Definition of Conversion Rates

At its core, a conversion rate is a percentage that reflects the proportion of visitors to your blog or website who take a desired action. This action can vary depending on your objectives and may include activities like making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or clicking on an affiliate link. In essence, conversion rates quantify how successful your blog is at turning casual visitors into engaged users or customers.

Why Email Conversion Rates Matter for Bloggers

Performance Assessment: Conversion rates provide a clear and objective measure of how well your blog is performing in terms of achieving its goals. They allow you to assess the effectiveness of your content, design, and overall strategy.

Goal Tracking: Bloggers often have specific objectives in mind, such as increasing revenue through affiliate marketing, growing their email subscriber list, or boosting sales of digital products. Email conversion rates help you track progress toward these goals.

Optimization: By monitoring conversion rates, you can identify areas that need improvement. If your conversion rates are lower than expected, it signals an opportunity to refine your content, user experience, or calls to action.

Resource Allocation: Blogging requires time and resources. Knowing your conversion rates helps you allocate these resources more efficiently. For example, if you discover that a particular type of content has a higher email conversion rate, you can prioritize creating more of it.

ROI Calculation: Understanding conversion rates is essential for calculating return on investment (ROI). For instance, if you’re running paid advertising campaigns to promote your blog, you can determine whether the cost of the ads is justified by the conversions they generate.

Continuous Improvement: Email conversion rates aren’t static; they can be improved over time. By testing different strategies and analyzing the results, you can continually optimize your blog to achieve higher conversion rates.

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How to Calculate Conversion Rates

Calculating email conversion rates is straightforward. It involves dividing the number of conversions (desired actions) by the total number of visitors and multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage. The formula is:

Conversion Rate=(Number of ConversionsTotal Number of Visitors)×100%Conversion Rate=(Total Number of VisitorsNumber of Conversions​)×100%

For example, if your blog received 1,000 visitors in a month, and 50 of them subscribed to your newsletter, your conversion rate for newsletter sign-ups would be 5% (50/1,000 x 100).

Conversion rates are a vital metric for bloggers, serving as a compass to navigate the blogging journey. They help you assess performance, track progress toward your goals, optimize your strategies, and ensure that your blogging efforts yield meaningful results. By understanding and leveraging conversion rates effectively, you can fine-tune your blog to achieve greater success and impact in the digital realm.

The Benefits of High Conversion Rates

As a blogger, you rely on website traffic and reader engagement to build your online presence and grow your audience. Effective email marketing can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to blog posts and engaging with readers, thereby increasing the overall visibility of your blog.

Blogs thrive when they have an active and engaged community of readers. Email marketing allows bloggers to foster this sense of community by directly communicating with their audience. By delivering valuable content and updates through email, bloggers can strengthen their connections with readers, turning them into loyal followers.

Monetization Opportunities

Many bloggers aim to monetize their blogs through various methods, such as affiliate marketing, sponsored content, or selling products/services. A well-optimized email strategy can be instrumental in promoting these monetization efforts. Bloggers can use email to showcase affiliate products, announce partnerships, or promote their own products and services to a targeted and engaged audience.

Bloggers spend a significant amount of time creating high-quality content. However, the “build it, and they will come” approach rarely works in the competitive online landscape. Email marketing allows bloggers to actively promote their new blog posts, ensuring that their content reaches a wider audience and doesn’t go unnoticed.

It’s not just about attracting new readers; retaining your existing audience is equally important. Regularly sending valuable content via email helps keep readers engaged and reminds them to return to your blog. It also provides an opportunity to re-engage with inactive subscribers.

Tracking and Analytics

Email marketing platforms provide detailed analytics that can help bloggers understand which content resonates most with their audience. By tracking open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics, bloggers can gain insights into their readers’ preferences and adjust their content strategy accordingly.

Unlike social media algorithms, which can limit the reach of your posts, email allows for direct communication with your subscribers. Your emails are more likely to land in the inbox, ensuring that your message is seen by your audience.

Over time, a well-cultivated email list can become a valuable asset. Bloggers can monetize their email lists by offering sponsored emails, promoting affiliate products, or selling digital products directly to their subscribers.

In summary, mastering email marketing is essential for bloggers because it can help drive traffic, engage readers, build a loyal audience, promote content, and create monetization opportunities. It’s a versatile and effective tool that can significantly enhance a blogger’s success in the highly competitive online world.

Perfecting your strategy for optimal email conversion rates requires a thoughtful approach. Here are six key strategies to help you achieve better results in your email marketing efforts.

1. Understanding Your Audience Thoroughly: The Cornerstone of Effective Email Marketing

Effective email marketing hinges on your ability to connect with your audience on a personal level. It’s not merely about sending emails; it’s about forging meaningful connections and delivering content that genuinely resonates with your subscribers. To achieve this, you must first dive deep into understanding your audience.

