Blog Growth

Email Marketing For Bloggers: 6 Ways to Successfully Promote Your Blog in 2020

January 19, 2019

Have you just started a new blog and can’t figure out how to promote your amazing content and increase your blog traffic successfully?

Or are you an already successful blogger who wants to get the most out of your blog without spending a fortune?

Well, whether you are a blogging master or a newbie, there is one thing that you should do to increase your blog traffic effectively.

While writing and publishing great content is the easiest way to have engaged readers, promoting your content can be one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks you’ll have to deal with.

If you’re wondering how this is going to happen, I have the perfect solution for you!

Email marketing is and will be one of the most powerful marketing channels bloggers can use to reach their audience and deliver exceptional messages that will get their subscribers to visit their blogs.

Now, if you are wondering whether email marketing and blogging are a successful combination, you should know that emails are among the top three methods bloggers use to drive traffic to their posts.

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Source

However, despite email marketing being a solid strategy, the question about how to use it to promote yours still remains.

With that in mind, here are 6 efficient ways to help you take advantage of email marketing for your blog in 2020.

1. Choose an Email Marketing Platform to Save Time

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective solutions bloggers can benefit from without worrying about spending too much.

However, sending emails manually can be a tedious and time-consuming task that will turn your email marketing endeavors into a full-time job that no-one wants. This is why companies generally hire email marketing experts instead of taking years to build an internal team.

To fully take advantage of email marketing, you should consider using an email marketing platform like Moosend or a fancy HubSpot alternative to provide you with the necessary tools to create amazing emails and promote your blog content.

Now what you have to do is to master your platform’s email editor, create amazing email newsletters that will attract your readers’ attention and provide an irresistible call-to-action that will get them to your blog posts.

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One of the things you should look for in a great email marketing platform is a user-friendly interface that will allow you to create your emails from scratch and advanced tools that will help you enrich your emails with powerful triggers like videos.

If your chosen platform also provides you with marketing automation, you can leverage it to set up automated workflows that will distribute your emails according to time- or action-based triggers.

For instance, you can set up a welcome series to introduce yourself to new subscribers and motivate them to start reading your newer and older blog post ideas.

Here’s an amazing example from The Blonde Abroad blog:

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Showing your audience that they matter is an essential part of forming a great first impression.

For the Blonde Abroad blog where the audience consists of people who enjoy traveling, the blogger uses her first email to establish a connection by offering them the chance to look at some of the most popular blog posts about famous destinations.

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As popular blog posts are those that will bring you the highest traffic, promoting them on your emails will help you increase your reach and engagement faster than ever.

To keep track of your numbers you can also use a great analytics tool like Google Analytics or Finteza, which is similar to Google analytics but provides advanced web analytics to monitor user engagement and determine the quality of your traffic through visitor data.

2. Optimize Your Content: Email Body and Subject Lines

While your main focus is the promotion of your amazing blog content, turning email marketing in a powerful ally requires you shouldn’t neglect to optimize your emails.

If you want to skyrocket your blog traffic you should optimize both your email body and subject lines to increase your email deliverability and avoid ending up in your subscribers’ spam folders. You can even use an email deliverability tool.

The first thing you should focus on is what your subscribers will see first when they open their mailbox.

While it may seem trivial, subject lines can determine the success of your email campaign and the percentage of subscribers who will click on your CTA, read your message and reach your blog.

To create great subject lines, you need to keep them simple, informative and give readers a clear idea of what they are going to find inside your emails avoiding spammy words. Furthermore, you can leverage an email subject line generator to help you craft authentic and catchy subject lines for your next campaign.

Here’s an example from Shane Barker:

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With a straightforward subject line, Shane Barker gives his subscribers exactly what they need to click on his email and find out how they can leverage FOMO for marketing.

If you notice, the email body is also focused on specific keywords that are highlighted in bold to attract the subscribers’ attention and show the value of the message.

Also, Shane Barker’s email resembles a short summary that is both short and straightforward, two qualities that will excite the subscriber and make them want to read the blog post.

3. New Post, New Email Update

So, you wrote your next big piece, published it and then felt disappointed because it didn’t land the clicks you expected?

You shouldn’t worry about it because it’s not your blog post that had lower quality than usual but it’s more of a matter of readers losing touch with your blog.

Unfortunately, it’s a fact that people forget about things.

Their busy lifestyle and limited free time tend to distract them from engaging with the things they love more frequently than you think.

So, to promote your next big post and increase your readership, you should always assume that a large number of your audience forgets to check your blog for new content or they are too busy to google search it.

In this case, email marketing can help you solve the problem with specific reminder emails that will simplify the search process and land them exactly where they need to be.

