This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti, an AWeber user who blogs about WordPress marketing at Sparring Mind. The simple truth when it comes to collecting more email subscribers for your AWeber email campaign is this: Add more web forms to give people more chances to join your list. But over-used and badly placed [...]

Power can come in many forms. Popeye gets his power from spinach. Green Lantern has his ring. Harry Potter has his wand. And email marketing has…plugins! If you’re running your blog with WordPress.org, you should know the power of the plugin and how it can benefit your email marketing campaign. Plugins can help your campaign [...]

True or False: Many marketers report that their blog is the most popular entry point for online visitors.

The answer is: true! A MarketingSherpa study has found this to be a new trend!

Which means if you haven’t started working your blog into your email marketing campaign, it’s time to start! Fortunately, AWeber helps make this easier for you with the blog broadcast feature.

If you’re ready to set up a powerful tool to improve your email marketing efforts, we’ve got you covered on how to do it and how it helps.

How Blog Integration Helps You

The blog broadcast feature makes it easy for you to reap the benefits of integrating your blog with email marketing. Here are some of the benefits:

• Increase sign ups

  If you’re getting a lot of traffic to your blog, that’s another opportunity to ask visitors to join your mailing list! Whether your blog is your website or just a part of it, you want to have a form available for potential subscribers to enter their information. If you’re using WordPress, we’ve got an app for that!

  You might also want to set up an email subscription just for your blog posts, in case that’s all some subscribers want. This can be done by creating a separate list that’s dedicated to blog post emails, rather than having one list for all emails. It’s good to offer options for receiving your emails, so subscribers aren’t just locked into one thing.

• Increase interaction with your site

  Your blog content gives your subscribers more to interact with. You can set up the blog broadcast to include a “Read More” link to get subscribers to click through to the website in order to see the rest of the post.

• Communicate a more personal tone

  Your blog can read as if you’re addressing a friend, so a blog broadcast can give your company the chance to set a more friendly tone.

  Opening up to your subscribers and connecting with them on a more personal level can help build subscriber loyalty.

• Provide more content for your emails

  The blog broadcast will allow you to send regular broadcasts to your subscribers. However, even if you don’t use the blog broadcast tool you can still integrate with your blog.

  You can simply link to a blog post (or a few posts) in your regular email newsletter. This way you’re still able to share more valuable content with your subscribers.

How to Set Up a Blog Broadcast

The blog broadcast will take content from your blog and automatically create that content in an email newsletter.

The way it does this is by checking your blog’s RSS feed. When you have a new post, the blog broadcast tool will pick it up and create a broadcast message for it. You can set your message to send at a certain time or after a certain number of posts.

You can also choose a template for your blog posts to appear in. The RSS variables will automatically pull your blog post (the dynamic content), but you can also set up your own text in the template that will be pulled in every time until you change it (the static content).

What Integrating with Your Blog Can Look Like

Here’s an example of AWeber customer Steven Aitchison’s blog:

Notice he has the sign up form on the right for interested visitors. You can also see his most recent post. This post was picked up by the blog broadcast tool and changed into an email:

Already Using Your Blog with Email Marketing?

Let us know if you’re already using your blog and how it has helped you!

Tweet This

Many businesses and bloggers use AWeber’s blog newsletter tool to convert RSS to email and tell readers about new posts on their blogs.

When we released this tool, our thinking was that it would be a way for you to get email subscribers back to your blog in order to read your post, comment on it and take any other actions you wanted after getting to your site. So we designed the broadcasts to include partial blog posts rather than full posts.

While this has worked beautifully for many of you, some of you have asked us to provide a way for you to include full posts directly in the emails.

Now, you can. Here’s how:

Use The {!rss_item_content} Tag

While editing your blog broadcast template, if you want to include full posts rather than partial posts, simply replace the {!rss_item_description} tag with {!rss_item_content}.

{!rss_item_content} will merge the full HTML and images from your posts into your blog newsletter.

Do You Prefer Full or Partial Posts In Your Blog Newsletter?

With this available, will you send full posts in your blog newsletters? Or will you send partial posts?

What about as a recipient? Are full or partial posts better for you?

We’ve put together a quick 2-question survey to find out what you and all of our readers think!

Once we have your answers, we’ll share the results via Twitter and Facebook, so be sure to follow or “Like” us!

Update 7/26/10: Results are now available here – thanks everyone who took the survey!

Tweet This

If you’re one of the many smart bloggers who also build their email lists and deliver a blog newsletter, I bet you put a lot of effort into creating high-quality content.

