5 Ways to Successfully Combine Email and Content

Any great marketing strategy includes email marketing and content marketing – the powerhouses of digital marketing. Leveraging both of these channels is an integral part of promoting your brand.

Depending on the industry, email marketing can have an ROI of as much as $45 per invested dollar. And content marketing can justify its cost in as many as 98% of cases in the B2B sector.

Impressive, huh?

But what if you were to combine the strength of email and content marketing to create an omnichannel campaign for the greatest reach and effect? Like we said, powerhouse.

How to combine email and content marketing for maximum effect

When joined into a single strategy, content marketing and email marketing complement and enhance each other. Together, they contribute a massive amount to the overall success of your digital marketing campaigns.

Let’s take a look at how you can get these two types of marketing to work together.

Use email to promote your content sources

In your content creation process, you have probably produced tons of quality content that you publish through various sources – a blog on your website, a YouTube channel, a publishing platform like Medium. However, that’s only half of the job, you also need to show your audience where to look for content updates and know what to follow to stay up to date.

On the other hand, you have your email marketing plan set up and running. Why not use it to attract more attention to your content sources? You can include references to them in every email you send out.

A good practice is to place links to your blog or video channel together with your social media icons. They are usually located at the bottom of the message, and email recipients will know where to look if they want to subscribe.

See, for example, how the Amazon Alexa development team does it – it posts a link to its blog together with its social media profiles at the bottom of each newsletter.

Include social media sharing options in email messages

While we’re on the subject of social media, they are another place to share your marketing content effectively. To increase your social media reach and bring in new followers, use your email channels to promote your social network accounts, too.

Include links to your social media profiles in the footer of your email template. This way, they will not distract the reader from the main message you plan to deliver but still stay visible for the user if they wish to follow you. 

Check out this example email from PortAventura, an amusement park in Spain, below – its footer contains links to all the resort’s social media accounts, and you can choose any of them to follow.

Produce different types of content to include in your emails

In your content marketing campaigns, you can – and should – produce different types and formats of content for different channels and audiences.

You can publish:

• blog posts for general informational and educational purposes,
• whitepapers for communicating with B2B customers,
• Infographics for visual learners,
• videos for quick audiovisual information sharing,
• long-form videos for more advanced education.

While your blog can offer regular updates on your business or product, the rest of your website can provide a comprehensive knowledge base to support prospective and existing customers. You can share and repurpose content between different channels for better efficiency and consistency.

Finally, don’t forget to include various types of content in your email messages and newsletters. You can either embed content directly or just add previews with links to the corresponding resources.

For example, when you get a message from Houzz Magazine, a resource for interior design ideas, you can immediately see whether Houzz has provided a new video or article for you. You can click the Watch Now link and jump to the video player page right from the email message.

Use email segmentation to send personalized content

Email segmentation may seem a bit tricky but it is definitely worth the effort. With segmentation, you are sending content curated according to the recipient’s profile. Such an approach increases the chances that your messages are opened and actually read rather than blocked as more spam.

So, how should you segment your emails to deliver content that is right for the recipient?

Firstly, you need to research your recipients’ profiles and determine the topics they may be interested in and the formats that are the most engaging for them. Secondly, you need to produce lots of different content to cater to your recipient personas. But again, it is well worth the effort.

You can intersperse your general content with curated pieces to keep your audience interested and engaged. The hardest part, however, is to determine what to send to whom.

This task can a lot become easier if you use AI-based marketing tools, such as rasa.io, to bring automation into the email segmentation process. The tool helps to create unique newsletters delivering content tailored to the recipient’s profile based on their previous engagement with you. As a result, the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns grows.

To increase the email open rate, enhance segmentation with catchy subject lines that announce personalized messages.

Send newsletters to drive traffic to your content source

Content + email marketing: greater than the sum of its parts

In a truly successful marketing strategy, all areas and components integrate with and complement each other smoothly and seamlessly creating a single efficient system. When you join content and email marketing, you are making the most of both strategies by fusing the reach of your email base with the engagement powers of your unique content.

Surely, it takes a lot of effort to build a successful marketing campaign involving both email and content. However, at the end of the day, you will enjoy the increase in your organization’s conversions – whatever that means to you – sales, membership renewals, webinar registrations, email list sign-ups. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what your conversions are, combining email and content will help you boost them!  and customer engagement metrics and, ultimately, sales.