Tope Olofin: How to use email marketing to get more eyes on your blog post (Y! Superblogger)

by Tope Olofin

Email-Marketing

Just think for a second, how do you feel when you get a personal email from a friend? Even if it is a nasty mail. You will almost always read it. Biko, e get all the fashionable banners or outrageously designed fonts?

Did I ever complain about the rain? Let me correct that. I love the rain oh, especially when it’s on the verge of becoming a storm. It gives me a good reason to come late to work.  But if you get a query, don’t blame me, I didn’t give you any guarantee that it will work for you.

About yesterday, there was no post simply because I am playing around with the Google Adsense thing. Let me just announce to my friends, family and those that wish me well, no overdo am by helping click countless of times on the ads oh, Google will suspend me and frankly speaking I can’t deal with that right now.

With that said, I want to do a quick shout out to Olaitan Ajiboye. Although our one hour or so conversation had him benefit more than I did (you said so oh), I was happy to rub minds and learn a few tips off him. He gets a shout out today because he has become another loyal reader. See how I shower love and appreciate my fans. You better become one or DIE!

What took me on that tangent sef? Now I can’t remember what I wanted to rant about….maybe it’s email marketing and some tips I picked up…abeg, you will just have to manage it o because I am currently working on another blog post, I should say “uncalled for assignment” that one troublesome blogger  is forcing me to do. It’s called BEING ME. Finish this, before reading that.

So what about email marketing…

I feel that at some point every blogger needs to get into email marketing and autoresponder.

Why?

Well for starters, all the automated emails from WordPress informing you subscribers that a new blog post is out seems a bit impersonal and often times is redirected straight to the trash bin. And mind you, you got their emails legally.

For those who buy the emails…and couple it with all the email templates on GetResponse, Awebber, Mail Chimp and the list goes on, na sure banker say you dey go trash bin or spam folder.

Here are a few ways I avoided that and even that doesn’t guarantee it will be a win-win. It just curbs it. That one na my own disclaimer.

Strip the template: Just think for a second, how do you feel when you get a personal email from a friend? Even if it is a nasty mail. You will almost always read it. Biko, e get all the fashionable banners or outrageously designed fonts? No! Yet you read it. The watch word is “personal”. So apply the same to your email marketing campaigns. Strip it until it looks like a normal mail. The font I like to use is Arial, size 14 or 15.  Do this and at least one mail will thank you for saving it from hell.

Subject line: Just like I suggested for your blog post headlines, you stand a better chance if your mail subject line has one of these three characteristics…curiosity, fear or outlines a benefit. Again, the automated headlines is just wrong. If you are smart enough to collect their names, then it will be wise to add in the subject line. Wait na, that one is automated…but they don’t have to know that.

Secondary send, different title: Because of the millions of marketing materials thrown at us the consumers per second, we have grown blind to it all, so chances are a lot still won’t open the mail. Bingo, your subject line didn’t pick their interest, so do another send, but only to those who didn’t open the mail and this time, change the title. If you used the curiosity slant, then change it to a benefit. You get the scope.

More links: I won’t talk about the length of the mail, because I am biased to short mails, but I know my baby sister, Pearl Omotoyinbo swears by long mails, so I will just say this, wherever you are sending them to, be sure to include not less than 3 links in that single mail. It is advisable that all links go to one particular page. Don’t ask me why.

Collect email legally: This should have been the first, but trust my upside down brain to go haywire. There is no hard and fast rule to this. Either you use the subscription method or you create a free offer. But I won’t go any further because I have to pee.

 

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Tope Olofin loves to rant. She is a boisterous and hilarious English graduate from the University of Lagos. She believes life’s experiences are priceless and the best way to capture it is by writing. She blogs atwww.toperants.com and tweets @toperants

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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