If you’re seriously interested in growing your business, you need to take a second look at your email marketing efforts.
Last week I outlined three major benefits why email still matters. And if you’re like most people, you’ve probably thought about email marketing but haven’t done much to kickstart it into action. The main reason usually boils down to the effort needed to grow a list and deciding on the content to send out – without feeling you’re spamming everyone.
The key to email marketing is to already have a blog where you’re publishing regularly. Remember, a blog is the home for all your content, and email is another channel for you get through to people.
So what type of emails should you be sending out to your list? Check this list of email marketing ideas to help you stay top of mind.
4 Email Marketing Ideas To Keep You Top Of Mind
1. The Newsletter
The most common, and probably easiest email to send out to your list is a newsletter. Because this type of email will usually feature topics you would have published on your blog, so there’s no need to create content from scratch.
A simple way to get started with you newsletter is to include information about developments happening in your business, product updates, important announcements and feedback.
Here’s what Evernote does with their newsletter. As you can see, they include posts from their blog along with news about product updates.
2. Reader Digest
A reader digest is similar to newsletters, but with the focus on content you’ve already published. If you’re pushing out content daily, then weekly digest would be great. Alternatively, if you’re publishing less frequently, a monthly digest would work better.
This email takes the form of the list whereby you have the title of your post and a short summary linking back to your website. With the main benefit being that it’s easier to read and gives people more than one opportunity to get back onto your website.
Below you’ll see a reader digest from Google Think Insights sends out every month.
3. Standalone Emails
This type of email just includes one piece of information!
It just gets straight to the point with what you want to say. And doesn’t include anything else other than what you want to announce.
Standalone emails can be used whenever you have a new product released, a new offer or a special promotion going on. And it’s main advantage here is that the focus is all on one piece of news which comes with a clear call to action.
For instance MOO – a company delivering quality business cards – sent out this email to introduce their new Luxe business cards into their lineup. From the email you’ll notice only one call to action.
4. Transactional Emails
Noticed those email you receive from Amazon after purchasing a product? That is what transactional emails look like. They get sent after the user has done a specific action, hasn’t done an action yet, or is the target of an action. In Amazon’s case this action was buying a product.
Transactional emails are typically automated and are an attempt to get people back to your website by keeping people aware your business exists.
Here’s an email I received from Amazon when I download The Entrepreneur Mind, as you’ll see the focus is on getting you back to Amazon.com.
While most of us (me included) tend to delete or filter them away from the inbox. Research has shown that they increase brand awareness and revenue!
Other types of transactional emails include reminders, subscription confirmations, account updates and invoices.
What about you? What type of content do you send out in your email marketing campaigns? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
