Content marketing is a marketing method that primarily focuses on producing and delivering meaningful and valuable content to defined audience segments.

Content Marketing would be critical to maintaining your authority as it raises brand awareness, attracts prospects, and turns them into paying customers. Both content marketing and email marketing is a worthwhile investment for businesses.

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1 . Why email marketing matters to content marketing

2. How to use email marketing to improve your content marketing strategy

When email marketing is employed in perfect harmony with content marketing, it becomes an indispensable communication medium.

Email is an incredible and effective way to stay in touch with your audience, but it is often used solely for sales purposes rather than sharing a brand’s content to educate and delight the audience. 

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Why Email Marketing matters to Content Marketing?

Email marketing lets you build relationships with your audience that content marketing efforts set out to create. Indeed, producing high-quality content marketing takes time — so, what doesn’t?

It is a significant investment for the benefit of your brand or business that will pay off in the future.

Email is alive and kicking, but there is a world of difference between good content marketing strategies for emails and the email that ends up in the trash.

Interesting Read : Integrating Your Content Plan With Email Marketing

According to Salesforce’s annual report, email has a tremendous potential to significantly affect, particularly when paired with other content marketing mediums.

One way to get the most out of content marketing emails is to personalize them for each prospect significantly. Email marketing is commonly regarded as one of the most popular methods of digital marketing.

When combined with your content marketing approach, you will be much more effective in conveying your potential customers what differentiates your business and why they should prefer you over your competitors.

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How to use Email Marketing to improve your Content Marketing Strategy?

1 . Determine which content you want to promote

First and foremost: You should create personalized and high-quality pillar content relevant to your target audience and add value to them.

67 % of marketers leverage data to plan personalized email content that helps them boost engagement, conversions, and customer retention. 

The content you choose should pique your audience’s attention and, at the same time, should be relevant to their interests or challenges. Nobody would bother reading the content if it doesn’t add value to them or isn’t interesting.

For example, the majority of my subscribers are looking for content related to marketing tips, company news, and tutorials or demo videos.

2. Include links in email newsletters

A whopping 83 percent of marketers employ email newsletters for their content marketing strategy.

Thus, indicating that email newsletters transcend in bright light as a tool to drive engagement.

Once you’ve decided to create content catering to your audience’s expectations through your emails, you should link to resources or pages on your site in a way that’s identifiable and spot-on for your subscribers.

Interesting Read : Best Practices to Generate Leads from Email Marketing

You can link to your additional content, offers, or freebies using calls to action. Your calls to action should be relative, appealing, and unambiguous. Your audience should be able to easily interpret the connection between the content in your email and the resources or pages your links will redirect.

Your goal is to develop a perfect content marketing and email marketing engine.

3. Use behavioral data

Create a personalization strategy and employ your audience’s activity and behavioral data to tailor email campaigns that perfectly align their interests and likes. 

Now, what behavioral data would you collect to start with precisely?

You collect this data based on their interactions with your website, with your social media content, and with previous email campaigns and beyond.

Don’t you think that every interaction your audience has with your company should be considered an opportunity for you to serve an expected and suitable reaction?

4. Use compelling images

The goal is for the reader to scan your email to see if it’s worth diving deeper. It is even more important when they are reading it on mobile devices where the text gets compressed.

Use images as your content marketing booster. Images help you not only break up the text but also make the communication more appealing and powerful. Moreover, it enhances readers’ interests and captures their attention. Often, you can use GIFs to make your email more dynamic.

5. Make your links visually interesting

When designing your emails, concentrate on a few main sections of content that you want to push traffic to, and make your links identifiable and unambiguous, outlining those sections. An effective content marketing and email marketing enjoys a good conversion when these points are kept in mind.

Here is what you should keep in mind for including links to make them visually interesting:

• Use actionable and unambiguous language 

When writing content that leads to a call-to-action hyperlink, use clear language and action verbs as they are helpful in clearly stating to your subscribers what you want them to do.

Swiggy used clear language here and utilized action verbs that certainly draw attention.

• Consider background colors or images

It is not a good practice to include links in a way that blends into the background/images of your email. Instead, it would be best to draw attention by using contrasting colors for your descriptive links or using a CTA button with a contrasting color.

Accenture, in the below example, has used good color combinations in their descriptive links.

6. Tailor your emails to your subscribers

When people opt-in to receive your emails, it’s natural that they expect you to provide helpful and valuable content. They won’t read your emails if it isn’t helpful or suits their interests.

Your content can only be effective if it is helpful to your prospects, so beyond a shadow of a doubt, ensure that the content you cater to them is genuinely beneficial and worthwhile. So, customize your emails, try to align them with your audience’s interests and likes. 

7. Take conversion seriously

You can do everything as perfectly as possible, but if your emails do not translate in terms of intended conversion, it will have no impact on your bottom line. As a marketer, the ultimate target is to generate conversions through your email campaigns. So, you need to take it seriously!

For ensuring high conversion rates, you must monitor email campaigns and must be monitored on a near-constant basis. There could be minor improvements to make along the way to ensure you’re elevating in terms of impact and efficacy.

Interesting Read : Email Marketing vs Social media – Which is More Effective for your business?

Understand what KPIs are crucial to your company and email campaigns, and employ a strategy of regular reporting on the progress of these initiatives. The majority of marketers tracks the following metrics:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate

Remember to track your KPIs based on email list segments, as it will assist you in determining when and how to target your promotions to achieve the highest conversion rate for every customer.

8. Be consistent 

It is the most challenging thing to do for many brands. However, being consistent is crucial when it comes down to email marketing. So, it would be best if you make efforts to ensure that your messages are consistent.

To do so, follow a clear tone in your messaging and specifically build a distinctive brand voice to accomplish that easily.

Moreover, you should send your emails in a consistent manner and post new content to your blog regularly.

9. Use A/B testing

Email marketing offers you the rare opportunity to determine what does and what does not work to your advantage.

Among other parameters, you can calculate open rates, click rates, and conversion rates. On top of that, you can assess what your subscribers react to positively, thus enabling you to determine which strategies worth emulating in the future.

One way to implement A/B testing is to send your subscribers two distinct combinations of email subject lines with different or fresh wordings. It would help if you then analyzed which one of those email versions garners more clicks.

Then, utilize that version for sending it to the remaining subscribers.

10. Consider setting up an RSS email feed

Allowing blog followers to subscribe to your posts instantly is another way to push traffic to your new content.

When you enable RSS, you can automatically send alerts and updates to your subscribers whenever you publish a new blog post. This way, they will conveniently be up to date with your new content – with no additional work on your side.

By providing this option to your readers, you are also providing convenience and incentive. They can simply search their inboxes to make sure they don’t miss anything instead of regularly checking the website to see if there is anything new.

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Parting Thoughts

When you focus on improving your methods and practices towards a near perfect content marketing and email marketing strategy, it automatically involves improving its core– Content!