Knowing your audience inside out enables you to create content that’s highly relevant to their needs, interests, and pain points. When subscribers receive emails that speak directly to them, they are more likely to engage and take action.

A deep understanding of your audience fosters trust. When your subscribers perceive that you “get” them and genuinely care about their concerns, they are more likely to trust your recommendations and become loyal customers.

Data Collection and Analysis

Start by gathering demographic data about your subscribers, including age, gender, location, and profession. This information provides a foundation for understanding who your typical audience member is.

Dive into your subscribers’ preferences. What types of content do they prefer—articles, videos, infographics? What topics interest them the most? This data guides your content creation.

Analyze past behaviors, such as the emails they’ve opened, links they’ve clicked, and products they’ve purchased. This historical data reveals valuable insights into their preferences and engagement patterns.

Creating Buyer Personas

Once you’ve gathered data, use it to create detailed buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal subscribers, complete with names, professions, hobbies, and pain points. Give them a human face to make them relatable.

Segment your email list based on these personas. Each persona represents a distinct group within your audience, and you can tailor your email content to each group’s specific needs and interests.

Personalization is the heart of email marketing success. Use the information you’ve collected to tailor your email content. Address subscribers by their first names and craft messages that directly address their pain points or desires.

If you sell products or services, use data-driven personalization to recommend items that align with each subscriber’s past purchases or browsing history. This approach increases the likelihood of conversions.

Feedback and Engagement

Actively encourage subscribers to provide feedback and preferences through surveys or by responding to emails. Their input can help refine your understanding of their needs.

Regularly monitor open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates for different segments. This data can guide adjustments to your email strategy over time.

Audience understanding is not static; it evolves as your subscribers’ preferences change. Stay vigilant and adapt your email strategy accordingly. Regularly update your buyer personas and reassess your segmentation based on the latest data.

Understanding your audience thoroughly is the bedrock of a successful email marketing strategy. It’s about more than just collecting data; it’s about using that data to create genuine connections and deliver content that speaks directly to your subscribers’ hearts and minds. When you prioritize audience understanding, you’ll see improved engagement, higher email conversion rates, and a more loyal subscriber base—essential ingredients for email marketing success.

2. Setting Clear Objectives: The Guiding Light of Effective Email Campaigns

Setting clear objectives is the compass that ensures your email campaigns are on course for success. It’s not just about sending emails; it’s about having a well-defined purpose and direction for each campaign.

Every email you send should have a clear purpose. Setting objectives provides that purpose, whether it’s promoting a new product, nurturing leads, or re-engaging dormant customers. Without objectives, your emails risk becoming aimless and less effective. Once you’ve set objectives, they act as a guiding force for your email’s content and design. Your messaging, calls to action, and overall approach should align with these objectives.

Effective email marketing is an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. Your email campaigns should align seamlessly with your broader marketing goals. Ask yourself how each email campaign contributes to the larger picture, such as increasing blog traffic, brand awareness, driving sales, or boosting customer retention.

Types of Objectives

One of the most common objectives in email marketing is to boost sales. You might set specific targets for revenue generation through email campaigns, such as achieving a certain number of conversions or a particular sales volume. This is whether you’re targeting sales of your own products or those that you are an affiliate for.

If your goal is reader acquisition, your email campaigns may focus on attracting and converting those readers who are not yet subscribers. Your objective could be to achieve a certain number of new email sign-ups.

For nurturing campaigns, the objective might be to strengthen relationships with current subscribers, encourage repeat clicks, or upsell and cross-sell products or services.

SMART Objectives

a. Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve with each email campaign. Specificity ensures that your objectives are well-defined and easy to measure.

b. Measurable: Determine how you’ll measure success. Whether it’s through click-through rates, conversion rates, or revenue generated, having measurable criteria allows you to track progress.

c. Achievable: Ensure that your objectives are realistic within your current resources and timeframe. Overambitious goals can lead to frustration and burnout.

d. Relevant: Verify that your objectives are relevant to your business and marketing goals. Irrelevant objectives can divert your efforts away from what truly matters.

e. Time-Bound: Set a deadline for achieving your objectives. This creates a sense of urgency and accountability.

Objectives provide a benchmark against which you can measure your campaign’s success. They enable data-driven decision-making. If you consistently fall short of your objectives, it’s a sign that you may need to adjust your email strategy or content.

Email marketing is dynamic, and so should be your objectives. Regularly assess whether your objectives need revision based on changing circumstances, market trends, or shifts in customer behavior.

