In the world of blogging and internet marketing, there are a ton of different ways to connect with your readers.
Video
Content
Social
Email
One of my personal favorites is the last one on that list.
In a world of content based marketing, email remains as one of the key ways to push your connection with your readers to the next level.
Why is that?
If used correctly, you can actually build connections with your readers by providing them with the content they need at exactly the moment they need it.
It’s like you can read their mind.
A perfectly designed autoresponder series can take a new reader and show them the content they need (and deliver it straight to your inbox).
Think something like this:
On our blog, we offer 3 different autoresponders throughout the site. The one that is the hands down the most engaging is our Newcomer series.
We quickly realized (based upon site analytics) that we have a large number of people who are visiting our site to find answers to specific questions. These questions could all be grouped into 6 different categories.
Knowing that these were the “common” questions that most readers would have, wouldn’t it be awesome to provide them the answers before they even knew that they had a question?
That’s exactly what we decided to do.
We took those 6 main questions and wrote 6 emails that were tailored for someone that who never had sold on Amazon before. In each email, we wrote about what they were thinking, what questions they had, and the resources we provided on our blog to help them get started. We also sprinkled in affiliate links (when appropriate) to help us drive some additional traffic to the products we promote.
All of a sudden, we created a powerful way to connect with our readers through email.
It was essentially the same content that we already had on our blog, but organized in a way that was consumable through email.
The amount of work might have been minimal, but the impact on the growth of our list and readership was incredible.
This one autoresponder series has accounted for over 10% of our total email subscribers and the readers of this series are some of the most active in our community.
Now autoresponders are great, but that is only one way to use email as method of connecting with your readers.
Other ways to connect with your readers include:
1 – Weekly newsletters that showcase your new content, relevant old content, and upcoming events/promotions.
2 – Email blasts that include links to your social media platforms (make sure to include relevant content in the email and you will get more bang for your buck).
3 – Send your new subscriber a welcome gift for signing up for your email list. This is an excellent way to build some trust and provide value right out of the gate.
4 – Send out emails featuring any video content you have created and posted to Facebook or YouTube. Just because it is located on one platform, doesn’t mean that all of your readers check everywhere for your content. Send it to them where you know they’ll receive it.
The possibilities are endless.
Use your imagination and find new and exciting ways to engage with your audience using email and your rewards will be incredible.
Cheers,
CW