Creating compelling and effective content is one of the greatest challenges email marketers must overcome. Most people receive so many emails each day that they simply cannot give their attention to every message. For an email advertising campaign to be effective, it must be relevant and valuable to recipients.
One of the most effective ways for achieving this outcome is by utilizing other marketing channels. Too often, organizations develop a mutli-pronged approach to marketing, which is good, but then fail to use them in conjunction. Yet these other channels can provide a great deal of useful material.
Leveraging blogs
As Business 2 Community’s John Hayes recently highlighted, a business’ blog is excellent example of one such channel resource. Many firms now actively maintain blogs, and for good reason. A regularly updated blog can significantly improve an organization’s SEO rankings, as Google and other engines put a heavy emphasis on websites that create new content. Blogs also allow a company to detail new events, products and services while utilizing a casual, easy-to-approach style.
Hayes suggested that email marketers should include blog content as part of their email campaigns. This will allow the material developed for the blog to perform double duty, making marketing efforts more efficient without wasting resources.
Getting social
Social media is another channel that can and should be utilized for email marketing campaigns. As with blogging, many businesses now regularly utilize social media platforms as a means of reaching out and interacting with customers and informing the general public of new products, services and sales.
Social media can factor into email advertising efforts in two ways. First, like blogs, social media content can be repurposed and included in emails to subscribers. Say, for example, that the company posts a Facebook message that receives many comments from users. As the conversation develops, the organization itself jumps in now and again to address customer issues and answer questions.
If this occurs, then the company should consider utilizing these exchanges in their email marketing efforts. Client communication is a powerful way of demonstrating customer care, which can improve customer loyalty and brand recognition.
The second way that an organization can utilize social media for email marketing is through cross promotion. As numerous industry experts have noted, emails should include links to social media pages and vice-versa, thereby improving traffic to both.