of certain changes to your site, special promotions and exclusive content.

If you are thinking about starting an email marketing campaign, there are certain things you should consider:

I strongly suggest investing in an email management and marketing system such as Icontact or Constant Contant. Here are a few advantages of signing up with an email marketing site to manage your contact lists.

Easy Management of Lists

Most email marketing companies allow you to sort your contacts into lists. I strongly suggest having separate lists for your contacts. Here’s an example of how you can split your lists:
Commenters - this may be a list of everyone that has visited your site and left a comment. Take a day or two and go back and record all the emails of people who have been nice enough to leave a comment on your posts. This list will be important in gaining new readers because more than likely a huge percent of those people probably visited your site through a)a link from another site b) google search. Sending out a message to this list with some of your hottest content will remind them to come back and check your site again. I suggest only sending this list an email 1-2 times a month to avoid overkill.

Subscribers - This list is everyone who has signed up to get your daily updates to your mailbox through your feedburner feed. These are loyal readers and I would suggest an email every now and then, thanking them for their support etc.

If you are using feedburner to manage your subscriber list, make sure you go into the Options TAB and Brand your daily newsletters. For everyone that receives Necole Bitchie updates, you will notice that the daily newsletter includes my header at the top, followed by excerpts of my latest blog postings.

To set this up you would go into your feedburner feed ->Publicize Tab -> Manage Email Subscriptions ->Email Branding and there you will find options to customize how your daily newsletter will look. After setting that up, choose Delivery Options and set the time you want the newletter to go out. Mine is set to go out between 1pm-3pm as it gives me time to get all of my posts out and it is normally delivered to my subscribers right after lunch. Once I changed this from 9am to 1pm, I saw a bigger response from my subscribers. Feedburner does all the work for you daily, but I highly suggest keeping a copy of this list in your email marketing system to send these readers special promotions, messages etc. These emails can be more intimate because these are your loyal site visitors.PR/Media - This list would include Publicists, All Media (VH1, BET, etc), publications, news sites, Record Labels, etc. You want to establish a kind of rapport with this list of people so that when they receive an email from you, they will open it because they know it is an exclusive and not spam that you send out every day. I only suggest emailing this list when you have exclusives, as these people are very busy and will get annoyed from constant emails. The initial email that goes out to this list once it is compiled can be a newletter, introducing your blog with a few links to your content just to say “hey, I’m here…I exist” and maybe request that they add you to their press list. If you put something on your site from a publicist or marketing company, always send them an email back with the link to your post so that you can stay on the radar and establish positive rapport.

Other Blogs - This would be a list of other blogs in your genre. I would treat this list, the same as PR/Media and limit the emails to exclusive content or content that you may have snagged that hasn’t appeared on these sites yet. You want to stay on these sites radars as well as it could gain you some link backs, placement on their blogrolls and they will start to check your site for updated content as well.

Weekly Newsletter list - If you like, you could put together a weekly newsletter that runsdown the latest updates from your blog and have a separate subscription sign up for this. (separate from feedburner). The writers of Im Not Obsessed does this which keeps readers that aren’t able to login every day up to date with a weekly rundown. They also run special promotions through this newsletter with advertisers (which = more advertising dollars). If you decide to do something of this nature, make sure you stay on top of the weekly emails and send it out consistently to build this list up.

Direct Contact

When you send emails through an email marketing service, it inserts the person’s contact in the TO: Field which makes the email more personable. How many times have you received an email from someone that forgets to use the BCC and it has your email among 150 other emails of people that they sent this email to. This is my number 1 reason I do not suggest running email marketing campaigns from your gmail, yahoo, etc etc accounts  because this method comes across as spamming and will piss people off. You’ve now broadcast their emails along with others to the world. Do you really think the Head Huncho at Island Def Jam wants his email address broadcast to the world??You will get more “take me off your email lists” emails then you can count and will leave a bad taste in the mouths of the people you want to impress the most (media). I get several of these a week from people who should know better, so the next time you get one of these to your inbox, send them a link to this article.

Scheduled Deliveries

Another great feature when using these services is that it allows you to create an email and schedule it for future delivery. So you can create an email on late Monday night and schedule it to go out early Thursday morning. I highly suggest sending emails between 9am-3pm during the week (Tuesday through Thursday preferably).

“Studies found that Monday’s are generally reserved for meetings, organizing, catching up on all the tasks left over from the week prior, and messages sent Friday afternoons are often ignored or show up at the bottom of the list when downloaded on Monday morning.” Source

Templates

You are giving hundreds of html templates to choose from to deliver your message when using these email marketing services. Taking the time to customize your email to the feel of your site will help in the branding of your site and makes the presentation of the email far more attractive than the “check this out” with a link emails.

Option to Opt Out

Members of your email list can opt out from recieving future emails at any time which helps weed out readers that do not want to recieve future emails. This is an additional aid in managing your list and will prevent pissing members of your list off.

Fees

There is a fee to join these subscriber services that depends on the number of emails you are managing. I think the lowest is IContact at $9.95 a month and Constant Contact’s minumum is at $15 a month. Both offer a trial period and I would utilize the trial to test out the features to see which one would be best. They also allow you to survey your readers for an extra charge which helps when you are trying to put together a media, marketing or adveritising kit.

In conclusion, Email Marketing will help you build relationships with your subscribers and can help to gain new ones. Your dedication to creating daily, weekly or monthly newsletters can help keep your brand top of mind and will give you an edge in this very competitive and saturated culture of blogging.

If you have any questions, leave them as a comment as I will try to answer at the best of my ability.

Tags: Blog Marketing, Email Marketing

Trackback URI | Comments RSS