Whether you use affiliate marketing, run ads, sell online courses or ebooks, or offer services on your blog, the key to making money is to provide quality content, drive traffic to your website, and most of all – to keep your audience engaged. Email marketing is a powerful tool to achieve these goals.
Chances are you’ve already spent time on finding ways to grow your email list, and on working out an email marketing strategy for your blog. But the landscape of email marketing is evolving quickly, and keeping up with recent developments and trends is vital.
Here are five email marketing strategies to help you engage your subscribers, and monetize your blog in the new decade.
1 – Harness the Power of Automation
Automation capabilities are now a standard feature of most email marketing platforms. But the extent varies widely. Mailchimp, for example, offers basic tools for marketing automation, while the array of automation features of Mailchimp alternatives such as Campaign Monitor or ActiveCampaign are much more comprehensive.
Diving deep into the automation features of your email marketing platform will benefit you massively. Nowadays some email marketing platforms will even coordinate with websites such as Jaynike and help you boost your social media marketing as well.
A simple automated series of emails sent to new subscribers is much more likely to engage than a single welcome email, or no email at all. You can also enhance your campaigns by utilizing business text messaging.
A complex automation campaign with workflows and decision points has an even higher potential. It will take time to work out a system, but then you can personalize the content that each subscriber receives based on whether they opened previous emails, clicked particular links, visited your blog – the possibilities are endless.
And personalized content is indispensable in 2022.
2 – Go All-Out on Personalization
90% of email subscribers favor personalized content. Emails tailored to their interests and the way they interact with your blog increase your chances of building a loyal and engaged audience – and thus of monetizing your blog – considerably.
Email marketing automation enables stronger personalization. But it begins at a far more basic level. Segmenting your email list is the very first step towards generating high-converting personalized email campaigns.
Fundamentally, you can segment by subscriber’s demographics, geographical location, and personal interests. Advanced tools allow further segmentation by past purchase history, blog interactions, and previous email engagement.
3 – Drive Engagement With Interactivity
A prime way of engaging subscribers in 2022 is by integrating interactive elements into your email marketing campaigns.
Surveys, polls, or user-generated content, animated CTA buttons, rollover effects, interactive image carousels, or accordion features that compact long emails all can help capture recipients’ attention.
This also works extremely well for any influencers and brands that are using Instagram to send traffic back to their blogs. You want to grab the attention of the end social user so they take action and not just scroll onto the next image. The same can be said about email marketing and that you want people to see your headline, open it up and then click over to your site or offer.
Luckily, most email marketing platforms now simplify including such interactive content, or offer integrations that can help you do so.
Bonus: How your audience engages with these elements will give you invaluable data for segmentation and personalization.
4 – Make Your Content and Design Accessible
The percentage of emails that are opened on mobile devices rather than desktop clients has increased dramatically – reaching 46% in 2019. That means your email content needs to display perfectly on mobile clients.
But in 2022, accessibility goes much further than responsive design to accommodate the reality of smartphones and tablets. The rise of smart speakers and conversational AI has been swift and all-encompassing, with almost 90 million adult US users as of January 2022.
Adapting your SEO, email marketing content and design to mobile and voice can give you an edge, and helps engage those subscribers who prefer to have their emails read to them.
5 – Keep Up With Content Trends
There are some clear trends in the content that audiences want to see on blogs and in their inboxes in 2022.
One of the biggest out there is user-generated content (UGC).
Whether it’s social media posts, comments on your blog, or reviews, hearing from one of their own will improve audience engagement even on the best blog post. You can harness email marketing to generate UGC – for example by launching a re-engagement campaign that asks for feedback. Then, include that UGC in your next email marketing campaigns.
Video is another major trend. As platforms like TikTok expand, video has become a core element of digital marketing strategies. Video content in emails increases click-through rates by 300%. Just the word “video” in subject lines boosts opening rates by 19%.
The Bottom Line
Developing an email marketing strategy for monetizing your blog is a process that never truly ends. Technology evolves, audience tastes change, new trends arrive.
This is what you need to do in 2022 to make the most out of email marketing: Stay on top of your automation and personalization game, include interactive elements and trend-aware content in your mails, and keep your design accessible.