Setting clear objectives is the cornerstone of effective email marketing. It provides purpose, direction, and a standard for measuring success. With well-defined objectives, your email campaigns become more focused, strategic, and aligned with your broader marketing goals. They not only guide your content and design but also serve as a basis for continuous improvement and adaptation in the ever-evolving landscape of email marketing.

3. Optimize Sending Times: Mastering the Art of Timing in Email Marketing

In the world of email marketing, timing isn’t just a detail; it’s a strategic advantage. The strategy of optimizing sending times revolves around the notion that the timing of your emails can profoundly affect their effectiveness. To leverage this strategy successfully, you need to understand your audience’s behavior, experiment with different schedules, and ultimately send emails when your audience is most receptive. Let’s explore why this strategy is vital and how to execute it effectively.

The Significance of Timing

The timing of your email can significantly impact whether it gets opened or ignored. Sending emails when your audience is most active and engaged can lead to higher open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement.

Consider that your subscribers’ inboxes are likely flooded with emails every day. If you send your email at a time when their inbox is less cluttered, your message has a better chance of standing out.

The foundation of optimizing sending times is understanding when your audience is most active. Use data from analytics tools to identify patterns in when your subscribers tend to open and engage with emails.

If your audience spans multiple time zones, take time zone differences into account. Sending emails at a time that aligns with your primary audience’s time zone can help maximize engagement.

Experimentation and A/B Testing

Experiment with different sending times and days of the week. A/B testing is a valuable tool for this purpose. Send the same email to two segments of your list at different times and compare the results to determine which timing works best.

Use the insights gained from your experiments to refine your email timing strategy continually. What works best for one audience may not work for another, so ongoing testing is essential.

Consider how your audience uses mobile devices. Many people check their email on smartphones during commuting hours or downtime. Ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly and consider sending them at times when mobile usage is high.

Seasonal and Event-Based Adjustments

Certain holidays or events may warrant adjustments to your sending times. For example, sending promotional emails ahead of major shopping holidays like Black Friday can be highly effective.

While optimizing sending times is crucial, consistency is equally important. Subscribers appreciate a predictable schedule, so aim to establish a routine for your email campaigns.

Monitoring and Adaptation

Continuously monitor your email campaign metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates. Keep an eye on how changes in timing impact these metrics. Be prepared to adapt your email timing strategy based on evolving audience behavior and preferences. What works today may not work as effectively in the future.

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4. Be Conversational, Not Sales-Oriented: The Art of Authentic Email Communication

In the realm of email marketing, being conversational rather than sales-oriented is a strategic approach that can set you apart from the competition and build stronger connections with your audience. This strategy emphasizes the importance of crafting emails that feel like genuine conversations, avoiding aggressive sales tactics, and prioritizing authenticity.

Today’s consumers are well-informed and discerning. They can quickly detect a hard sell or overly promotional content. Building trust with your audience begins with presenting yourself as genuine and honest rather than pushy.

Email marketing is not just about making a one-time sale; it’s about nurturing long-term relationships with your subscribers. An authentic, conversational tone can help foster these relationships.

Engaging Content Creation

Prioritize delivering value to your subscribers. Whether it’s informative articles, helpful tips, or entertaining stories, focus on content that genuinely benefits your audience.

Consider educating your audience rather than simply selling to them. When subscribers learn something valuable from your emails, they are more likely to view you as a trusted source.

Keep your language clear and accessible. Avoid excessive use of industry-specific jargon or terminology that might alienate readers who aren’t familiar with your field.

Encourage two-way communication. Invite feedback, questions, and responses from your subscribers. Engage with them in a meaningful conversation rather than using a one-way broadcasting approach.

Humanizing Your Brand

You’ve worked hard to build a brand around your blog. Now let your brand’s personality shine through in your emails. Whether it’s humor, warmth, or professionalism, infuse your emails with the tone and personality that best represents your brand.

Share real stories and experiences that connect with your audience. Personal anecdotes can make your emails relatable and humanize your brand.

Understand the pain points and challenges your audience faces, and use your emails to provide solutions and insights. Show that you genuinely care about helping them overcome their problems.

5. Segment Based on Pain Points and Value: The Precision of Personalized Email Marketing

Segmentation is the secret sauce that can elevate your email marketing from ordinary to extraordinary. The strategy of segmenting your audience based on the pain points and value they seek is like wielding a finely tuned instrument. It enables you to craft highly targeted messages that resonate deeply with each segment, driving engagement and conversions. Let’s explore why this strategy is so potent and how to execute it effectively.

The Power of Personalization

Personalization is not just a buzzword; it’s a proven strategy for capturing your audience’s attention. When you segment your audience based on their specific needs and interests, you can deliver emails that feel tailor-made for each recipient.

Personalized emails are inherently more relevant to the recipient. They address pain points and values that are relevant to the individual, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Begin by identifying the pain points that your blog content addresses. These may be challenges, problems, or frustrations that your audience commonly faces.

