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Email marketing for bloggers is one of the best ways to drive continuous traffic to your articles, build trust amongst your readers, and increase your income.
Although often swept aside as an afterthought, my goal here is to show you that any blog can benefit from an email marketing strategy, as I truly believe that it can have an immense impact on your blogging income.
In the most simple terms, email marketing is powerful.
Today, our email list is 100,000+ subscribers strong and is the direct lifeline to our audience. We use email marketing for everything, from connecting with our readers to promoting digital products to driving readers back to relevant articles on our blog.
From my own personal experience, I can attest to the fact that email marketing is an invaluable tool for building relationships with readers and creating a steady income at the same time.
But don’t just take it from me!
In most of the world, email marketing is actually the go-to platform when it comes to customer engagement. Email is 40% more likely to convert than Facebook or Twitter, and is used enthusiastically by businesses (and individuals) all over the world to generate leads and drive sales.
So if you’re a blogger hoping to make money with your website, don’t overlook email marketing! It’s a key component in turning a blog into a business and can be done by anyone (yes, anyone).
In this article, I walk you through everything you need to know about email marketing for bloggers (plus the real strategies we use on our own blog), how you can use it to your ultimate advantage, and steps to take to get started with email marketing TODAY.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Bloggers
You may think that social media has taken the crown as the best way to connect with your readers, but for bloggers, email marketing reigns king. Nearly half of the world’s population has an email address (we’re talking 3.9 billion people here), and this number is expected to grow to 4.3 billion by 2023.
Beyond just the sheer number of people using email, the return on investment is huge. For every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an ROI of $42.
But these are just some of the numbers associated with email marketing.
The real benefits of email marketing for bloggers lie in the fact that it’s a way to connect with readers outside of your website and make a meaningful impact on them.
It’s the intangible benefits that make email marketing so important for bloggers… and these lead to real perks like increased income and traffic for your blog.
Let’s look at why email marketing is so important for bloggers.
Grow Your Income
First and foremost, email marketing can grow your income as a blogger. As I mentioned just above, the return on investment for email marketing is enormous, and the earning potential is unlimited!
Email marketing is a great way to send your recommendations right to the inboxes of your readers and drive them back to your affiliate articles over and over again. It’s also an awesome way to promote your own digital products or services in a way that’s more personal than on your blog.
In fact, we actually use email marketing as the primary driver for selling our own digital products, a collection of travel ebooks. While they make up a small portion of our income (just 12%), using email marketing, we were able to earn more than $14,000 from our ebooks in a single year.
Overall, email marketing has the potential to skyrocket your income and direct readers to your money-making articles so that they can make an informed purchase.
Increase Blog Traffic
Besides income, email marketing can also increase your blog’s traffic.
Think about all those one-time visitors who land on your blog but never come back.
What if, on that single visit, they signed up for your email list? You can then use email marketing to convert one-time readers into loyal fans by following up right to their inbox. Using personalized recommendations, you can drive these readers back to your blog consistently, increasing your website’s traffic, and building your blogging tribe.
Beyond just the one-time readers, email marketing works well for the loyal fans, the occasional visitors, and everyone in between! With email marketing, you can stay at the forefront of people’s minds by sending them relevant and engaging information, rather than a one-time newsletter or promotion.
Besides just bringing people back to your blog, using email marketing, you can also direct readers towards high-value articles, which directly correlates with your blog’s income.
Build Trust With Your Audience
Email marketing is, without a doubt, the top way to build trust with your audience… so much so that we’ve actually dubbed our email marketing strategy “trust marketing” as trust is a central component of it.
Through email marketing, you can build trust with your readers by showing that you understand them and can help with their unique problems.
Much of this comes from sending relevant content to their inboxes filled with products, services, or general information that appeals to them beyond just surface level. Through email marketing, you can really target people’s individual interests and desires in a way that you can’t do through a blog.
Building trust with your readers through email marketing is invaluable as more trust ultimately leads to more traffic to your blog and an increase in your income. When readers trust what you have to say and feel like you’re looking out for them, you’ve built a successful email marketing plan.
The bottom line is that the benefits of email marketing are wide and far-reaching for bloggers. Email marketing can really turn your blog into a business by building trust with your readers and having a strong funnel to drive them back to your website.
