Two main goals of content marketing are increasing web traffic and nurturing the leads you have. Email newsletter marketing helps you do both.
Today we’ll look beyond your basic newsletter campaign and examine how email newsletter marketing can help you increase web traffic.
Email newsletter marketing is a versatile, and sometimes overlooked, method of increasing visits to your website – and more qualified traffic means more leads for your business.
Newsletter Basics
Before I get into new ways to use your email newsletters, let’s first discuss the basics of newsletter marketing:
1. Adapt Your Message to Your Reader’s Needs
It should be easy to adapt your newsletters to your readership. If the majority of your audiences are males in their mid-30s, you probably don’t want to talk about weddings or fashion.
Do your research and poll your readers, and write what they want to know and learn more about. Your marketing personas will come in handy here as you develop topics for your newsletter editorial calendar.
2. Spend Time and Money on Content
Providing great content is a must, that is a given. Write quality, compelling content that people wouldn’t want to put down and you should be fine.
3. Set Expectations and Keep Them
Whether you are writing a newsletter or a blog, your readers start to become dependent on you and your content. If you are supposed to have a new blog post or newsletter out every Wednesday, then you better deliver or your readers will fade off.
In addition to timing, you will want to make sure you are writing about the topics your readers are asking for, or that you are promising them.
4. Add Design
All newsletters should have some element of design to them.
It may seem like a silly thing, but readers will take your content more seriously if what they are reading also looks pretty and put together well.
Design can also change the whole dynamic of your piece as well, by helping it flow better and making it easier to read.
5. Keep It Simple
Keeping email marketing newsletter concise is critical.
Newsletters are great pieces for your readers to be able to scan and search for what they need and then move on to your website for more detailed information.
Keep the information in your newsletters on topic and to key information only.
If you have more detailed content to share (and you certainly should) add a link to additional content and topics on one of your websites or landing pages.
5 Ways to Increase Traffic with Newsletters
In the past, I have talked about using newsletters for lead nurturing (get our new eBook guide to lead nurturing here today!) and basic content marketing needs. However, I haven’t talked about additional ways you can utilize them that will boost traffic and readership. Here are 5 tips to increase web traffic with email marketing newsletters:
1. Create a Newsletter Sign-Up Series
A newsletter series can be a goldmine for lead generation and increasing your subscriber base. Give them a place to sign up and verify their email address then decide on the length of your series.
A common series is 7-14 days of content each day or every other day. On the final day, include a link to a free trial, demo or subscription. This will turn your readers into buyers.
2. Offer Free Subscription(s)
Offering a free subscription to your newsletter, product, demo or blog can be a great way to increase traffic to your website as well as readership.
People love anything that is free or discounted!
If you, as a practice, don’t charge for your newsletter you should still remind the user that it is free before they sign up.
Free triggers pleasure. Despite being overused in marketing and advertising over the years, free is still a power word. People can be skeptical of “free” though. You don’t want to diminish the importance of your content and newsletter. Make your potential subscribers feel special with a free offer – perhaps give them a free eBook download or graphic when they sign up to the newsletter.
3. Add Video and Use Social Share Networks
Insert or imbed a video into your newsletter and then share the video on all your social networks such as; Facebook, YouTube and SlideShare.
Video is one of the most effective forms of marketing around, and another great way to increase traffic to your website. We offer multiple tips on video marketing here on our blog.
4. Add a Sign-Up App
If you don’t have the skills to build your own app or you simply don’t want to build your own, then turn to Facebook. The new Facebook Timeline offers many options now for building apps, such as an email sign-up box and page. It is also very easy to incorporate your brand and overall look and feel with some of the customization options. Adding a sign-up app will increase traffic and readership to your website and for your newsletter.
5. Build a Home for Your Newsletter
Lastly, make sure you build an actual home for your newsletter . This simply means that you want your e-newsletter to live on one of your hosted sites as well as the archived pieces.
This gives you both the opportunity to extend the life of your content and also a URL to share socially.
Build the framework supporting this and you will see the increase in traffic and readership. Including your back-issues on your website also adds valuable unique content to your site, helping increase your search relevance and rankings.
Adding your quality newsletters to your site as permanent content can increase your web traffic in a few different ways. First, you’re providing more content – which is a huge step towards better search results. The addition of your newsletters will help you capture more long-tail search traffic on the topics that you cover. Second, you’ll be creating another way to interlink and push your web properties. Make sure to setup a nice archive, and make sure to link your newsletters to where you want people to go.
Promote Your Newsletter
There are many ways to market and promote your newsletter, no matter which ways you choose it needs to be done. You can’t count on people just finding it. Here are three effective ways to market your email marketing newsletter:
- 1. Include your newsletter in directories of other web sites or newsletters related to the topics of your newsletter. Make sure the sites you advertise on are reputable and ones you want to be associated with.
- 2. Advertise with a contest or prize drawing , linking back to your newsletter subscription form to be entered to win. Readers who enter the contest will then get your newsletter automatically and will be more apt to visit your website to see the results.
- 3. Promote your newsletter with an email blast and on all your social networks. These to tactics are the easiest and even though done often by other companies can have a big impact.
Final Thoughts
Newsletters can and should be a fun way to interact with your prospects and clients. Newsletters are also a great way to show credibility, a high level of expertise and authority for your particular market.
Take the time to develop your newsletter, its surrounding framework and content. Once you have a product that is ready to market, do so. You will be amazed at how much newsletters can do for your business, website traffic and readership.
By regularly sending new and compelling content to readers, you will encourage them to visit your site. By adding the past issues to your site, you will benefit from new content on the site. Overall, email marketing newsletters are a great way to get more traffic to your website .
“If you build it, they will come. If you build it and lead people to it, more will come.” – Author Unknown