Create Pain Point Segments

Segment your audience based on these pain points. For example, if you blog about skincare products, you might have segments for acne-prone skin, sensitive skin, or anti-aging concerns.

cCraft emails that specifically address the pain points of each segment. Provide solutions, tips, and product recommendations that directly relate to their specific challenges.

Different customers may seek different types of value from your offerings. Some may prioritize cost savings, while others value convenience, quality, or exclusivity.

Categorize your audience into segments based on the primary value they seek. For example, you might have segments for budget-conscious shoppers, luxury enthusiasts, or convenience-seekers.

Tailor your email messaging to highlight the value propositions that matter most to each segment. Showcase blog content that aligns with their specific value priorities.

Data-Driven Segmentation

Leverage customer data to inform your segmentation strategy. This data can include link clicks, email open behavior, survey responses, and demographic information.

Implement dynamic segmentation that evolves as customers interact with your brand. This ensures that your messages remain relevant as customer preferences change.

Continuously refine your segmentation strategy through A/B testing. Experiment with different segmentation criteria and analyze which segments yield the best results. Ensure that your email content remains consistent with your brand voice and messaging across all segments. Consistency builds trust and recognition.

Segmentation not only helps acquire new customers but also nurtures existing ones. By showing that you understand their unique needs and values, you can foster customer loyalty and repeat business.

Test Different Elements: The Art of Continuous Improvement in Email Marketing

In the dynamic world of email marketing, staying ahead of the curve requires a willingness to experiment and a commitment to ongoing improvement. The strategy of testing different elements in your email campaigns is like a laboratory for success. It empowers you to refine your approach and ensure that your emails resonate optimally with your audience.

Testing is not just a routine; it’s an opportunity to optimize your email marketing strategy. It allows you to make informed decisions based on data rather than guesswork. Email marketing is an evolving landscape. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Testing helps you stay agile and adapt to changing audience preferences and behaviors.

Elements to Test

a. Subject Lines: Your subject line is the first thing recipients see. Test different subject lines to see which ones capture attention and lead to higher open rates.

b. Email Formats: Experiment with email formats. Test text-based emails against HTML emails to determine which format resonates best with your audience.

c. Content Styles: Test different content styles. Try long-form emails with in-depth content against shorter, concise emails. Gauge which style generates more engagement and conversions.

A/B Testing

A/B testing involves sending two variations of an email (A and B) to segments of your audience. These variations differ in a single element, such as subject line, content, or layout.

By comparing the performance of A and B, you can identify which version performs better. This controlled comparison provides valuable insights.

4Start with a hypothesis. What do you expect to happen when you change a particular element? Having a clear hypothesis guides your testing. Randomly divide your email list into two segments—one for version A and the other for version B. Ensure that the segments are similar in size and composition.

Keep all other elements of the email constant except for the one you’re testing. This ensures that the results are attributable to the specific element you’re examining.

Define what success looks like for your test. Whether it’s open rates, click-through rates, or conversion rates, choose a measurable metric to evaluate the results.

Data Analysis

After sending your A/B test emails, closely monitor the performance metrics. Analyze the data to determine which variation outperformed the other.

Ensure that your results are statistically significant. This means that the difference in performance between A and B is not due to chance. Implement the findings from your A/B tests in your future email campaigns. Use what you’ve learned to refine your approach.

Email marketing is an iterative process. Continue testing different elements to stay ahead of changing audience preferences and improve your email conversion rates consistently.

Test These Strategies to Boost Your Email Marketing Conversion Rates

In the world of email marketing, success hinges on a blend of strategy, creativity, and adaptability. We’ve explored six essential strategies to perfect your email campaigns for optimal conversion rates, and together, they form a robust framework for success.

Perfecting your email strategy is an ongoing journey of refinement and adaptation. By prioritizing audience understanding, clear objectives, optimal timing, authenticity, segmentation, and testing, you’ll create email campaigns that not only engage but convert. Remember that email marketing is a dynamic field, and your ability to evolve and adapt through these strategies will ultimately lead to increased engagement, improved email conversion rates, and long-term success.

Interact is an awesome tool that allows you to create quizzes that capture emails and it connects with many of the popular email service providers. You can share the quizzes directly on social media if you’d like, eliminating that step of needing someone to come to your blog first before they have access to the quiz, and your email list.

The best part about it all is the vast amount of quiz templates ready to be shared. I’ve already created one that asks the question, Do You Have The Blog For Profit Mindset? It was an entrepreneurial mindset quiz that I simply tweaked a few of the questions to tailor it to what I know the blog-for-profit mindset needs and I was able to launch the quiz in just a few minutes!

