Content is the fuel of email marketing: here’s how to ignite it

This post contains excerpts of our recently published ebook: “ROI or RIP: the lean content marketing handbook for SMBs” that you can download for free here.

According to research performed earlier in 2014 by Gigaom and reported by eMarketer, email marketing is still the most commonly used method of digital marketing, with a whopping 86% of respondents claiming to use it. If that’s not enough, though, over half (59%) of B2B marketers surveyed by HubSpot say that email marketing is the most effective channel for generating revenue.

Email marketing needs content and content marketing needs email

Why are email marketing and content marketing such a great match?

1. Because email marketing ends up being spammy if it’s entirely self-promotional. Nobody likes to read about your 15% end-of-month discount endlessly. Content that answers your audience’s question – aka content marketing – is not spam nor advertising: it becomes something your audience will be eager to find in their inbox. How does content perform vs promotion in email marketing? Here’s the data from 2 years of experimentations that we published the results of last year on our blog:

2. Because content requires distribution before it can generate some. “Write it and they will come” doesn’t work: you need some initial spark to ignite your content marketing – as Mark Schaefer puts it – and email is perfect for that as your email subscribers are your most loyal readers and the more likely to share your content to their own social networks. Sending them your content will amplify your own distribution through social networks.

In short, email needs content and content needs email.

The 3 minimum things you should put in place to combine email and content marketing?

How to optimize your content email newsletters?

There are many ways to experiment with email newsletters (MailChimp even includes A/B testing features) and we ran a lot of experiments ourselves (again, see that post for complete results).

But a key takeaway from our experiments and from discussing with hundreds of our clients about this is that

• the more you can send newsletters the higher the engagement…

• … up to the point where you degrade your content quality and become spammy.

For instance in our own case, we moved from 2 newsletters per month to 4 newsletters per month while maintaining strict quality criteria on our content and this is what happened:

We reached 2.5x more people while maintaining our open rate (which means our quality didn’t lower).

This means you should find the sweet spot in the following diagram:

How do you do that?

Find out how in this eBook packed with 30 effective techniques to master content marketing along with valuable insights from 10+ influencers like Mark Schaefer, Rebecca Lieb, Lee Odden, Jason Miller or Ian Cleary, download our free eBook now!

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