On this interview, Lauren Pawell from Bixa Media shares why email marketing is absolutely crucial to your business. This blog post comes from the show notes. For even more details on how to improve your email marketing, listen to the episode!
In this episode you’ll learn:
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- Why email marketing is crucial to your business
- Why you need to be collecting emails from your readers, even if you don’t plan on selling a product
- The two biggest mistakes you’re making and how to fix them
- Two actions to level up your email marketing
Subscribe to the Blissful Bites podcast in iTunes to listen to Lauren.
Email Marketing is Crucial To Your Blog + Business
When it comes to a food blog or really any business, emails are important because that’s the way you’re going to stay in touch with your audience. So if you think about everyone who comes into your blog, all that website traffic you get, all those visitors you worked so hard for, if they don’t give you permission to contact them again, they might leave and they might never hear from you.
If you’re able to convert a website visitor into an email subscriber, you then have this traffic source that you can continue to talk to, again every time you post content and you can leverage them. They can be as a part of your VIP audience, the people who are your most important visitors. Now keep those subscribers coming back to your blog time and time again because you remind them that you exist. Perhaps more importantly, include them in the on-going story of your food blog. Then this is the audience you turn to if you ever are going to sell a product, they’re going to be the first one to buy because they’ve grown up with you and followed out.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t have any intentions on creating a product.” Is it really important to get people on my list?
Yes, even if you don’t have to have any intentions of creating a product. How are you going to get people come back time and time again to read your post besides just remembering your site? If you’re in their inbox every week, and you let them know about the new content that you’ve posted, that gives them a reminder. For example, our food blog is Something New For Dinner, and you get an email and say“Oh something new for dinner posted a new recipe, I’m going to go take a look at it.”
If you don’t do that, you’re waiting for someone to keep you topped of mind and you know a lot of things happened in your day. Someone’s going to remember you, of all the websites they’ve been on, and comeback week after week, and without email, the picture is going to be a tougher challenge. So you don’t have to sell anything, it’s just a way you keep your most important audience close to you and a way for you to build a relationship with them so you can understand what they like, what content they like, what content they don’t like. And you’ll just keep sending them back to your site every time you post a new content.
Want to post less on your blog and get more traffic? Fix up your old posts! Download this checklist to figure out what you should be updating!
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The Two Biggest Mistakes You’re Making in Email Marketing
- No clear call to action in an obvious placing sign up for my newsletter. Often times this might be on the side bar, or this might be towards bottom of the side but it’s not obvious in a way that forces the visitor to make a choice. When it’s on your side bar for example, someone doesn’t have to make a choice to continue reading the content, they don’t have to add their email or not to continue reading the content. If you have a pop up or something that’s obvious as a pop up, something has to say, “do I want to hear more from this person?” Yes, or “can I input my email?” or “I don’t want to hear more from this person” so I close it out. If you don’t give someone that choice they’re most likely not going to take the action you want. Being a little more obvious, even though sometimes the people get pushed back, they say, “oh my gosh, pop ups are so annoying.” You’ll see, that alone will increase your subscriber rate insignificantly.
- When people just say “sign up for my newsletter” and they don’t offer any sort of incentive to sign up. What do I mean by incentive? It doesn’t have to be like you often see on an e-commerce site someone most have like, 5% off for a first time customer. Maybe it’s a compilation of your most popular blog posts you put in a PDF format. And then you say, sign up to receive my favorite top ten recipes. Or maybe you’ll just email those out in an email format. That gives someone incentive to sign up. Right now you get requests for so many newsletters sign ups, but that alone isn’t enough to convince someone to sign up or to opt in.
Examples of Lead Magnets
It depends on what your blogging about. If you’re a food blog, it might be 5 kitchen tools that you need to have in your kitchen or 5 drinks you want to make in your home bar. If you don’t want to repackage all your old content, you can come up with something new, it can be a one page pdf that just lists those tools and why you like them. That’s one way to do it, the other way it to just look at your google analytics and find your most popular post. Then package that in a PDF.
Two Actions to Implement Now to Level Up Your Email Marketing
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- Go get a popup on your site. There’s a few different ways you can do this: sumo me or hello bar, are two good choices. They work on any type of site whether it’s WordPress or not. They have a couple different types of popups, some would just like a top bar or your side bar. I’m sure you have seen them on food blogs that are little less obvious. Go install that and start collecting emails subscribers from your regular website traffic.
- Design a great lead magnet: that freebie or incentive you use to replace your call to action from sign up to my newsletter, to sign up to receive my free best recipe or whatever it is. Those would be the two thing I would do to start leveling up your email marketing or at least start collecting the emails subscribers.
Click Here to Access Checklist!
Helpful Links Mentioned in the Episode:
- Join Lauren’s Emails That Generate course: To sign up for the waitlist, click here.
- Check out Lauren’s blog post where she details the steps we took to materially increase her email subscribers…from 6 new subscribers a month to 212 new subscribers per month.
- HotJar — Technology you can add to your site to collect feedback through surveys.
- How I Made $10,000 In 24 hours With My First Product (A Case Study) — A great tutorial by Bryan Harris of Videofruit that walks you through an idea validation process. My own beta launch was inspired by this article.
As the founder of Bixa Media, Lauren Pawell loves helping entrepreneurs turn their WordPress and Shopify websites into revenue-generating powerhouses. To improve your
email marketing performance in 11 days, sign up for her free course here.
Find Lauren!
Website: bixamedia.com
Instagram: @bixamedia
Twitter: @bixamedia
Facebook: Bixa Media
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