Here, give it a go! It’s a really fun, quick and simple way to interact with your audience and to ask questions that can funnel them towards something you’d like them to opt into! For instance, this quiz funnels into my how to start a money-making blog email series if you decide to enter your email before revealing your results.

Related: How to Start a Self-Hosted Blog on WordPress – Simple and Detailed Tutorial

There are loads of different types of quizzes inside the interface too! And you can request a quiz template if you have an idea and you don’t see anything quite like it. Of course, you could also just create your own quiz from scratch.

A Snapshot of their Fun Free Quizzes

Just a handful of the many quizzes inside the dashboard that you can customize and use to create your lead generating quiz. It’s connected to Unsplash.com so you’re able to search free stock photography to make your quiz pop or upload your own photo to make it even more unique.

Create a Data-Driven Marketing Quiz

With the tens of thousands of quizzes created on the Interact platform, both free and paid, they have a vast amount of data at their fingertips that tell them things like what type of quizzes do best, what type of headlines and images you should include and so on. Therefore if you’re really stumped on coming up with quiz content, their premade quizzes are awesome jumping off points for you.

I find that the Interact blog is superbly helpful with information about best practices, how to come up with quiz questions and general helpful tips on using the quiz generator.

Free and Paid Quiz Generator Plans

Though on their free plan you’re not able to collect email addresses, give it a try and decide if you like the idea of using quizzes before signing up for the paid plan. The benefit of the free quiz is the ability to use them on Facebook to grow your page’s engagement. And we’re all trying to find off-the-wall free options for growing our Facebook page reach. We’ve all done a quiz or two on the platform so it’s safe to say that your audience may be into Facebook quizzes. Try Interact’s Quiz Generator here.

They also have polls and giveaways included in their premium plans and I’m excited to dig in and see how I can use those tools to grow my email list.

Here’s another quiz I created for my lifestyle brand. I’m currently hosting a 30-day green smoothie challenge on this blog and used this quiz to make people really think about just how healthily they eat in hopes that they decide to check out the challenge.

You can ask people anything you want! What type of celebrity personality do you have, how much do you know about Star Wars, whatever you think will appeal to your audience. I’ve already gotten 14 leads from the quiz and I haven’t done a good job of promoting it to be honest since I launched it just before Christmas and who has time to think about blogging during Christmas!

I’m very excited about the possibilities. I’m thinking of using it to help me to figure out what blogging problems my readers have so I can create more content and even some courses as well. Blog for profit!

Have I piqued your interest? Do you think a quiz is something that you could use to capture emails for your blog?

Related: Why Every Blogger Needs Email Marketing – The Money is in the List

Why You May Want to Segment Your Email Marketing List

On my lifestyle blog, some of the main themes are travel, natural hair and fashion. As I’m diving into email marketing to grow my blogging business, it dawned on me that some of my readers who are interested in fashion may not be interested in my natural hair posts any at all. Other readers who came for my travel or Jamaica posts may not be interested in anything to do with fashion or hair.

But I still wanted to find a way to get everybody on my email list and to keep them all engaged there without sending them information they may not be interested in.I found two ways to do this really simply, depending on how you’ve chosen to set up your email sequences. Keep reading to find out how ConvertKit can help you to do just that super easily. If you haven’t even begun to build your email list as yet, then you may want to sign up for my free email list-building course.

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Why I Chose ConvertKit As My Email Service Provider

Once upon a time, I used Convertkit on my lifestyle blog and Mailerlite on this blog. I kept both going to be able to compare them both since the blogging community goes hard for Convertkit even though Mailerlite is cheaper.

I get it now. Mailerlite is still very easy to use and you can’t beat free. But you get what you pay for. The features offered by Convertkit are so much more robust and honestly, the cost is paid for multiple times over if you’re using your email list to make money, as you should. (Even if you have no product to sell, sending your favourite affiliate links to your email list with honest feedback about the product should make you some dough.)

Convertkit also has an even higher percentage of making it to your subscriber’s email inbox as opposed to spam or promotions tab in Gmail and that’s where you want your emails to end up. I find that once my emails are stylised any at all with Mailerlite, meaning if I want to put an image or use a template for my emails, they end up in the promotions tab. I’ve been able to add my beautiful blog banner to all my Convertkit emails and still land in inboxes instead of spam and promotions tabs.

The bottom line is that Convertkit is very simple to use with much more powerful features and has an amazing support team. It is a beginner or middle-tier blogger’s dream. These features will be discussed further as we go along in this post.

How to Get Started With Your Email Campaign

This is the dashboard inside ConvertKit. Don’t you love how simple it is? Yes, I know, my subscribers were pitiful on my lifestyle blog. I couldn’t figure out for the longest while how to grow my email list there or what to send them until I realised I could simply segment my audience and send them each what they wanted to hear more about.

