It’s funny. It seems like for every hot new topic that hits the marketing world, there’s a crucial place for email, most recently with social media and content marketing.
You can be talking about blogging and I can be telling you how email integrates with and supports it. You can be talking Facebook and I’ll tell you the same thing. Content marketing? That too.
What makes email a critical part of all these new marketing methods? The content. Email has always been about content. OK, except for the emails set up as all images that render as simply a little red X on a big white space. Let’s disregard those for now.
No, I’m talking about real content, content of value, useful content. This is the stuff of email newsletters in particular.
If you aren’t yet integrating your blogging, social media, content marketing and email programs, you’re possibly not making the most of what you are doing. Post your emails to blogs. Make your emails share-worthy. Use email to feed your content marketing and then use email to promote it.
Here’s an example of how all of these pieces can play nice. The commonality that ties it all together? Email.
Let’s say you sell building kits for various things like sheds and corrals. Write a guide on building a round pen for horse training. You sell such a kit, of course, but your guide won’t promote the kit. It will give the instructions and the factors to consider like choosing a site, and only towards the end promote your kit. You post this guide on your website and push out an email to your list telling them about the guide and encouraging them to click through and check it out. Subscribers click through, like what they see, and share it with their social networking sites because they find it useful. Even those on mobile devices! Others see the guide shared and go check it out at your website. If they like it and you, they might “like” you on Facebook. Now you’ve extended your reach to a new audience, people who are already warm to you because they were in effect referred to you by their social network. At the same time, you’ve blogged on the guide and linked to it. People using search engines for tips on building a round pen find either the guide or the blog or both. Now you’re extending your reach even farther to people who haven’t heard of you at all. Those people like the guide and decide to sign up for your emails…so the next time you publish a guide, they receive an email from you telling about them about the guide…and the cycle starts all over, every time extending your reach a bit more each time.
Then it gets even better: You email your list asking them for stories about building round pens and you publish those stories in your blog. Subscribers share the blog posts…and again, your reach is extended.
I just made this example up, but these kinds of streamlined marketing efforts go on every day when savvy companies tie it all together and use email as the common thread that makes it all work.
Yes, we’re caught up in the newness of social media and content marketing right now, but there’s one thing that won’t change: We have always and will always need email.