Often, that valuable content is timeless, but only appears on the most-viewed part of your blog – the homepage – for a short time. Other posts push it off into your homepage and into oblivion.

This is frustrating – after all, other subscribers could benefit from this content, right? Even if they sign up days, weeks, months or years after you first published it?

Fortunately, with a simple email marketing tactic, you can resurrect your content from the depths of your blog and keep it in front of your ever-growing, ever-changing audience.

Turn Your Blog’s Best Content Into an Automated Email Newsletter

There’s no reason to put all that hard work into creating great content, then get just one round of clicks, comments and other actions from it. Why be satisfied with that?

Much of your blog’s content isn’t only relevant at one particular time. And to borrow from an old NBC slogan, if subscribers haven’t seen an old post, it’s new to them.

Get that old content out to them and make it fresh again!

Create an Autoresponder Campaign For Your Blog in 3 Easy Steps

1. Identify Your Best Content

Go through your old blog posts and figure out which ones are the truly high-quality ones that all subscribers need to see, even if they’re years old.

2. Turn Each Post or Group of Posts Into an Email

There are a handful of ways to go about this:

• The fastest, simplest way is to just copy and paste your full post content into an email, style as you see fit (if necessary) and save. No introduction, no conclusion, just the post as a standalone.

  I don’t necessarily think this is the best solution for everyone, but it’s far better than doing nothing – and if you’re really too pressed for time to do more than that, then at least do that.

• Copy and paste a compelling excerpt from your article, add a link to read the full post, and then add a brief introduction and conclusion to the email.

  I like this method because it encourages clickthroughs, but you may find that including the full post is better.

  Either way, including an intro and conclusion is a good idea because it gives you a chance to build context and continuity into the series of emails you’re sending.

• If you have two or more good posts on a topic, write an email that combines the ideas in those posts and links to them in context (this is something you might be doing with blog posts already).

  The more posts you have on a topic, the less you need to write.

  In fact, if you have say, 10 posts on a topic, you could write a simple introduction (“a lot of our readers want to learn about ______ because ______, so here are our most useful resources about that”) and then just provide a list of links to those posts.

3. Add Your Emails To Your Follow Up Series

Once you have your emails together, create them as follow up messages.

As you create each one, think about how much time you want to pass between those messages and schedule accordingly.

Remember, new subscribers will also be getting your new posts (right?), so spacing the emails too close together could be overkill, especially if a subscriber gets your new posts and your old posts on the same day.

• One way to get around this: deliver your follow up messages only on a certain day of the week – a day when you don’t send your regular blog newsletter – using Autoresponder Send Windows.

  For example, if you normally email your latest post/s to subscribers on Tuesdays, you might tell us to only deliver your follow ups on Fridays.

  That way, you could deliver these emails as automated weekly tips without sending subscribers 2 emails on the same day.

As you create more quality posts, you can either continue adding emails to your follow up series or edit your existing ones to work those posts into the emails you’ve already created.

Examples of Email Campaigns That Do This

1. Darren Rowse shares how he did this for his site digital-photography-school.com.
2. In our recent video interview with Ramit Sethi, he talks about doing this for his site iwillteachyoutoberich.com

3. At AWeber, we do this in some of our own email campaigns.

   For example, if you join AWeber and subscribe to our customer training series/newsletter, you’ll see some emails that take posts from this blog and rework them into email messages designed to expose you to educational content that you might not have ever seen otherwise.

Do You Revive Your Blog’s “Oldies But Goodies?”

What results have you seen from doing this? Any tips on this for the rest of your fellow readers?

Share your thoughts on this post!

Tweet This

More bloggers than ever are converting RSS to email to connect with a wider audience. (Are you one of them, too?)

Now that the idea that RSS and email can and should coexist has taken hold, what can bloggers learn from the email marketing world and use to make RSS to email (even more) worth their while?

RSS to Email Tips

While this is by no means an exhaustive list of things you can do to make the most of RSS to email, hopefully these tips will form a list of best practices we can all build on to better engage our blogs’ email readers.

OK, here goes…

1. Start With a Plan.

   A number of articles I’ve read on “emailing for bloggers” (like this one) set this as the first thing you should do.

   And no wonder. This is step #1 for any successful email campaign.

   After all, if you don’t know why you’re converting RSS to email, you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone to sign up, let alone deliver the kind of value that will effectively engage your readers.

