Producing valuable and interesting content for their blog and social media accounts on a regular basis is hard for most people. Doing it also for their email campaigns is basically a death sentence.
In this day and age, if you want to achieve success with online marketing, you need to constantly produce great and original content. The more you make, the bigger the chances that people will recognize you as an expert within your industry.
Although quality content attracts visitors to your site and helps your potential customers see your brand as something more than just a place of business, it can still turn against you if don’t do it right.
I don’t know about you, but I have unliked a lot of brands on social media, and unsubscribed from tons of newsletters in the last year or two. Why? – Well, because I don’t see any value in their content. The quality of the work has plummeted so much that it’s ridiculous. It’s either pointless or way too aggressive to make a sale.
The cornerstone of every successful content marketing strategy is consistency. You cannot just write one great post and milk it ‘till the end of time. No. You need to feed your targeted audience with new and (at least) equally good stuff on daily, weekly and monthly basis.
To create a piece of content that offers some real value and solves a problem for a particular group of people, you need to invest more than just a few minutes into its production. You cannot just create something in a couple of seconds and expect people to amplify it. Nope. Those days are long gone.
This tends to be a problem for most brands. A lot of business owners today don’t really have the luxury to spend an insane amount of time every month creating all sorts of different content pieces for various uses. No. They have other important things to take care of, if they don’t want to see their business crumble in front of their eyes.
So what do they do? They cheat.
To cut down on time, most entrepreneurs today are doing their best to repurpose their content. They are figuring out ways on how they could use the same idea more than once, and still make it seem fresh and unique.
Although this seems great to some of you, dressing your content in a new and shiny suit is not quite as easy as it sounds. If you fail to make it look as if you just pulled it out of the oven, Google Panda will penalize you. Hard. Trust me, you don’t want that.
Don’t be fooled by its cute name, Google Panda is a vicious beast who doesn’t really know the meaning of the word mercy.
Should I Even Bother With Email Marketing?
Email marketing is extremely important for any type of business. It’s a great way of staying in touch with your most loyal customers and also a good and inexpensive way of working on leads that are not yet customers.
Studies have shown that email marketing has the highest ROI among all forms of marketing. That is why it still plays an important role in almost every online marketing strategy.
Email marketing is especially advisable for small businesses. If you treat your subscribers with respect and provide them with quality information that they are looking for, you’ll be rewarded with referrals, new customers and additional sales from existing customers.
The purpose of your email marketing should be to entice recipients to actually do something. Whether it’s to visit the website, check your products, sign up for a free trial, download a pdf file, or use the ‘enclosed discount coupon’ to purchase something – it doesn’t really matter. Your goal here is to provoke some sort of action.
Your emails need to provide enough value for the receiver not to unsubscribe, but to open and click through the links you send.
This is where your blog can come in handy. If you already have loads of great content on your website, you should consider the following ways to repurpose your already amplified content in your next email campaign:
Create eBooks
A great way to repurpose your content is to make it into an ebook. All you have to do is recycle your content into one big, greatly designed, and coherent story. An innovative way to promote it is to share parts of it via social media and email.
Chapter titles, chapter summaries and even chapter or paragraph illustrations can become a valuable asset in your email marketing strategy, if you, of course, link it back to that dedicated landing page where people can buy your ebook or download it for free.
You can split the content within your ebook anyway you want to. You can create all sorts of teasers that give the people just a sample of what’s your new content all about. You can split it up and mix it anyway you want to. You can even give them a free copy as a thank you for being on your email list.
Apart from giving your current subscribers something to keep them interested in your work, e-books can even help you grow your email list. How? – By offering your leads a free copy of it in exchange for their email address.
In the internet marketing field, I see a lot of people giving away free stuff to other people as a bribe to join their email list. Why? – Well, because once they have your email, they can remarket you in all sorts of different ways.
The possibilities are endless. It all depends on your goals and creativity. The thing that makes this a great way to reuse content is the reduction of actual work that you need to do in order to create original pieces from scratch.
Bring Your Blog to Your Subscribers
If you already actively update your blog once or twice a week, you can automatically send your new content to your email subscribers and thus help them stay up to date with your writing. Not all people use RSS feeds and social media. Some of them prefer to receive information via email. It’s just more convenient for them. Your content is there, in their inbox, waiting for them to read it. They don’t have to track it all around the web.
Although this way of reusing content for your email marketing seems pretty easy, there’s a catch to it. You don’t want to spam your subscribers like crazy. If they feel like you’re abusing their inbox – they’re gonna unsubscribe from your mailing list. You don’t want that.
It’s your job to figure out how often people want to receive this sort of content from you. If you’re busy entrepreneur, you certainly don’t want to see your inbox overflowing with these types of emails. Nope. My suggestion is to send out this type of content no more than once or twice a week. Be sure to create a catchy title and lead to ensure that people will consider opening your emails.
Create Clever Roundups
If you have a lot of different content, like blog posts, infographics, guides or anything similar, you can always put it in a nice and well-organized list and send it to your subscribers. All you have to do here is find a common ground between these different pieces of content, connect it in a way so that it makes sense and send it to people on your list.
We do this all the time here at AltusHost. Every one of our roundups has a clear theme that makes it easy for us to combine some of our existing content with original pieces that we create solely for these specific newsletters.
In most cases, we use this framework to give our users a chance to immediately read entire blog series on a particular subject or problem, without being forced to dig through our website.
Use Real Life Events to Your Advantage
I don’t know about you, but I tend to visit all sorts of different seminars. Heck, I even participate on most of them. Just in the last two years, I’ve talked about web hosting, running a successful online business and content marketing on at least 20 different events.
For every single one of them, I created all sorts of different concepts on what I should talk about, slide shares, infographics – basically various types of different media that is evergreen. Why not implement that type of content in your email marketing?
Apart from this, most of these events where I talked about my work and passions in the previous year or two were being filmed.
Why shouldn’t I consider chopping these videos into segments and embedding them in my emails as links? They can serve to educate my recipients, help them better relate with my brand or even just see me as someone who’s not just an avatar that sends them content, but a living and breathing person.
These are just some of the ways you on how you could reuse your content for your email marketing. If you work in a different field than me, you probably have other types of evergreen content that you can spin for this.
Before we part ways (for now), when considering how to repurpose some of your already published content, always remember not to duplicate it outside of your emails. You don’t want people to see you as someone who is far too lazy to create something new and original.
That’s it for now,
See you soon again,
Kindest regards,
Goran @ AltusHost
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
