Letter #89: Using email to distribute blog content
In an ideal world, I’d rename ‘content distribution’ as ‘content repurposing’ simply because the former sounds so intimidating.
Doesn’t it?
But distribution is far wider than content recycling. It involves:
And also sharing it with your email list — which is exactly what we’ll talk about today 🙌
And I don’t mean the ‘dump link, hit send’ approach. Because the expert we have today, Maria Marchewka advises against it.
Maria is the Senior Brand Marketing Manager at Newswire who focuses on who the email is for (leads or customers) when planning her email distro campaigns.
“Think of the angle as the seed of success,” Maria says. “The main message stays the same, but when writing to two different audiences, the angle changes.”
Because: “What works for our customers might not resonate with leads and vice versa.”
Now for the 3 regular questions we always ask our guests:
A mistake Maria made when using email to distribute content
An actionable tip to help you better earn your email list’s trust
And, a secret tip for using email for content distribution
Lezggo:
👉 Learn from Maria’s mistake: “Saying too much in one email”
“I tried to touch on too many points, resulting in a long email with multiple call-to-action (CTA) buttons,” Maria admits.
‘When I noticed my click-through rates were consistently low, I knew I had to make a change.”
The change Maria made? Focusing on one point per email.
“That one point became the main message of the campaign, and everything from the subject line to the CTA button mirrored it.
For example, let’s say I was promoting a listicle with five tips on how to write better headlines.
Instead of giving a preview of every tip in the article, I’d focus on one of the five.
The headline would tease that one tip, the body copy would highlight it, and the CTA would encourage the reader to learn the other four tips in the article.”
👉 Do this today: Organize and pre-plan
“It all starts with being organized and planning out campaigns in advance.
“By using a tool like Monday (dot) com, I can see the big picture of my email campaigns to make sure I’m adding variety to my content and posting cadence.”
Bonus tip: Test your subject lines
“Your subject line is what gets people to click or not. That’s why you have to put time and effort into writing subject lines. I test everything from questions to statements and lists to emojis.”
👉 The secret tip to winning at distributing your content using email: Test colors.
“Whether it’s the backgrounds of the body text or the CTA button. Colors matter.
“For example, I ran an email last week, and A/B tested the background color of the CTA section. The version with a dark blue background outperformed the version with a light blue background – 49 clicks compared to 11.
Though it was only one test, it gave me some insights to apply in future email campaigns to test the theory more.”
That’s all for today folks.
Have a great rest of the week,
Masooma