Have you ever written a killer blog post that you wanted to share with the entire world, forever and ever? The problem is, every blog post has a life cycle. Most posts get 50 percentof their total impressions within the first week it’s live.
You can share it on your social channels, but it’s only a matter of time before you exhaust them all.
Sooner or later, traffic to your amazing post will dwindle.
If only there was a better way to extend the life of your blog post to get it in front of new audiences, over and over again.
Well, there is! With email marketing, you can repurpose your best blog posts just for your subscribers. Below, we’ll look at three types of email campaigns that you can create using your best blog posts.
Create a Curated Email Newsletter with Your Own Blog Posts
Content curation happens when you sift through the world of content and share relevant articles, videos and more with your audience. It’s a big time-saver since you’re sharing content that’s already been created, plus it’s effective: When compared to creating original content, every dollar invested in content curation sees 5.2 times more volume and 2.2 times more traffic for small and medium sized businesses.
Typically, marketers use content curation to share other people’s content with their audience. But you can also create a curated email newsletter full of your own blog posts.
How do you do that? Collect the blog posts you want to share and save them to an email newsletter. It’s OK if they’re older posts as long as they’re relevant and useful to your subscribers.
Write a sentence or two for each post telling them why they should read it. Be convincing; this is your chance to sell them on your best content!
To make content curation easier, download an app like Curate. You don’t even need to design and format your newsletter - the app does it for you.
If you’re wondering how often you should send your curated email newsletter, once a week, bi-weekly or monthly all work well. The most important thing is that the content in your newsletter is valuable to your audience.
Introduce Yourself to New Subscribers with a Welcome Series of Your Best Blog Posts
Welcome emails get four times the total open rates and five times the click-through rates compared to other emails. Create an entire welcome series, and you’ve got yourself a winning email marketing campaign.
A welcome email series also gives you the opportunity to get your best content in front of your new subscribers and lay the foundation for lasting (and profitable!) relationships.
To create your series, first pick three of your best blog posts. Not sure which blog posts to choose? Google Analytics will tell you.
Let’s say I want to promote these posts:
- Common Email Content Mistakes and How to Fix Them
- Time-Saving Email Marketing Tips to Take Back Your Day
I’ll begin with my first email to new subscribers - the welcome email. Always include these four things in your welcome email:
- A big thank you for signing up
- A heads up about the content you’ll send (and how often)
- Your incentive if you offered one
- Your contact information
Here’s what my welcome email would look like:
Subject line: Thanks for signing up to the Email Tips List
Hi there,
Welcome to the Email Tips List! Every week, I’ll send you a new tip to help you with your email marketing strategy. I want to know what you think about my tips, so don’t hesitate to reply directly to my emails and give me feedback.
Here’s your first tip to get you started: Common Email Content Mistakes and How to Fix Them.
Ever make a big email mistake? What did you learn from it? Hit reply and tell me!
Thanks again for signing up!
Kristen
For my next email, I’ll promote my second blog post.
Subject line: Time-Saving Email Marketing Tips to Take Back Your Day
Hey!
How’s your week going? This week’s Email Tips is all about how you can use email marketing to save time. Check it out: Time-Saving Email Marketing Tips to Take Back Your Day
How much time do you usually spend on email? Hit reply and tell me!
See you next week,
Kristen
As you can see, simple and conversational emails are what you want. The focus is on the blog post I’m promoting, so my subscribers have just one call-to-action.
How long should you make your welcome email series? It depends on how many blog posts you want to share. If you have three blog posts you want to promote, you can create three emails. If you have more, feel free to make your welcome series longer.
No matter how long you make your welcome series, be sure to ask readers for feedback on your content at the end. A few ideas for what to ask them include: what type of content they like best, what format they prefer (blog post, video, infographic) and how often they like to receive content.
Educate Your Subscribers with an Email Course
Want to teach your audience a new skill? Or maybe you want them to learn how to use your product or service? An email course gives you the opportunity to educate your subscribers with useful content.
The best part about creating an email course is that you just need one blog post to get started. It’ll be easier to create your course if your post is on the longer side and has multiple headers and sections, but you can use just about any blog post.
First, outline how many lessons you want your email course to have. Then, divide your blog post into sections based on those lessons.
Using the blog post we talked about earlier, Time-Saving Email Marketing Tips to Take Back Your Day, here’s what a course outline would look like:
[Lesson 1] How to use email automation to save time
[Lesson 2] How to grow your list fast
[Lesson 3] Time-saving tips for subscriber management
All I did was divide up the blog post into lessons, which then become your emails to your subscribers. To make your course exclusive to your subscribers, add something new to the lessons - an image, template, or more detailed explanation of your most salient points.
What about cadence and timing? If each of your lessons are short and snackable (think less than 300 words each), feel free to send a new lesson every day. If you want to create long-form lessons, allow for a few days in between lessons so your subscribers have time to digest them.
About the author: Kristen Dunleavy is a content marketing specialist at AWeber, a provider of small business email marketing software.
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