Email newsletters are a great way to boost traffic to your blog posts and grow a loyal readership. However, you better do email newsletters the right way or you risk having the recipients hit the unsubscribe button without looking back. There is a lot to creating excellent email newsletters and big companies who send them out have teams of writers, designers, marketers and computer programmers collaborating on the newsletter. This can be overwhelming for the one man or one woman blogger, but there are some tried and true methods you can use to quickly create email newsletters that make readers want to return to your blog.
Make It Look Professional By Using a Template
Unless you’re a coding ninja, save your time and sanity by using an email newsletter template. There are several free sources for these templates including MailChimp, CampaignMonitor and PatternHead. There are so many templates with so many different color, layout and theme choices that there is no need to personally customize and design your own newsletter in most cases. Plus, using a template ensures your newsletter will look professional and without misplaced lines of code, which is the most important factor.
Make It Look Not Like Spam
There are a couple key ways to make sure your emails don’t look like spam. First, only send an email newsletter when you really have something important to say. You never want to bombard your readers with meaningless emails and even if you think you have important things to say in daily emails, you still should send emails at most once every few days. Secondly, make it easy for a user to unsubscribe. Spam artists are notorious for not allowing users to unsubscribe or burying that option deep in an email where it’s hard to find. Although, this may sound tempting, mimicking spammers will only serve to decrease your readership.
Email Marketing 101: Getting Readers From Their Inbox To Your Blog
Marketing is a highly refined skill and it’s what will get readers to click on the links in your email newsletter that will take them over to your blog. While you can earn advanced degrees in fields of marketing, here are some of the basics of email marketing to get you started:
- Don’t give out all your information in the newsletter, give snippets: If you send out a nice long email with some great content and helpful information your readers will appreciate it and may thank you, but they have no reason to visit your blog again. Rather, display several information “teasers” that when clicked, takes your reader to the full article on your blog.
- Make your headlines and teasers outrageously interesting: Headlines and teasers are only a few words to a few sentences long at most. You only have a small window to grab a reader’s attention so you must make the most of it. Spend time crafting teasers that your reader’s can’t ignore. Some common teaser formats that work include any numbered lists, “top” or “best rated” lists or negatives, such as “the worst (product names) you should avoid.” These formats tend to spark interest most of the time, but anything that really relates to your readers on a substantial level or anything that’s truly creative will result in clicks to your blog.
- Use awesome clickable images: Pictures really are worth a thousand words sometimes. A great didactic, creative or humorous image can result in more return readers to your blog than you’d probably expect. Filling your newsletter with a few well-placed images and your readers are guaranteed to pay more attention to your email. However, do not use too many images, since users without the highest internet speeds will dislike this and do not rely on images alone, since some of your emails will undoubtedly be flagged as junk mail. These images will not load unless a user un-flags the email. In this scenario your headlines and teasers will be the end all be all of your newsletter.
- When all else fails give your readers incentive: Nothing encourages return readership to your blog like giving something away for free or offering something at a steep discount. Put forth a sense of urgency by saying the first “X” number of readers to visit after receiving this email can claim their free “ABC” product.
Track Visits After Sending Out Email Newsletters to Learn Your Readers
Pay careful attention to spikes in visitors shortly after you send out email newsletters. Inevitably, some letters will gain more visitors than others. Realizing which topics your niche readership favors the most will allow you to cater to them in the future, ensuring long term success for your blog.
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According to water & stone, the “big three” open source CMSes from 2010 continue to dominate in 2011. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla all topped the company’s survey of open source CMSes, with WordPress “clearly outpacing” Drupal and Joomla.
The survey started with 35 systems, which were narrowed down to 20 after getting the survey responses. The report primarily looked at rate of adoption and brand strength. All we really care about is rate of adoption, so let’s look at that.
For adoption, the survey looked at downloads, installations and third-party support.
WordPress blows the doors off the competition when it comes to downloads. This year WordPress averages more than 640,000 downloads a week – which is actually down from last year by 34%. Joomla is a distant second, with more than 86,000 a week, and Drupal is at nearly 23,000 per week. However, the report notes that Drupal is significantly under-reported due to users who grab Drupal via the git repository, which is not tracked.
Third party analysis shows WordPress far and away more popular, with 53.6% of the Alexa One Million. Joomla has 9.6%, Drupal a mere 6.4%. Another third party, BuiltWith, shows WordPress as having more than 4.2 million installs, Joomla nearly 1.7 million, and Drupal with nearly 308,000.
The survey also looks at third party developer support by comparing Elance and Guru stats. Here developers are advertising their skills, and WordPress tops the list on Elance. It comes in second on Guru, whereas Joomla tops that list. Drupal once again comes in third, and there’s a strong fourth-place showing from DotNetNuke. Note that this may say less about any of the CMSes than it does about the job market – nearly all the major CMSes showed growth.
Another metric? Books in print. WordPress sports a field of 83 books, with 23 released in 2011. Drupal has an impressive 64, with 22 released this year. (Including Drupal User’s Guide by a friend of mine, Emma Jane Hogbin.) Joomla has 65 books, but only 13 released this year.
Though not quite up there with the top three in most metrics, Concrete5 made impressive gains. It came in with 19.3% of the respondents saying they were using Concrete5. WordPress has 34.2%, Drupal 19.8 and Joomla 18.5%. Its downloads are up by more than 500% according to the project’s spokesperson.
The survey responses were mainly from Europe and North America, though the company says that there was participation from 86 countries. More than 50% of respondents identified that their organization was 10 or fewer employees, but more than 20% (21.3% to be exact) were from organizations with more than 100 employees. More than 8% of respondents were from organizations with more than 1,000 employees.
This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware.
If there is one lesson that I have learned well as an Internet marketer it is this. Building a list is one of the most important things you will need to do for your business. In fact it is the one thing that you should begin doing right now. Here are some reasons why list building is critical to the strength and success of your business.
What is List Building?
You have probably heard the term list building a lot. What exactly does it mean? Building a list can be done in several ways. It means making a list of people whom you can contact legally, usually by email. These people are either your established customers or potential customers. They have all given their consent for you to contact them about news and offers.
List Building and Your Business
Making a list will increase sales conversions and profits for your business. This is because you will have been able to build a relationship with them and they trust you. Trust is one of the main ingredients of selling. If a potential customer has trusted you with their email address and joined your list, then they have indicated they want to hear from you and will be interested in your offers. Customers have already bought from you so they already trust your products and want to hear about related ones.
Email Marketing Saves Time and Money
Email marketing is the method of communicating to your list. It is not only effective but can save you time and money. Email marketing is done with an auto responder. This software allows you to write to many people and will allow them to subscribe and unsubscribe from your list. You can also set up auto responder sequences that can be used again and again as new people join your list. These are powerful selling tools and once they are set up will continue selling for years to come. This saves you time as they will work on autopilot.
Email marketing will save you money. You do not have to be involved with expensive advertising when you have your auto responder sequences working. You only have to pay the monthly fee for the auto responder, $19.00 to $20 at the most and the rest is pure profit.
Multiple Lists Mean More Profit
All successful Internet marketers know that niche marketing will increase profits and allow you to build very successful businesses in specialized markets. List building works the same way. In order to gain maximum profits and the highest sales conversions you should segment your market and build separate lists for them. This will make your list building very profitable.
As you can see from these few points list building is a must for any web based business. You can save your time, boost your profits and develop your enterprise into a very successful business just by building lists of customers and potential clients. Now all you have to do is to start building your profitable list.