No matter what kind of blogger you are, you don’t want to miss out on email marketing.
Email Marketing for Your Blog: 6 Things You Should Be Doing Right Now
If you want to get started with email marketing for your blog, there are a few key things that you should start doing right now!
Build Your Email List
Before you can actually get started with email marketing, you’ll need an email list to send messages to. You should start growing your email list from day one so that you can call on it when you’re ready to start with email marketing.
On a personal note, we really neglected our email list on Adventure in You for the first 2 years of our blogging journey. We’d collect the occasional email address with our generic opt-in form, but never really went beyond the “sign up for our email list for updates” approach.
However, once we realized the immense value of email marketing, we pivoted our efforts to growing our email list into what it is today.
With so many people on our email list, we have an incredible reach which we use to drive traffic to our blog articles over and over again.
My only regret when it comes to email marketing is not growing our list SOONER! If we had started growing our list right from the get-go, we would have set ourselves up for success beforehand, rather than when we wanted to start sending emails.
I recommend that all bloggers devote time and energy into growing their email lists, even if you’re a complete beginner. Remember, your email list is the lifeline to your audience so the sooner you can tap into it, the better.
Action Item: To collect emails for your blog, you’ll need an email marketing service. I’d recommend investing in one as soon as you start thinking about email marketing so that you can get the process rolling. We discuss our recommendations for an email provider below but our top choice is ActiveCampaign.
Create Segmented Lists
If you have an email list already (or one that’s in the works), one of the best ways to set yourself up for success with email marketing is by segmenting your list.
When you create segmented lists in email marketing, you’re able to send people only the information that they care about. Rather than spamming a bunch of people’s inboxes with content that’s going to thousands of people, with segmented lists, you can get personal with your readers and tailor your emails to what they really care about.
Within our jumbo list of email subscribers, we have loads of segmented lists.
Depending on where people hand over their emails on our blog, we’re able to determine the kind of content that an individual is interested in and may want to see more of. From there, we can hone in on this through follow-up emails to show that we know what they care about and have relevant content to provide.
For example, when someone signs up for our email list on an article about Thailand, they’re automatically added to our Thailand segment.
What this does is make sure that they only receive content about Thailand; they don’t get any emails about Europe or America or Australia. The only emails they receive are directly related to their interest in Thailand.
This is an incredibly meaningful way to show your email list that you value their interests and can cater to them.
Segmented lists make individuals feel understood and even special, in some cases. Use them to your advantage to build even more trust with your audience, keep them from unsubscribing, and drive them to articles on your blog that they’re guaranteed to love.
Action Item: Take some time to assess the content on your blog to see where you can create solid segments based on reader’s interests. The more specific the segment, the better, but you can also keep it pretty general at the beginning and then break the larger segments into smaller categories down the road.
What categories do you have the most content around? What articles get the most traffic? These are good starting places to work from.
Offer a Value Gift
Let me let you in on a little secret. People will be much more inclined to hand over their emails if they receive something in return. That’s where value gifts come in!
Value gifts are our version of lead magnets, which are downloads that offer value to your audience in exchange for their contact information (an email address, in our case) to feed into your funnel.
You can find value gifts on all kinds of websites, with the main goal of growing the number of subscribers.
These downloads can take on many different shapes and forms, allowing bloggers to get creative with them. They can be mini-ebooks, printables, downloads, and more, so long as they’re designed to captivate a reader’s attention and entice them to leave their email address.
When it comes to creating a value gift for your blog, consider what your readers are most interested in on your blog.
For example, on Adventure in You, we knew that tons of people were there for our diving content, so we created a mini-ebook on the best diving destinations in the world as a downloadable value gift.
Adding this to our blog not only increased the number of readers on our list, but also helped to segment our list too.
We actually have lots of different value gifts on Adventure in You, and each of them feeds into a different segment. So whenever someone downloads a value gift, they’re automatically placed in the relevant category for future emails.
Pro Tip: We make all of our value gifts using Canva Pro which is a total lifesaver, if you’re not a design wiz. Canva makes it super simple to get your design on a professional level and has an infinite number of templates to help get you started.