At the top of the dashboard, dash for short, you see everything you’ll need for your email marketing campaigns. It’s all laid out in pretty much the exact steps you need to take. There’s even a little drop down there with step-by-step instructions to take you through the whole set up. You can see mine is at zero. I bet if I had paid attention to this feature from the start, I wouldn’t have been struggling all along. It’s now at 100%

Get started by taking these steps:

1. Create a freebie – here, you will first create a thing that your subscribers will receive in exchange for jumping on your email list. Gone are the days of “Subscribe here to get my new posts in your inbox.” Now, if you want to attract subscribers, you’ve got to give them something they want in return. This can be in the form of a checklist, printable, worksheet, even your post in PDF format if it’s a very valuable post.
2. Create a form – This is the actual thing that people will fill out with their name and email address in order to join your email list and receive your freebie.
3. Create an automation – here you’re setting up the response. This is what happens when I join your email list. I should get an email immediately from you with my freebie that I signed up for.
4. Sequence – Here’s where you create all the emails I receive after I’ve joined your email list. You pre-write these emails and set a delay between them so they go out automatically every other day or week or however long you set. Set and forget! You’ve filled them with your product info or your blog posts or your affiliate marketing links so you’re making money on auto-pilot.
5. Broadcasts – These are emails you go in and manually write and send to everyone (or a certain segment of your list) on whatever you want to update them on.
6. Subscribers – Here’s where you’re able to see all your subscribers. You can sort them by the freebie they signed up for, other interests they’ve been tagged into, segments etc.

For detailed information on how to do all of this, please consider joining my free 5-day email course! I walk you through the whys and hows of all these steps.

What Emails to Send to Your Email List

I find that a lot of bloggers struggle with what to send to their list. Some bloggers put off email marketing because they’re not yet established and others are simply scared, thinking they’ll be bothering their subscribers.

I however think you should get started on your list right away. The last thing you want to do is get comfortable as a blogger and then begin fumbling around with email marketing and come off as a newbie to your list. Get it right along with everything else you’re working on on your blog.

Remember that subscribers signed up to your list because they think you have value to offer. Go ahead and give them all that value in even more helpful and in-depth detail. Here are some emails you could send to your list after sending them the freebie:

• Complimentary information – send them something that’s directly related to the freebie they just received. If you sent them a meal plan then maybe you now want to send them a grocery list or a printable planner.
• Welcome email – welcome your new subscribers, tell them who you are and what kind of information they can expect to receive from you in your emails.
• Survey – You know that they’re interested in information related to whatever your freebie was about, here’s your chance to get to know them even better. Send a formal survey or simply ask them some questions in relation to problems they may be facing that has anything to do with either the freebie or other topics you blog about. This is a great way to get new post ideas and develop products.
• Your most important blog posts – You can package emails surrounding one or two posts that you think they may be interested in reading. Be sure to explain why these posts are helpful and what problems it will help them to solve.
• A link to your Facebook group, video or other resources you may have.
• Of course, you can begin to introduce them to your product if you have one.

Two Ways to Segment Your Subscriber List

If you’re just starting with your blog then the easy way to do it is simply to tag subscribers based on interests that they signed up for. For instance, you can tag anyone who signed up for a blogging freebie in your blogging sequence. Anyone who subscribed to your mommy freebies in a mom segment and so on and so forth.

Then, in your welcome email to these subscribers, you can have people opt-in to other topics they’re interested in hearing more about by simply clicking a link in your email. It would say something like: “Thank you for signing up for my mom planner. Starting a mom blog was one of the greatest things I did to boost my income as a SAHM. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, click here to get more information.”

If they click on the link, they’re tagged within ConvertKit into your blogging email sequence as well.

You could also do this in the reverse. This works well if you only have one email sequence and everybody is funnelled through that sequence but suddenly you need to send a bunch of emails and you want to have people be able to opt-out of them if they want to, without opting out of your whole list all-together.  What kind of scenario could cause this?

• Maybe you have an upcoming product launch and will be sending people emails every day for the next 5 days until the product either launches or closes. In your first email explaining the product, it’s awesome to let people know that you have a product coming out and will be sending them info over the next few days about it. If they’re not interested and would rather not get the emails about the specific product launch, they can opt-out from just the product launch, but will continue to receive your awesome weekly emails.
• Another scenario this works well for is if you do things like send daily emails around Black Friday with the latest deals or have an upcoming event. Anything where the frequency of your emails will increase, I like to give people the option to opt-out if they’re not interested in hearing about it.

You’ll do your full sales push first of course so people know all the details and then get a chance to decide if they want to hear more or opt-out at the end of your email.