By including a clear call-to-action that will lead them to the piece of content you’ve written, your readers will have an easy-to-use channel to reach your posts without going through google search and filtering results to find the posts they have missed.

Here’s how Julie Blanner’s email does the trick:

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Compared to other blog update emails, Julie Blanner’s was the most minimal and straightforward I received without offering extensive details about what the post is about.

Your new blog post emails should possess all the elements that will make the reader click on your CTA and visit your blog by highlighting the reason why they need to read it.

For Julie Blanner’s email, the promise of finding out the best tips to maintain a clean home is all her subscribers need to see to click on the link.

To make your emails rock, you should also find the best time to send your email, try to make it as simple and straightforward as possible, keep only the most important elements in your email body and include a nice image to turn boring plain-text emails into amazing reminders.

Also, if you want to make the connection between your blog and newsletters a lot more effective, you should consider using some of the best content curation tools to simplify the process.

4. Build A Mailing List from Scratch

Before you start sending out exceptional emails to catch your audience’s attention and turn them into loyal readers who will support you unconditionally, you first need to find the best way to build a mailing list.

If you are new to the blogging landscape, then you should pay extra attention, since your readers are the ones who will help you achieve your blogging goals and dreams.

The easiest way to start building a mailing list is to add subscription forms on your blog to capture your readers’ email addresses.

Here’s a simple subscription form from Kotaku:

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Now, your readers just need to enter their contact info and, in no time, you will have a direct communication channel to reach them.

Using such forms is an excellent way to start building your list. Especially when your blog is relatively newer.

If you want to maximize their success, you should consider making them pop out when your visitors take a look around your blog.

Keep in mind, though, that you shouldn’t make them appear before your visitors the moment they land on your website, but rather give them some time to look around your blog posts and then present them with the pop-up form.

Growing a mailing list with subscribers who will be interested in your content is all you need to set your email marketing and blogging endeavors in motion.

5. Segment All the Way

Now that you have a mailing list to work with, it’s time to find a way to deliver the right content to the right people.

Not every reader has the same interests as the next one and if your blog covers a variety of topics, then you can’t possibly tell what interests them more.

To boost your readership, you can target each reader separately, delivering them content that will truly suit their reading needs and help you build a specific bond with them.

While it is quite impossible to send a targeted message to every single subscriber, the best thing you can do is to take advantage of list segmentation.

Segmentation is a winning practice that’s meant to divide your subscribers into groups with similar preferences and/or interests.

For instance, if you have a business blog, you can divide your subscribers according to whether they like marketing, sales or customer experience blog posts.

When you manage to divide your readers into manageable groups, then you’ll be able to deliver content that will speak to your audience and minimize your post bounce rate due to uninterested readers.

The easiest way to get you started is to enrich your subscription forms with preference boxes, giving your new subscribers the chance to choose what they want to receive from your blog.

Here’s an example from the Convince & Convert blog:

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6. Repurpose Blog Content

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to come up with a new piece that will stun your blog readers, the right ideas don’t seem to be there when you need them most.

So, what do you do when that happens?

Do you just wait until new ideas finally come to you, letting your readers think that you just gave them the cold shoulder?

Well, if you have a regular newsletter that engages your subscribers with your blog, you can’t just stop sending them updates due to writer’s block.

What you can do until your next big blog post idea occurs, though, is to repurpose your content to prevent disengagement and give you time to come up with an idea that will amaze them.

For example, the easiest way is to create an ebook template and use your posts to come up with an amazing e-book series that will revive your older content and enhance its value.

While there are more ways to repurpose content, email roundups are the most effective way to deliver your old content and promote your blog.

Here’s how the blog A Beautiful Mess does it:

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The bloggers use this email to make their archived posts relevant by reminding their older readers of their existence and familiarising newer subscribers with them.

Also, this email has another section that is meant to encourage readers to participate in their new e-course by offering an amazing discount.

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As you can see, repurposing your old content not only helps you maintain a steady newsletter flow and earns you extra time to plan your next post but also gives you the opportunity to engage new readers with your best pieces of content and promote any products/services you might have.

Takeaway

Email marketing has been used by numerous bloggers to increase their blog post visibility and skyrocket their traffic.

While finding the best practices to take advantage of email marketing can be a time-consuming task that requires careful planning, using them will save you both valuable time and help you boost the success of your blog.

To give you a helping hand, use these 6 amazing ways to power-up your blog and in no time you’ll be promoting your amazing content in the most cost-effective way possible.

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About the Author

Marilia is a Creative Writer working for email marketing software Moosend. Her passion for writing has made her find new ways to combine the art of Creative Writing with SEO Copywriting. When she’s not writing articles, you’ll find her enthusing over marketing tech.

Author bio Marilia D

Marilia Dimitriou
Marilia Dimitriou