Email marketing offers an amazing potential for businesses to spread brand awareness, extend reach, and generate prospects for their offering. We recently discussed the big positive aspects of great email marketing in my beginner’s guide, as well as included steps to improve your campaigns’ results. But it all comes down to providing your readership with quality content so they’ll see you and your brand as a valuable and trusted source of information in your niche.
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So how do you continuously come up with great ideas for email newsletters?
It actually isn’t as hard as it seems. Sure, if you’ve been pulling links and ideas from the same places for a while, it can be a bit tricky to think of new content sources for your emails, but you just need to “step back from the problem”, change your perspective. Great content is often right under our noses; but we’re not looking.
However, you must keep your email marketing goals in mind when sourcing content.
You know what you want to accomplish, right? Well your content must support this intention. If you’re building brand awareness, the content that you share doesn’t necessarily need to link back to your website, or if you’re trying to generate prospects, nurture leads into customers, you’ll probably need to be on the lookout for a more product-centric kind of content.
Mix it up with different types of content to test what your readers enjoy, and remember that you’re addressing your larger goals.
Here are nine great sources of content ideas for your next email marketing campaign:
#1 Industry News and Events
Regularly monitor everything that’s happening in your industry, and be ready to react when you get breaking news on your hands that your audience would love to know about.
You can touch on the subject, comment on what it means for the industry, and provide your own insights in a blog post, – and then send that out to a targeted list of interested email subscribers.
This is a great way to build brand awareness and establish trust with your readership, positioning your website as the go-to-place for new and exciting information that people in your niche want to know more about as soon as possible.
You can also include popular industry events that would be relevant and useful to your following.
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#2 Your Website’s Top-Performing Content
I’m sure you’re already tracking the success of your web content. If not, read what metrics are must-follows. Identifying what works best with your audience is probably the easiest way to source out content for your email newsletters.
Take a look at the pages that got the most traffic in the past 30 days. This can be your company’s blog content, the help documentation, your landing pages and other resources that keep readers engaged for longer and generate more social shares. Take what already works and transfer it to your email marketing efforts.
Also consider the type of content that performs well on email, based on your past sends. Are your landing pages converting better when promoted by email? Are your subscribers clicking the infographics? Or do they love your blog posts better? See what content you can send next that will replicate or even outshine the previous success.
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#3 Frequently Asked Questions and Concerns on Social Media
Your social profiles are direct channels to your business’s existing and future customers.
Take a look at your Facebook and Twitter page, and listen to what your fans and followers are saying. Is there some issue they’re concerned with, or maybe a specific question they’re repeating multiple times?
Make sure to address these queries on social media, and if you think the answers would interest a larger percent of your target readership, then you can include them in your email newsletters as well.
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#4 Check Out the Comments on Your Company Blog
Your blog’s comment section is another great source of email content suggestions. Check out your readers’ comments under the blog posts to find interesting questions and discussions that you can address in your following emails. Remember, it’s all about being useful and providing value; – so if you got the information people are looking for, be sure to share it with them.
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#5 Most Frequently Asked Questions in Support Forums
Another way your prospects and customers can help you with fresh email content includes the questions they ask on the support forum about your products, services, and company. Identify the common topics and questions that pop-up numerous times and answer them in your next newsletter. You can even send out a separate email if you think lots of people would be interested in this piece of content.
#6 Share the Results of Your Own Research
Of course you can do your own research to help solve a problem or difficulty that your target audience may be facing, and then share the results with your email subscribers linking to the page on your website. If you’re a yoga teacher, you can review different types of yoga mats, for example, and offer the options for your readers to choose based on their individual wants and needs.
#7 Most Popular Content on Industry Blogs
Not all your email marketing content needs to link to your web pages. You can dilute promotional emails with great content pieces from other popular industry and influencer blogs which do not generate leads, but simply provide information that your subscribers would appreciate and enjoy reading.
Regularly check and read the top-performing websites and blogs in your niche, with lots of social media shares, and save the posts that your readers would benefit from on Evernote, or a secret Pinterest board. You can link to these pieces whenever you’re struggling with new content ideas for your emails.
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#8 Success Stories from Satisfied Customers
You can feature satisfied customers on your website and discuss their success stories in case studies, but you can use them as examples in your email newsletters as well.
However, don’t get too long about it; – just a general explanation, some testimonial quotes, and a quick customer tip would be more than enough to help you build trust with your audience, and then you can link back to their full case study.
Be sure the customers’ stories are sincere, and don’t come across as promotional.
#9 Add a Promotional Message Every Once in a While
Once you’ve established solid trusting relationships with your subscribers, which will naturally happen after three or four nurturing emails, you can start including one or two promotional messages with your every newsletter and recommend your products, services, affiliate offers, and so on. Don’t spam your readers! They’ll unsubscribe and leave you forever…
Hope these sources and tips will freshen up your perspective and content ideas for your next email marketing campaigns and boost your subscribers list with new regular visitors and customers. Try them out. And let me know the results you get.