I’d show you how to do all of this step-by-step, but Convertkit has more awesome how-to videos than I do so I’ll end here and remind you again that the free course gets your feet fully wet with Convertkit and you’ll be a pro at all this by the end of the course. Sign up below!

Do you segment your email list? How has this helped you out?

You need an email list no matter your blog size, demographics, intent, niche or target audience needs an email list. Every blogger needs creative opt-in forms and lead magnets to gather emails.

Your Love-Hate Relationship With Email Marketing

The psychology behind our emotions toward email marketing is interesting. We get bombarded with dozens of email each day in our own inboxes so it is understandable why we may have negative emotions towards building our own email list. We barely have time to get through our own emails and often wonder how we ended up on some of these lists!

However.

Emails are still the top method of connecting with an audience. In fact, email is 40% more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. Compare that to the fact that only 2% of your Facebook page’s audience is actually seeing your message (unless you want to shell out for ads.)

A tweet has a lifespan of around 18 minutes on Twitter. 91% of US consumers use email daily with anywhere from 10-60 minutes spent browsing marketing emails each week.

Let’s think about how you personally use emails now. How often do you open a company’s marketing emails? How often do you get annoyed enough to unsubscribe?

How often do you click through to check out what they’re yammering about? How often do you actually make a purchase because of an email you received?

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Why Bloggers Should Focus on Email Marketing

Whether you’re in blogging to make money or simply to connect with your readers, an email marketing campaign is invaluable to your bottom line.

A reader may come across your blog, read and decide it is wonderful and even decide to go ahead and follow you on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest but algorithms and life causes them to never see a post from you again and they’ve moved on.

However, if you had managed to capture their email, you have an open line of communication to that reader so long as they continue to use that email address and remain on your list. Emails are a crucial part of my affiliate marketing income on this blog.

You own your list. If Pinterest decided to implement crazy algorithms like Facebook and Instagram tomorrow, imagine what could happen to your blog’s traffic!

But with this list, no one controls the communication between you and your reader but you and your reader. It’s been reported that for every $1 spent, your email list’s return on that investment is $38. You need to build your list.

How to Build Your Email List

Hopefully, you have by now realised that even if you have no product to sell, you still need a list if only to keep in contact with your audience. Email, with a 40x higher customer acquisition rate than social media, is the crux of building your die-hard tribe.

You will turn your list into raving fans that look forward to your content and will buy anything you sell eventually. Or at least click through to read your post and then share it on social media.

But how do you even begin? The first thing to do is to sign up with an email service provider. I will be giving you two professional options below, one is paid and one is free to begin with.

Convertkit

Convertkit is a premium email service provider that I use on my main blog. What I like about them is how easy it is to use as a newbie, how great their sign-up forms look, how easy it was to embed these sign-up forms into different areas of my blog plus how smooth the email automation process is.

They have a WordPress plugin to connect your forms to your blog and they allow you to attach items in the body of your emails to your subscribers. This is helpful when sending digital products or freebies to your list.

They also have great looking landing pages and make it super easy for a reader to sign up to your email list and begin receiving emails that you have pre-written to go out in a sequence.

If all of this sounds like Chinese to you, read their free Complete Guide to Email Marketing Ebook here.

Mailerlite

Mailerlite is the ESP I use on this blog. I heard about them after I had already signed up for ConvertKit incidentally, and decided to try them out since they’re free. They boast the fact that all they’re paid services are included in the free version.

You begin to pay after you hit 1000 subscribers. That was a very enticing offer, however, I ended up continuing on with Convertkit on my main blog because the features are more powerful, more professional-looking and yet, easier to use.

There are a couple of key features of ConvertKit not available on Mailerlite like the ability to add email attachments. This means that your freebies, products, lead magnets will all have to be hosted somewhere else.

You’ll need to send your subscribers a link to the attachment instead of sending it directly. I wasn’t a fan of having to host my products elsewhere, susceptible to security issues.

ConvertKit’s segmenting of your list and tagging of your list when they click links in your emails are another reason I prefer their more robust suite of features. I manage multiple blogs and wanted to be able to control who gets what email easily.

This is a superb feature if you have just one blog but write about different topics, for instance, mommy bloggers who teach their readers how to start their own blogs. Not all of your audience may be interested in that information so this makes it easier for you to tag them into different email sequences.

Just a couple of advanced features for you to consider when deciding between free and paid. ConvertKit is pretty affordable so if you intend to make money blogging, you’ll want to go with their features from day one or switch to them soon. It will pay for itself very quickly even if you have no product to sell. You’ll find out more on this further in this post.

On the contrast, I won’t discount Mailerlite’s features. They do have lots of features that are perfect for new bloggers and some that are even comparative to Convertkit. 

I still use it on this blog so now I have good experience with both and I must say that while it takes quite a few more clicks to perform the same function in Mailerlite than it might in Convertkit, I’ve gotten over this and looked on the brighter side. FREE!

