This is a guest post by Jesse Langley from TechNected.com.
Along with other social tools, every blog in existence has an email sign-up. Signing up for an email is a sign of faith in the blog from the visitor. They’re putting their faith in you to give them interesting, relevant content.
Like any social contract, though, there are consequences if you break that trust: the dreaded unsubscribe button.
If readers unsubscribe, you can pretty much guarantee they won’t be coming back to your blog. Most people passively cut through their email content. Once they’re annoyed enough with you to actually go through the process of unsubscribing, they’re annoyed enough to stop visiting your site. Email marketing is only as valuable as its content.
The worst thing you can do is tell your readers every single time a post goes up. The truth is, they may love your site, but no one but your mother cares that much about your site. The trick, then, is to find a balance between overwhelming your readers and not communicating with them at all.
If you’re using email in a way that engages and draws your readers in, though, you’re going to see a sharp uptick in readers and in your traffic statistics.
Be Valuable
For marketers, this principle is simple. If they have a coupon or a sale notification, most readers will appreciate an email from them. If they don’t, consumers don’t want to hear from them. Blog owners have a different line to walk, though.
Instead of notifying readers every time a great post goes up, notify them at the beginning of a series so they can catch the whole thing. You shouldn’t send more than two emails a week as a blog owner, unless you’re advertising giveaways and promotions.
Be Timely
Another great place to notify your blog readers is around the holidays. If you feature crafts, obviously you can get pretty good mileage out of telling people they can learn how to do Halloween makeup or Christmas cards. If your blog is more business oriented, you can talk about holiday sales and tell readers how to leverage them either from the business or the personal side.
Receiving an email with a holiday notification gives the reader the sense that they’re getting information that’s relevant to them because of the timing. They’ll be able to use your post quickly, and it should ideally prepare them for something coming up.
Be Personal
Ask for a birthday when people sign up for your email newsletters, and reach out to them to tell them how much you appreciate them throughout the year. Larger sites should consider having a designer create an embeddable JPG or PDF that can be personalized and sent along for birthdays. Of course, a personal note from a site owner to a faithful reader can go a long way as well.
If someone spends a long time commenting on your blog, consider both answering them on the blog and sending a note thanking them for their interaction via email. The time spent creating relationships won’t be wasted.
Be Wanted
Seth Godin’s book about permission-based marketing came out more than 10 years ago, but it’s still incredibly relevant today, as marketers find new ways to reach consumers. A company may think that sending out SMS text alerts would be helpful to consumers who provided their phone number on an email form, but chances are good that’s not what the consumer wanted at all.
Consumers are naturally a little sensitive when it comes to businesses reaching out to them. They want it to be on their terms, the ones they agreed to when they originally subscribed. Take that out of its context, and you’re going to be left with a lot of unhappy customers.
Well put, I think you’re right that consumers are sensitive to how businesses reach out. If you are a blogger and you do plan to email with every post you need to make that clear when someone subscribes to your post. I have a couple different blogs that I subscribe to that both send me emails with each post. One blog offers inspiration and I know to expect the email around 2:00 each afternoon. I take a short break from work to read the post and I appreciate the email reminder. The other blog I believed to be a craft blog where I had gotten several great craft ideas. However as I get the email from them each day I’m realizing that they do a lot of contests and advertisements, content that I’m just not interested in. As the content becomes more boring to me I get closer and closer to clicking the dreaded unsubscribe button. If you’re emailing daily you need to be sure you’re sending content that your readers want.
Thanks, Jesse. Making connections ( not spamming ) is what networking is all about!
Hi Jesse,
I am totally agree with what you written in your great post.Today email marketing is good but some time it’s look like Spam,even i also daily getting lot of marketing mail and it look like Spam.
For a long time, my email box was flooded by spammy message of so called “marketers”, which annoys me very much, so for now hardly ever open any of them. And i think there are many other did the same to those “marketing emails”. If they really care about their customers, the situation wont be that bad! Hope all of them can read your post and have a change in mind.
Thanks for the great tips, Jesse!
Actually, I have an entertainment blog where I update pretty frequently. But since email subscribers wont like to get email updates daily, I burned a feed for a particular category (in which the posts sort of summarize the other articles) and allow people to subscribe only to that via email. That’s a maximum of 4-5 emails per month. They have the links to other posts as well, and can click through to read them if they want.
I totally understand the thoughts about emailing as a tool for connecting, and less for spam, though I never found it that useful, let along I have a nice amount of subscribers, each time I send something, the number goes down, and yet, even if they do go in the site, it doesn`t quite change the traffic.
Therefor I haven`t really found it useful to use it, because subscribers goes into the website anyway, does not matter if they get mail or not.
It may be a great way for some blogs, but I found my readers loyal, and without the need of email, they do come back.
What are people’s thoughts about the proportion of images to text? I know usually more text is recommended but I receive emails all the time which are completly made up of images without a problem. It’s also worth adding words like ‘free’ and ‘win’ to the list of words to avoid. Thanks for sharing info.
In my opinion it’s all about finding the perfect rate of sending informative content or even better free resourses that will make people want to open your next email message and at the same time have a few ads and promotion to atleast maintain the costs.
Personally I have a weekly newsletter where I send my best articles of each week (sometimes I share articles from other blogs) and in addition I give a free ebook or tool which I believe that is the best way to have high open rates. Of course I have to make some money too, for that reason usually I send a product review which I try to make it not too promotional.
This works pretty well for me…
thanks for the post. I am trying to use email marketing with my tiny list and struggling to find the balance between content and marketing….so this post helped! thanks.
Good post. People are tired of the bots, trolls, or whatever they are calling them in 2012. If you want me to look at your web page yelling at me 50 times as the exact opposite effect.