Action Item: Start to brainstorm different value gifts you can create for your blog. If you need some inspiration, check out our complete guide to creating lead magnets!
Use Email Automations to Build an Affiliate Machine
Email automations are a total godsend. Set ‘em, forget ‘em, and reap the benefits over and over… what could be better?!
Email automations have changed the game for bloggers as they allow an email marketing system to work around the clock.
Automations make it so that you don’t have to manually send emails each time someone subscribes to your list. Instead, you can set up different triggers so that whenever someone activates one, an email (or series of emails) is fired off.
The best part is that once you set up these automations, they continuously run on their own.
Automations are a key component of an Affiliate Machine, as well.
In short, an Affiliate Machine is affiliate marketing taken to the next level. Rather than just inserting affiliate links into our content, we have these articles working in conjunction with our email marketing plan to deliver fully automated value to our readers 24/7.
Email marketing is essential to any Affiliate Machine as it’s what actually connects readers to products and services they can benefit from. Beyond just directing traffic, with email marketing, this entire process happens on its own by utilizing automations.
We have lots of automations running for Adventure in You, most of which contribute to our Affiliate Machine. Some of them are pretty standard (i.e. if someone signs up for our list, they automatically get a welcome email and a short sequence after) but others are aimed at providing value.
An example of this in action is our Liveaboard automation which is delivered to people who subscribe to our list on any Liveaboard diving articles on our blog.
The automation is a value series that aims to educate and explore the different options Liveaboard offers. While the main goal of this is to provide value to our audience, the automation also drives sales for this high-ticket affiliate.
Rather than waiting for people to go back and visit the Liveaboard section on our blog again, we can give them a gentle (automated) nudge there instead.
On top of that, Liveaboard has a low keyword search volume, so instead of relying on Google to get our articles in front of people’s eyes, we were able to leverage email marketing to do this ourselves.
By targeting people who actually care about Liveaboard diving through our email automations, we went from a Liveaboard income of about $46 per month to nearly $1,000 after just one month.
After 9 months, we saw our Liveaboard affiliate income climb to a steady $1,525, a more than 30x increase from where we started!
This demonstrates the true power of email marketing and why I believe in it so much: using automations enables bloggers to create an Affiliate Machine that works around the clock to earn you an income.
Action Items: Do you have any money-making articles on your blog or any high-ticket affiliates you’d like to promote? If so, think about how you can build a short value series around one of these topics and set up an automation for it.
Send Engaging Emails
The final piece that ties all of these components together is engaging email copy.
Always keep in mind that the main purpose of email marketing is to build a relationship with your readers. It’s nearly impossible to do this with drab and dry emails. Instead, your emails need to be catchy and engaging enough to make people want to open them and read until the end.
Getting people to open your emails is half the battle. As such, every single email that you send needs to have a subject line that will pique people’s curiosity and incentivize them to hit “open” instead of “delete”.
Besides the subject line, the actual body of the email needs to capture your reader’s attention and hold it to the end.
To write emails that will keep people enamored from start to finish, we use a structure called: Hook, Story, Offer.
First, you open with an irresistible hook. This is another attention grabber, but one that should open a gap to make the reader want to find out more, or say “wait what?”. Once you have them on the line with your hook, you can start to tell a story.
People naturally relate to stories more than anything else. Take your experience or wisdom and turn it into a tale that will allow your readers to walk a mile in your shoes. I’m not saying to write a book here, but pull on a personal aspect for your emails and remind your subscribers that there’s actually a person behind the screen.
After telling your readers a story and tugging on their emotions a bit, you can make an offer or a call to action. Obviously, this should be tasteful, but also be sure to showcase the value your offer can add to your readers. If your readers can see how the offer can directly benefit them, they’ll be much more inclined to click it and return to your blog.
Action Item: Practice the hook, story, offer structure and give it a try. The best part about this method is it can apply to any kind of writing! Try it out in your blog posts or social media captions… then take it to your email marketing and really see what a difference engaging writing can make.
Track Your Email Marketing Numbers
Once you’ve gotten your email marketing on a roll, you’ll want to keep track of some numbers so that you can see how your strategy is panning out.
When it comes to email marketing analytics, these are the top metrics to take into account.
