There are a lot of ways you can drive traffic to your blog. You can pay for it, work on your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO), pray it’ll come on its own, or use your email newsletter. That last approach is one people often ignore because they think email is just good for driving sales.
Yes, email is a fantastic medium for increasing conversions. However, you can also use it to drive traffic back to your blog. That shouldn’t be a problem since your content was engaging enough to get people to give you their emails in the first place.
In this article, we’ll dig a bit deeper into why email marketing works so well to drive traffic to your blog. Then I’ll teach you three ways to do it including examples. Let’s get to it!
Why You Should Be Using Email Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
There’s a term that gets thrown around a lot in marketing, called funneling. When we talk about funnels, we mean the journey you want users to take, hopefully ending in a conversion. Here are two quick examples of simple funnels:
- Search engine > Your blog > Affiliate sale
- Social media > Your blog > Email signup
Most websites make money off their visitors in some way. With a blog, you can use affiliate marketing, ads, sell your own services, and more. Getting people to that end stage is what we call a conversion.
There are a lot of ways to try and increase your site’s conversions. However, I’m partial to email marketing (as are a lot of successful bloggers) because of its potential for recurring conversions. Let’s take a look at another example of a funnel:
- Search engine > Your blog > Email signup > Sales campaign > Affiliate sale
That funnel can vary in a hundred ways. However, the key part in that process is getting people to subscribe to your email list. That’s because once they’re in, it enables you to reach out to them directly when you see fit. That means you get to use email to remind people your blog exists and to drive traffic back to it.
How you monetize that traffic is up to you, but the main takeaway here is with email marketing, it’s easier to transform visitors into recurring users. In other words, if you haven’t dived into email marketing yet, you’re losing out on an important source of traffic, so give it a go.
3 Ways to Boost Your Blog Posts Using Email Marketing
Now that we’ve established email marketing’s potential to drive traffic, let’s talk about how to put that into action.
1. Send Periodical Post Roundups
I’m signed up to way too many email newsletters. Every day, I get messages like this one:
You can’t see the full message there, but it’s a roundup of last week’s posts on that website. The goal here is simple – to get the attention of people who haven’t checked into the blog for a while and, hopefully, get them to click on at least one of those articles.
This approach is pretty easy to put into action if you’re running a blog. However, there are two factors you need to keep in mind for successful roundup emails:
- At most, you should send one of these emails per week or space them out even further.
- The frequency of your roundups should depend on how often you post new content.
If you only publish one new blog post per week, then it doesn’t make sense to send a roundup email every Monday, as you’d imagine. In any case, remember to include brief descriptions for every post you include within the email, as well as featured images!
2. Include Links to Your Latest Posts Within Marketing Messages
Not all your email campaigns can be roundups. In many cases, you’ll use your newsletter to inform subscribers about new promotions or products:
Discounts and product launches are two perfect reasons to reach out to your subscribers. While you’re at it, you might as well add an extra section to those messages, including some links to your latest blog posts, like so:
In my experience, this approach tends to work rather well for two reasons:
- The lure of a discount or new things can increase your email open rate.
- By including both your latest blog posts and more direct offers, you target two different sets of subscribers.
Some people may only care about discounts, whereas others might not be interested, but maybe one of your latest blog posts catches their eye. In both cases, the result is the same – you get one more person to visit your blog, who might not have done so otherwise.
3. Submit Your Content to Third-Party Newsletters
Ideally, you want to use your own email newsletter to drive traffic to your blog. That way, everything stays in-house. However, sometimes the best way to get a boost in traffic is to get some other newsletter to link to you. Think about it as the email equivalent of a backlink.
There are a lot of popular newsletters with a primary purpose to curate the most interesting posts across the web. Chances are there’s at least one of those for your niche, so your goal is to find out which one it is and look up who runs it.
In a lot of cases, the people who curate these newsletters don’t have time to look under every stone to find the content they want to share. A helpful nudge towards your blog may be enough to get you on their radar, which can pay off big time depending on how popular that newsletter is.
If you can’t find any newsletter focusing on your blog’s niche, then you might even consider starting one of your own. That way, you’ll be able to cast a wider net and use it to drive traffic to the sources you want.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a fantastic tool to drive conversions, stay in touch with your audience, and direct traffic to your blog. To succeed with email marketing, all you have to do is keep the fundamentals in mind. That means knowing how to create engaging titles to get more clicks, and what types of messages work best to keep people’s attention.
As for how to use your email newsletter to drive traffic to your blog, here are the two approaches I recommend:
- Send regular post roundups.
- Include links to your latest posts within marketing messages.
- Submit your content to third-party newsletters.
Do you have any questions about how to use your email list to drive traffic to your blog? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay.