This is the kick off to our annual January Blog Challenge: 31 Days To Clean Up Your Blog. What better time than January to sit down and review your blog? Over the 31 days we'll be sharing 31 tips, ideas, and strategies for you to deal with all those pesky maintenance tasks, take steps to grow in the new year and make blogging easier. This is Day 25.
How many of you have email subscribers? Hopefully at this point you all do!
How often do you simply send out your latest blog post via an automated service from Mailchimp or Feedburner and that's that?
If this is you or if you haven't sent an email out to your list in ages or... ever... then today's challenge is for you!
Why You Need To Email Your Subscribers
Why do you need an email list? And why do you need to use it?
Your email subscribers are your core group of readers who want to hear from you. They gave you their email address. People don't do that unless they expect you to... well... EMAIL THEM.
These are your people. Your fans. They like what you have to say. Most of them have probably already read the latest post on your blog and they want something else - something more. Something to make them feel special and connected.
These are the people who will buy your book, your digital product, your workshops, your courses, click on your affiliate links. They're hot leads that you want to keep warm and engaged.
We're not talking about spamming them daily or constantly asking them to buy things or sign up for things. We just want you to send them an email about something other than your latest post!
What Do You Send Subscribers?
We are such big proponents of email newsletters that we recently wrote an entire series on how to use email with your blog. Everything from getting started to more advanced topics like email funnels. You can read our entire series on email newsletter marketing here.
Included in that series was this article with 25 Email Newsletter Content Ideas For Food Bloggers. We guarantee you'll find something in that list that you can send out to your readers this week.
How Often Should You Email Them?
Finding a balance of how often to send out email is tricky and there's no right or wrong answer. As somebody who writes email newsletters for multiple clients, I know that some people have lists that tolerate high volumes of email - daily or every other day.
For other clients lists the frequency might be much less - once a week, once every two weeks or even once a month (I don't recommend less than once a month or people tend to forget why they signed up and unsubscribe)
You 'll need to experiment to find the right balance for your list. If in doubt, err on the side of too few over too much to start and then gently increase the frequency until you get push back in the form of a significant increase in unsubscribes. Your audience will usually tell you quite definitively when you've crossed the line. Don't spam.
Don't forget - you should be making it easy for them to subscribe! If you did Day 4 of the challenge you've probably already taken care of that!
More Reading
- Choosing An Email Newsletter Provider For Your Food Blog
- 6 Ways To Monetize Your Newsletter
- Tips For Maintaining a Healthy Email List
- 5 Ways to Take Your Email List To the Next Level
Pin For Later
You can unsubscribe any time!
I was wondering how to turn a subscriber list into a newsletter mailing list! Thank you!
Thanks for this tutorial! I have used MailChimp in the past to send out newsletters.