   Ask yourself: What is the goal of my email campaign? How will I know if I am meeting that goal?

   The answers to these questions will help shape decisions about what content to include in your emails, how often you will send emails, and other tactical questions.

2. Decide How Often To Email (and How Much To Send In Each Email)

   Frequency and scheduling aren’t typically the first things you should think about for your email newsletter.

   However, with a blog I recommend thinking a bit more about them at first – especially if you have an established blog, or if you post frequently (if you haven’t gotten to that point yet, you might be better off focusing on creating content and getting potential subscribers to your blog).

   And it’s important to think about how much content to send in each email – you don’t want to overload subscribers, but you want to make sure there’s enough to make opening and reading your emails worth their time.

   Ask yourself: Will I send an email every time I have a new post? Once every few posts? Once a week? How much content is appropriate for one email? How many emails per week/month will my subscribers want to get?

   The answers to these questions will help you decide how often to schedule your emails.

3. Define Why People Should Subscribe

   One of my favorite lines (as anyone who has come to a webinar knows) is “Nobody wakes up and says, ‘Gee, I’d sure like to sign up for some email today.’”

   If you don’t give people a good reason (better yet, several good reasons) to subscribe, well… they won’t subscribe. Even if they love your blog.

   Sometimes the selling point is the simple convenience of being notified about new articles on your blog. Or only getting notified once a week instead of every time you post.

   Other times it’s getting something of value that non-subscribers don’t – this tip was offered by a couple people when I asked for RSS to email tips on Twitter:

   

   Whatever your “hook” is, clearly define it and then come up with a few (2-4) simple phrases or sentences that sell visitors on subscribing.

   These will serve not only as headlines for your signup form, but also as calls to action to help you get more subscribers faster.

What’s Your #1 RSS to Email Tip?

If you blog, and convert your RSS feed to email, I (and the readers of this blog) would love to hear your best-loved tip on using email with blogs effectively.

You can either share your tip here or reply to me on Twitter – your tip just might make it into a future RSS to email post here…

Just a quick note to say that the Twitter your email newsletters tool now works for Blog Broadcasts, too.

So you can now use AWeber to convert from RSS to email to Twitter – and get your message out to your audience even more easily than before!

Also, we fixed an oversight where personalization tags were being included in some tweets – so now, if you personalize your email subject lines with say, {!firstname_fix}, that field won’t appear in your tweet.

Enjoy – and don’t forget to follow AWeber, Tom, Sean and Justin (me) on Twitter!

Last weekend, Tracey (our Director of Customer Solutions) and I attended and presented at PodCamp Philly.

While it’s not an email marketing event per se, it gives us an opportunity to learn about and discuss complementary media and marketing technologies and tools. (Plus it gives us a chance to get out from behind our computers and talk to local business owners and publishers in person.)

Just like last year, it was a great event with a lot of quality discussions on web publishing and building communities.

To give you an idea of what went on at the event, below are some of my notes from the event, as well as my presentation slides.

Email Newsletters and Podcasting

In the discussion, I aimed to point out that while email often gets denigrated in discussions of new media publishing, it still has an important role to play (not least due to its continued widespread use).

The discussion then turned to how bloggers and podcasters can incorporate email into their communication strategy, as well as some specific content/tactic ideas.

RSS Subscribers:if the slideshow embedded below does not appear, click here to view it on our site.

Interestingly, most if not all people at the talk were already on-board with the idea of incorporating email into their blogs and podcasts – they were mostly there for the tips!

So we spent a lot of time on the last handful of slides, talking about content ideas.

Do you have any other suggestions for email content? Share them in the comments!

Meeting and Listening to Debbie Weil at PodCamp

In addition to presenting, Tracey and I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of quality sessions.

In a couple of these, Debbie Weil (author of The Corporate Blogging Book) discussed executive blogging and critiqued a couple of blogs live.

One of the most interesting points she made – that the success of a blog isn’t best measured by the number of comments or the sheer amount of traffic that it receives – applies quite well to email marketing, too.

We often get caught up in judging our email marketing success by those things that we can most easily track over the shortest period of time. Opens, clickthroughs and yes, even orders are important, but they don’t fully determine the value of your email campaigns.

That’s an important idea to keep in mind when building an email marketing program for the long haul – it helps to keep us from getting too promotional too often (and driving away subscribers who feel there’s not enough value in our emails) rather than building the relationships that drive repeat customers and referrals.

Debbie was also kind enough to give us a copy of her book and chat about email marketing for a while (thanks!).

