A 3-Step Plan For Easier Email Marketing
Don't just throw away perfectly reusable email content. Columnist Daniel Faggella outlines some ways to help you create a compelling email campaign without the fuss.
Since 1970, the recycle triangle, or what’s more formally known as the universal recycling symbol, has been the little reminder that we should recycle, reuse and reduce waste.
If you want to rev up your email marketing and create great emails without having to spend too much time rethinking them, there are three comparable Rs you need to follow.
To keep a presence in your customer’s inbox and continuously drive traffic from your subscriber base, just remember to Regiment, Repurpose and Recycle.
Regiment
As a foundation for easily creating quality emails without too much hassle, one needs to be able to draw upon a solid base of rich content and written content. That rich content can include any combination of videos, webinars, podcasts or interviews, and your written content can, as the name implies, include blog articles, guest posts and white papers or guides.
Obviously, it will vary based on your business, but to build a solid base of content, it’s important to establish a firm regimen of content creation. If your rich content and written content regimens are on point, then you’ve already taken the biggest step to creating great emails.
Conversely, if your content is unorganized, featuring only an irregular blog post here or a podcast there, your email marketing will likely be just as unorganized.
Starting that regimen is easy. As an example, let’s say we’re running a CPA firm focusing on small businesses. For our purposes, our content creation regimen might start with a video once a week that lays out tips on how to save on taxes or a weekly blog detailing changes in the tax code.
The frequency doesn’t matter, but the point is to find a content creation cadence that’s right for your business and then stick with it, as doing so is the first step to creating great emails.
So, with a content creation regimen in place for our accounting firm, we can now move forward to the next step and start repurposing that content.
Repurpose
With a weekly supply of blog posts, videos or webinars at the ready, it’s easy to take that material and repurpose it into more content for your emails. As an example, let’s go back to our tax firm that’s been pumping out videos or webinars on a weekly basis.
Once we’ve got a video up, it’s easy to repurpose it as a blog article. In fact, we can literally take the transcript of the video, focus on the highlights and easily spin it into a blog or guest post article.
If time to write it up or throw it together is an issue, we can even pay someone a modest sum to take the video or webinar content and “translate” it into a blog article.
Now that we’ve repurposed our initial content into other types of content, we can keep on repurposing. The goal here is to take solid educational content and drive it across multiple channels.
To do that, we can take different sections from a blog post and create a newsletter article. (Content Marketing also offers tips on turning a blog into an email.)
Or we can collect a selection of blog articles and repurpose them into a larger newsletter. Furthermore, we can take the high points of a podcast and truncate that into a newsletter article or email feature.
The key to all this repurposing is to ensure that the cadence for our rich content correlates with our written content. And when we do this a few times, we’ll have plenty of content to repurpose into email content, while we simultaneously double the benefit of both.
Then we can move onto the next step: recycling all this content into an email.
Recycle
Now that our tax advisory business has a stockpile of content available, creating emails without the need to think up new content is a snap. In fact, we could even delegate someone to put together the emails from our content without the need to train them or have that person be a content expert.
At this point, creating an email for our theoretical accounting company is just a matter of picking and choosing from our existing content base.
One email could feature an existing blog post. Another email could offer a newsletter comprising summaries of, and links to, existing blog posts. Turn the highlight of an instructional video or podcast into another email.
On top of all that, we can also recycle the images we use in our content for use in emails. The jpeg that accompanied a blog post can just as easily go into an email featuring that blog post.
If we’re sending out an email with a newsletter, the photos used with each post that comprise that newsletter can be included as part of the synopsis of each article. A screenshot from a video or webinar is another easy way to recycle existing content into email content.
Now that we’re easily generating regular emails without the hassle of creating new content for each one, assess your own email marketing: Are you following a regular rich and written content creation regimen?
If so, is it being repurposed into even more content? Finally, are you recycling all that content into emails that will inform your customers while driving more traffic to your website?
As we’ve shown, if you need to create compelling email content for your business, it doesn’t require excessive rethinking on your part. Instead, just remember the three R’s: Establish a regular rich and written content creation regimen, repurpose that content to create even more content, then recycle that content into engaging, and easy, emails.
Now, sit back and watch those emails create another “R”… results!
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