Email and Blogging Belong Together
Peanut butter is delicious if you are a fan. But it just doesn’t go down quite as good without your favorite jelly. Peanut butter and jelly. The most common sandwich known to a kid. The day I grew up I had invented a healthier combination and called it the A-Jam. Organic chunky almond butter and chunky strawberry jam. You can definitely improve on an old favorite.
That is how I feel about the combination of email and blogging. Email isn’t going away and corporate blogging is just starting to become a corporate mainstay.
HubSpot, an inbound marketing systems company interviewed business professionals about how they would be allocating their lead generation budgets.
15% Pay per click (paid search/AdWords)
12% Search engine optimization
11% Telemarketing
11% Tradeshows
10% Blogs and social media
10% E-mail marketing
8% Direct mail
23% Other
Source: eMarketer, citing HubSpot, “The State of Inbound Marketing,” 2009
We are now seeing budget allocations for blogs and social media that equal email. Consider how you might integrate blogs and blog posts into your emarketing campaigns and how you could integrated emarketing into your blogging activities.
Blogs Should Include Email Subscribe Forms
Every blog should have an email subscribe. The best email subscribes should have an attractive incentive to motivate an opt-in. If you haven’t added incentives and subscribe links from your blog pages, you should put that on our priority list.
Developing an offer for premium content is the next step. The most popular premium offer continues to be the white paper. Your company may already have one or more papers that would be good incentives for convincing someone to provide their contact information.
Email Campaigns Can Include Blog Posts as Content
When emailing your prospect database or customers consider coordinating your email and blog posts.
Use email to promote a topic with an incentive for a white paper. The respondent then links to a landing page that provides a web form. Once the form is complete and submitted, they should get an email that provides the double opt-in confirmation and a link to download the content. Once the content downloads, forward them to the blog that contains more content based on the topic of the offer.
Develop techniques to combine email offers and blog content in your campaigns. Lead your prospects to relevant and useful content as an incentive for joining your social community.
Cynthia Nowicki helps technology thought leaders, startups and B2B enterprises by implementing social media programs that expand the web footprint to attract, capture, convert and retain IT customers. Email me at cynthia@rithims.com or call me at 408-323-8148 for a no obligation assessment of your social media lead generation potential. Subscribe and you’ll receive blog posts by email.