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Subscribe in a reader9 Tips for Leveraging Synergies of Email & Social Media
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Email Marketing | February 4th, 2010Are you using social media to promote your email marketing efforts? Are you using your email marketing to promote your social media efforts? The easier you can make it for people to go between the two, the more connections and touchpoints you’ll forge. Here are 9 tips to help you do just that.
Promote your Email Newsletter on your Blog
Feature your email newsletter on your blog and provide a way for your blog readers to subscribe to it. Promote it in the sidebar of your blog near the top of each page. Be sure to include a link to a sample issue.
Link to your Blog
Somewhere in your email—either in the sidebar, header, or footer—promote a link to your blog. Have options for them to subscribe to the blog, either through RSS or via email. That way you can gain people as both email and blog subscribers. Not only does this give you two media through which you can reach your contacts, but it provides a back-up conduit, in case people for some reason unsubscribe from your email or your email is later blocked (e.g., change in recipient’s spam filtering).
Link to your Social Media Profiles
Put links to your social media profiles in your email marketing. Email marketing goes out whenever you send it. But you’re not going to send it every day. Perhaps only once a month. But if you promote links to your social media profiles, email recipients can connect with you on LinkedIn or Facebook, or discover and follow you on Twitter, where you can have additional and more frequent touchpoints.
Post Email Content to Your LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn is one of the most popular social media sites for people in the B2B realm. Assuming your email marketing content continues on your site, you should promote that content in the LinkedIn groups to which you belong. Members of LinkedIn groups choose to get either a daily or weekly digest of activity within the group. That activity includes members’ postings of news, discussions, and other information. If you have good content that continues on your site, you should submit that content and its URL as a news or discussion item within relevant groups.
In posting to LinkedIn groups, you can link to either the web version of your newsletter or to individual stories within it. Either way, however, you want readers to understand that the content came from an email newsletter and they can subscribe to it. For that reason, it may be best to link to the web version of the email. Just make sure the web version has a clear and obvious button that allows readers to subscribe. Also, if you’re trying to point people to, let’s say, the third story in the web version of your email newsletter, be sure to insert named anchors in the web version and use URLs with named anchors as links to that content. That way, people who click through won’t have to figure out which of the four articles in your newsletter you’re trying to reference. In posting to LinkedIn groups, however, remember to also post and cite others’ content. It’s good social media etiquette. If all you do is promote your own content, you’re really not contributing to the group. You’re simply using it as a sales platform. People can easily see the difference. (more…)
35 Content Ideas for B2B eNewsletters
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Email Marketing | November 5th, 2009
This is not another “How to” article for creating newsletters. Rather, this is a “What to” article, with 35 B2B eNewsletter content ideas to help you think about “what” to write about. There are in fact, a number of excellent resources with “How to” tips for creating, producing, publishing, and managing newsletters—including our own B2B Email Marketing Best Practices eBook. This list on the other hand, is intended to poke you, prod you, make you think and give you ideas about where to look to generate stories that make relevant, meaningful, engaging, and entertaining content for B2B email marketing. Of course, the ideas are also great for business blogging as well. Have more ideas? Please use the comments to add to the list. (more…)
9 Onsite Tips for Maximizing Visibility of B2B Email Marketing Newsletters
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Email Marketing | October 19th, 2009Your B2B email marketing should be much more than putting together the email and pressing send. Given that most B2B email marketing newsletter content continues on your site, there are some important things that you should remember to maximize the online visibility of your newsletter. In doing so, you help ensure your content marketing gets found by many more people than just those in your email marketing databases.
Remember SEO
Most email marketing newsletters carry abstracts or snippets of the stories. Readers then click through to a website to continue reading. If you’ve got good email marketing content you’re going to post on a public part of your site—content for which you’d like to get found via organic search—optimize your content for the search engines. Make sure your email copywriters understand SEO. All the best practices for website SEO apply here—keyword-rich content, title tags, alt tags, headings, meta descriptions, URLs, etc. (more…)
B2B Email Marketing Best Practices eBook
Galen De Young ( @GalenDY ) | B2B Email Marketing | August 28th, 2009
Our new eBook:
- Features more than 130 best practices, strategies, and tips for B2B email marketing
Focuses on the most popular type of B2B email marketing—content marketing, such as email newsletters
Goes beyond the email itself, discussing how to integrate and leverage social media, web analytics, and search engine optimization
Covers general email marketing issues, as well as those specific to B2B marketing
Hot off the press, our new, 58-page eBook is a comprehensive guide to improving your B2B email marketing practices. We put this book together to help our clients and friends improve the results of email marketing to other businesses. (more…)