We’re getting email templates published at a faster pace than ever before, and today we’re happy to announce an addition that should be welcomed by bloggers who send a newsletter to build a stronger blog readership.

Something to Impress Your Blog Readers With…

What’s So Special About This Template?

The first, most important thing to mention is the fact that “Meadows”, like all the templates our designers make, has been tested across all of the major email applications email subscribers tend to use.

It just can’t be overstated how important testing is for all HTML email.

In addition, although it can be adjusted for general newsletter use, “Meadows” is geared specifically toward blog newsletter senders because it has:

• A built-in “Subscribe via RSS” block so subscribers can gracefully switch to getting your content via RSS if they eventually prefer that option.
• A “Related Blog Posts” block so you can link up other articles your subscribers can read.

Other Unique Features

If you’d like to use this template for a non-blog email newsletter, just remove the two blog specific blocks mentioned above. There will still be other sidebar content left-over:

• This is the first time we’ve integrated a special “Share this email” box into a template. See if sharing your newsletter helps you to boost your subscriber numbers.
• There’s an explicit “Unsubscribe” block. We hate to see subscribers go, but it’s better they leave easily when they want to rather then making them jump through hoops.

Enjoy the free template, and let us know what you think!

In the previous three posts on doubling your blog newsletter subscribers, we’ve talked about:

• Adding subscribe opportunities within posts
• Creating a dedicated blog subscribe page
• Getting current readers to bring you new ones

Today, let’s take a step back from these online and email marketing tactics and look at how you can grow your blog newsletter away from your website.

Blog Newsletter Grower #4: Find Outside Subscribe Opportunities

In the past week, how many people have you talked to face-to-face (either in a business or casual setting) where your business came up?

What about on the phone? Anyone?

You have ample opportunities to ask people to subscribe to your blog newsletter, even when they’re not on your blog!

For example, near the end of each of our live webinars we ask attendees if they’d like to subscribe to our blog newsletter. We import the folks who say yes shortly after the webinar ends.

Since we started offering the blog newsletter to webinar attendees, we can directly attribute an increase of 15.97% in our readership – that’s a lot of potential readers we’d have lost out on if we didn’t ask them to subscribe!

Where Can You Find These Outside Subscribe Opportunities?

Here are a few possibilities:

• In Person

  Whether it’s at a trade show/conference, a Meetup, your office, or any other appropriate setting, “face time” is a great time to offer up your blog and newsletter.

  If you exchange business cards with someone, bring up your blog in the conversation and ask for the subscribe. Write his/her response (“yes blog newsletter” or “no blog newsletter”) on the back of his/her card, so you know who to import and who not to.

• On teleconferences, webinars, training calls, etc.

  If you provide value on the call, attendees/callers are likely to want to get more value. Where better for them to get that than on your blog?

  Your webinars/conferences/etc, like your blog posts themselves, are sales letters for your blog.

  Put the effort into making them great, ask for the subscribe, and watch your blog newsletter grow.

• In your email signature

  There’s no law that says you have to put your site’s homepage in your email signature (well, unless you work for a company that mandates it).

  Your blog, or even your blog subscribe page, may be a more useful landing page for people clicking from your email signature, and may lead to more subscribers.

  This isn’t likely to bring in as many people as the other tactics discussed here, but every subscriber counts, right?

• On articles or guest posts you write for other blogs

  Typically, when you write an article (either for an article site or a news publication) or a guest post on another blog, you’re allowed a signature at the end of your article.

  Just as you should add subscribe opportunities within posts, you should give people who read your articles and guest posts the chance to easily join your blog newsletter too.

• Other business communications

  Do you ship physical products? Take a recent post (or highlights from several recent posts) and print a one-page insert that exposes customers to your blog and encourages them to subscribe.

  Do you give away or sell digital products (such as ebooks/whitepapers)? Include references to your blog and blog newsletter on the “about” section or in the footer of each page.

  Can customers/readers reach you by phone? Mention your blog in your outgoing voicemail message, or in your phone menu.

Opportunities Are Everywhere… Take Them!

In reality, there’s an infinite number of ways you could translate “expanding beyond your blog.” These are just a few of the ways you can get more blog subscribers outside of having them find your blog on their own.

So let me close this 4-post series with a reminder: there are always opportunities to grow your blog newsletter. Keep your eyes open for them!

Do you promote your blog and blog newsletter in other “outside” situations like the ones mentioned today?

If so, where and when? What have you found to be effective? Share your experiences below!