Promote Your Content via Email: Here are the Best Ways to Get into Your Registered Users’ Inboxes and Hearts!

Promote Your Content via Email: Here are the Best Ways to Get into Your Registered Users’ Inboxes and Hearts!

A lot of marketers focus on producing excellent content that brings users to their website and helps them create and maintain brand awareness. However, no matter how good the content is, if there are not enough views, ultimately, it becomes useless. While social media is the first and most apparent go-to place to promote content, email is one of the best ways to promote content to registered users. A lot of time, email marketing is used for sales purposes only. Reaching your registered users with the content on topics they care about could help you both promote that content and establish positive relationships with them.

Why Email?

Reaching your audience in different channels is definitely the way to go, but with emails, you’re reaching users that already registered and confirmed that they want to read more from you by doing so. According to Campaign Monitor, there are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined and your message is 5x more likely to be seen through email than Facebook. While these numbers are general, the fact is that you should use every available channel to promote your hard work. Here are the best ways to get your content into users’ inboxes:

Ask for User Preferences

While it’s great to use first-party data you collected about your registered users, asking them to share zero-party data means that there’s no guesswork involved and that you appreciate their input. Users want a personalized experience and are willing to share data to get there. That said, when they register, you can ask them some questions (emphasis on some, because each additional question might mean a higher bounce rate) aimed at improving their experience. Be honest and direct and you’ll get straight answers. One of the obvious examples would be asking about the topics they are generally interested in and then offering choices that represent your content for them to choose from. This doesn’t have to be a one-time thing, however. You can ask your registered users to provide feedback at the end of a content promotional email. For example, you could ask them to rate your newsletters and to let you know if there’s a topic they’d like to hear about more.

Email Content Best Practices

Don’t send everything to everyone: all the information you collected, as mentioned above, should be used to form marketing personas. You should combine demographic data with user interest and behavior info and then diversify the promoted content accordingly. You want to make sure it matches their preferences and provides the kind of value they are looking for. Avoiding clutter will allow the user to focus on the action you want them to perform – getting to your website. If you’re not convinced yet, marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue (Hubspot 2019). Optimize for mobile: 46% of all email opens come from mobile (Hubspot 2019), so make sure you’re emails are device responsive and readable when scaled down. Your call-to-action should be within the first screen on mobile and your main message should be held within the first 35 characters of the subject line, as it will likely get truncated. A/B test different subject lines: the subject line should be connected to the promoted topic, but you can try different formulations and find out what works best. Try using emojis, as 56% of brands says that using an emoji in their email subject line had a higher open rate than those that did not (Hubspot 2019). You could also retarget those that didn’t open your email initially with a different subject line. Evergreen and related content: while you can focus on promoting your new piece of content, you should always include some additional evergreen or relevant content pieces. Again, don’t drown the user in content and in this part use the topics that already proved successful – you want your best successes in front of the users. A great way to introduce these pieces is by including an influencer quote you managed to get or a user comment. Check out this Neil Pattel blog to learn how to get an influencer quote and other innovative content promotion methods. Create and use snippets: you can create different variations of the title, but also make sure you’re using interesting facts and quotes from the content itself. Just like with the subject line, you should A/B test to find out which works best. CTA buttons: don’t be shy with your call-to-actions: they should pop and attract the users as soon as they open the email. Read our blog on CTA best practices and go above and beyond the boring old “read more” call.

Timing

The best way to ensure trust with users is with consistency. Sending monthly newsletters lets you reach the registered users without being too pushy. Let’s say you published four pieces of content during that month; you could create four different newsletters that focus on each of them with different linked articles. To test additionally, you could send out these emails with different subject lines. You should test different days of week and times of day to learn what works best with your audience. You might find out that your different personas are more likely to open the email at different times.

Other Ways to Incorporate Content into Emails

If you don’t feel like creating specific emails just to promote content, you could incorporate some of the pieces into your sales-focused emails. Let’s say you’re promoting your healthy eating app and asking the users to download it and get percentages off the premium version. If someone opens your email and is not too keen on doing so, at the end of the email you could link a piece of content that’s tied to the importance of healthy eating or top 10 easy and healthy recipes. That way you’re offering an alternative conversion that will get them to your website and that closer to actually downloading the app. Another good idea is to link your content in the signature of the email. Sure, a lot of people will focus on your message instead of the link, but there’s no reason not to use this free space to advertise your great content. Finally, your onboarding and automated emails should contain the links to your most popular articles. These emails go out after the user makes a particular action to engage with you, so they could prove to be a great source of traffic.

Conclusion

Email is one of the best channels to get your content in front of users. They registered because they want to see more and by creating personas and asking for zero-party data, you’ll be able to reach them with content they value. Grab your seed list and start sharing your great content right away!