Blogging is an excellent way to turn your passion and knowledge into a source of income, but it requires a marketing strategy. Blogs don’t turn a profit on their own, and just like any other business, marketing is an essential component for success. While you can generally pick and choose which strategies you use, not using email marketing would be a mistake.
There are plenty of legitimate ways of making cash from a blog, like building your readership and running paid ads, but if you don’t employ email marketing, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate sales and here’s why it’s a vital component in creating a profitable blog.
Email marketing is where website owners make the big bucks
Regardless of the industry or market, a successful email marketing campaign can drive more sales than any other strategy, with the exception of direct mail. Statistics show that email marketing can increase revenue by up to 760%. If you’re solely using digital marketing, you need to start building an email list today because that’s where you’ll generate the most money.
Email marketing is profitable for a handful of reasons:
- You can market to a captive audience that agreed to receive your emails.
- You can build rapport with your market through nurturing your leads.
- Nurturing leads increases sales and loyalty.
- Segmented campaigns increase your effectiveness.
- People who regularly receive emails from you will feel more familiar with your brand, which increases the chances of them making a purchase.
- Email marketing increases the lifetime value of a lead by generating repeat sales.
- Email marketing strengthens customer relationships.
Through email marketing, you can deliver targeted messages to specific segments of your audience, which is more effective than general messages sent to everyone on your list. You also have the ability to move leads through different email sequences and apply or remove tags based on the links they click. This comes in handy when someone makes their first purchase and you want to move them out of your general sequence and into a more targeted sequence.
Email marketing captures people who aren’t ready to buy
Every day, thousands of people land on websites selling a product or service they’re interested in, but not ready to buy. Many of these leads come from paid traffic. If the website owner doesn’t ask for an email address on the spot, most of those users will bounce and never come back.
Not collecting email addresses will waste a good portion of your ad spend because not everyone who clicks on your ad will be ready to buy from you at that moment. Some of your leads will buy eventually if you nurture them, but you can’t do that without their email address.
Using email marketing is the only way to capture people who are interested in what you’re selling, but aren’t ready to buy the moment they find you. It takes far less effort, time, and money to nurture existing, interested leads than it does to continue to generate traffic to catch one-off sales.
Some people need to be reminded that you exist
People are busier than ever these days and often need to be reminded about things they want to buy or read, including their favorite blogs. Even if you’re not selling anything, not everyone will bookmark your blog and remember to visit periodically. You have to remind your audience that you exist, and the easiest way to do that is by collecting an email list and sending out regular communications.
You can send daily or weekly digests containing your blog posts, send promotional emails, or connect with your audience casually. If they truly want to hear from you, your leads will be glad that you keep in touch.
Capture more long-term profits with email marketing
Once you put in the work to create automated email sequences, email marketing becomes mostly hands-off. Think about it as a long-term strategy to generate money over time with minimal effort. You’ll still spend plenty of time and energy to generate leads, but nurturing the leads who don’t buy right away won’t be that hard.
Don’t let any leads slip through the cracks. Capture every lead possible and nurture them until they either unsubscribe or buy from you.