Not sure how to build an email list? Take my easy and FREE 5-day email list-building course below. I take you through all of this step by step using Mailerlite. You can of course also reach me in the Help a Blogger Out Facebook group if you have any questions.

Creating an Opt-In, Lead Magnet, Landing Page and Email Sequence

I won’t go into incredible detail here as I teach you how to do all of these things in my free list-building course. However, let’s go into what all of these things are. An opt-in is the form used to capture emails. You can easily place one anywhere on your blog or within a blog post, like the one above for my free course.

This opt-in also demonstrates the need for a creative, compelling lead magnet. A lead magnet is a fancy name for a product or service offering, usually free, that is given away in exchange for an email. In the above form, I’m offering to help you build your email list in return for your email.

The point is that you need to come up with a such an attractive lead magnet (also called freebie) that makes me feel compelled to hand over my email address so that I can get my free product or service. It’s not enough to have an opt-in that simply says “Subscribe to our newsletter” or “Get new posts here” or something similar. That evokes absolutely no response from me and is likely to result in much fewer signups than creating a convincing lead magnet.

Landing Page

A landing page is a stand-alone page that has one purpose and one purpose only. That purpose is to capture emails or to sell a product. A landing page is important to help market your freebie or product separate from a blog post.

For instance, though I have created an awesome blog post telling people why they need email marketing, I also have a landing page set up for it for the sole purpose of selling the course.

The landing page is hosted by ConvertKit but uses my domain name thanks to their plugin. As you can see, there’s no other navigation or distraction on this page. You can either sign up or close out the page.

With my blog post, there are lots of other distractions to take you away from the signup form. We see pretty, shiny new things in the sidebar or elsewhere in the post and forget all about why we were there.

Therefore marketing my landing page gets my point across without distraction and converts better than a blog post that also has the promise of Facebook groups and Pinterest strategy in the sidebar.

Email Sequence

If you do sign up for my Pinterest strategy or any other freebie on this blog, you will immediately get your email with a link to download your freebie. Then, you’ll begin to receive other emails I have set up within my ESP to go out after certain days have passed or if you clicked on certain things in my emails.

The type of emails you should be sending, how often and other specifics is something you’ll need lots of research to perfect because what works for one may not work for the other. However, there are some basic sequences to play around with.

For me, I send out your freebie and a link to the post that explains it in detail so that you can refer to it if you need. I also include an invite to join my Facebook group and then wrap up, keeping things pretty succinct.

A few days later I will send out an intro email with my name, my picture, what kind of info is available on my blog and maybe another freebie. I’m offering up so much value here that it’s hard to resist opening. That’s what you’re after.

Then a couple days later a follow-up is sent with an offer to help with any issues encountered using the freebies or for us to connect over a coaching session. The sales people call this a soft-sell, warming you up for the kill…er..the sale.

If they haven’t clicked on my offer to connect, they are moved over to what I call my evergreen sequence where they’re sent snippets of my most valuable posts once per week with the link to click through if they’re interested.

This is all done automatically inside ConvertKit, I haven’t even sent a manual email to my subscribers yet and already I have connected with them in a valuable way.

Email Marketing for Bloggers Made Easy

The point of this all is that you can set up all these emails one-time and forget it. There’s no need to keep sending the same kind of email manually, over and over, everytime you get new subscribers.

Each time you write a cornerstone post or have a new product/freebie, you add that email to your sequence. This is passive income at it’s best since as more people get added to your list, more opportunities for a sale are happening and you didn’t do anything new.

This type of sequence with your best posts, your old freebies and products is important for sales or marketing your best material. It’s not enough to simply gather emails and begin sending them the latest posts on your blog. Bring a constant flow of traffic to your best performers and sell things that you’ve long stopped marketing in lieu of new, higher priced products.

If you have no products yourself, you can link to your best-performing affiliates in your emails. Yet another way to make money from your list and you can tell which links are doing better than others. This kind of data is invaluable.

Recapping this post, if you skimmed:

• You need an email list to grow your tribe and make money with your blog.
• You should begin building your list from day one.
• You need an email service provider that allows you to quickly and easily create opt-ins and landing pages.
• You need an irresistible lead magnet to capture emails.
• You need an awesome sequence of emails that you use to bring attention to old posts, products and freebies.

I truly hope you’ve found this post informative and helpful. I would absolutely love it if you’d join my Facebook Group Help a Blogger Out where we share nuggets of our best blogging tips and resources and inspire bloggers to think outside of the box.

Do you need help building your email list? My free 5-day list-building course will help you to get started. These are the exact steps I used to gain my first 100 subscribers in 30 days. Here’s to you doing that even quicker.

Here to help,

~Mo