Opt-in Rate
Your opt-in rate is the percentage of people who have seen the email form on your blog and subsequently subscribed to your list.
This metric is important as it shows you how effective your opt-in form is. If your opt-in rate is rather low, you can tweak its appearance and text to see if you can bump that number up a bit. If you have a high opt-in rate for one of your contact forms, try to emulate these qualities in other pop-ups on your blog.
For example, we run a full-screen pop-up that appears before people leave our website offering a free training. It’s given us one of our best opt-in rates ever, so we’ve used the design and similar wording on other pop-ups to try to duplicate the effect.
Open Rates
An open rate in email marketing is the percentage of people who actually open your email after receiving it. Pay close attention to this because you should be striving for a high open rate.
If you’re struggling to increase your open rate, try tweaking aspects like the subject line, the day the email is sent out, or even the time! A lot of this is trial and error to find out what works best for your audience but remember, a catchy subject line can make all the difference.
Click-Through Rates
Lastly, you should also track your click-through rates, or how many people clicked on a link embedded in your email. This can be any affiliate links you insert, links back to your blog, images, or specific calls-to-action.
Tracking your click-through rate shows you how effective your strategy is with placing links in your text.
A high click-through rate is best, as this means that people are actually reading through your email and following suggestions. If you’re experiencing a low click-through rate, it might pay to increase the font size of your hyperlinks or play around with the colors for your call-to-action buttons.
Our Recommended Email Marketing Tools
To build your blogging empire using email marketing, it’s 100% worth it to invest in the best tools right from the beginning.
Pro Tip: While you’ll find plenty of free email marketing tools out there, these can be so limiting, especially as your email list grows. This is why we suggest that bloggers who are serious about turning their website into a business spend the money on paid tools so that you don’t have to worry about running into roadblocks or migrating from a free plan later.
ActiveCampaign
With email marketing, the most important tool in your arsenal is your email marketing provider. The email marketing provider you select will not only collect emails in one place but allow you to create campaigns, develop automations, segment your lists, and track your results.
We have tried every email marketing tool under the sun, and finally settled on ActiveCampaign. While they’re not the cheapest, ActiveCampaign certainly offers the best value for money and has powerful capabilities, coupled with a user-friendly interface.
What we love most about ActiveCampaign is how easy it is to set up and run automations. This can be pretty tricky with other email providers, but ActiveCampaign has simplified it to a tee, perfect for integrating into a trust marketing system.
If you’re curious about why we swear by ActiveCampaign when it comes to email marketing, you can read our full review here.
OptinMonster
Another email marketing tool that has greatly contributed to our success is OptinMonster.
This is what we use to actually create the contact forms on our blog for people to fill in. While many email marketing providers offer opt-in services, they barely scratch the surface of what OptinMonster provides.
Before I get into why OptinMonster is a must-have for bloggers, you must keep in mind that your contact forms are everything when it comes to getting people to subscribe to your list.
If you stick with something generic and boring, it’s unlikely people will be tempted to leave their emails. But if your opt-ins are engaging and eye-catching, they can be simply irresistible.
This is where having OptinMonster comes in so handy.
OptinMonster allows you to design just about any kind of contact form under the sun. They have several categories for bloggers to choose from, with a huge amount of templates to actually build the opt-in with.
It’s a super easy tool to use and can make all the difference when it comes to growing your email list. Trust me when I say you don’t want to skimp on this tool.
For more information about what OptinMonster is and why it’s essential for bloggers, check out our in-depth review.
While it may seem like there are lots of moving pieces when it comes to email marketing for bloggers, the process is rather simple and straightforward.
The main takeaway is that no matter where you are in your blogging journey, you can get started with email marketing right now for your blog in order to make money with your email list.
Take some time to run through the action items listed throughout this article and you’ll be well on your way to creating an email marketing strategy of your own.
Email marketing has helped us connect with our readers on a deeper level and provide a level of personalized value that’s impossible with a blog. Our email marketing strategy has driven an immense amount of traffic to our website and is widely responsible for a large chunk of our passive income.
If any of this sounds appealing to you, just know that it’s possible to achieve this with your email marketing plan too… So what are you waiting for? It’s time to get started!
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