5 Reasons Why Content Marketers Should Love Email
July 5, 2011
This is a guest post by Chris Baggott, CEO and Co-Founder of Compendium
Email is the most underappreciated tool in the content marketer’s arsenal. The opportunity here is to leverage old social media to supercharge your content marketing strategy.
How can email help? Here are five easy email marketing tactics that almost no one is leveraging:
1. Turning email into content
Every day, in just about every organization on earth, people send one-off emails that explain their business, solve a problem, introduce a new concept, etc. Most of these emails are sent through Microsoft Outlook and have very short shelf-lives with minimum benefits. But with some minor tweaking, many of these “throw-away” emails can be imported directly into your company blogs and become the kind of content that wins search, gets shared and is discoverable forever.
Content, after all, is the foundation of a solid online customer acquisition strategy. By curating your Outlook emails into informative posts, you can generate some solid building blocks.
2. Generating content from email marketing
Most email marketing is never indexed; it sits, gets sent, and dies. It still exists somewhere, but rarely does it see the light of day. But why let this valuable content sit around unused? Instead, try pushing your email marketing and newsletter content into your blogs (this is similar to the tactic described above). It could help you develop a terrific foundation for SEO.
3. Using email to solicit content
A lot of user-generated content (UGC) strategies are based on hope. Email, however, is the tool that makes things happen. Triggered emails sent to your customers that ask specific questions, promote contests, and encourage the right kind of information are outstanding ways to generate a constant flow of relevant content. People will almost always do what you ask them to do, so try using email to ask them to create content.
4. Promote sharing via email
Sharing is one of the most important social signals Google uses to determine page rank in search. People who create content for you will also want to share it with their networks, so why not make it easy on them? Sending triggered emails to notify contributors when their content has been published is a surefire way to encourage sharing.
Making it special (“Dude, we just featured your story on our site!”) and putting big Facebook buttons in the email are other great ways to help drive traffic back to your site.
5. Pulling email content from other sources
This content could come from your own blog or other content marketing resources. Folks have talked about relevance in regards to email marketing for years, and email marketing vendors introduced dynamic content functionality way back in 2001. So why isn’t it used more effectively? It’s not the technology, and it’s certainly not due to a lack of customer data. It simply comes down to a lack of content. Finding terrific places to pull relevant content from is a great way to fill your blogs with more information.
I’m sure there are other great uses for email, but these are five painless, almost-free ways to use email to boost your content marketing efforts in a big way.
Chris Baggott is CEO and Co-Founder of Compendium. Compendium is a business blogging platform designed to enable companies to create, capture, moderate and broadcast their message online. Chris is also a Co-Founder of ExactTarget.