One of the most powerful yet under-the-radar marketing strategies in the metablogging community seems to be building an email list, or email marketing.
I did a quick poll with my friends and asked them two questions:
- Are you subscribed to an RSS feed?
- Are you subscribed to an email newsletter?
Most of them were subscribed to some kind of email list or newsletter - from one about fashion and beauty (my sister) to another about php tips (my friend who does programming as a hobby).
Yet most of them didn't know what RSS was.
Many People Can Relate to Email
Based on this poll, most of you are not in a niche that's social media or blogging savvy. This means that most of your readers have no clue about RSS.
Email, on the other hand, is widely used by the general public. People use email at work and to pass on viral content.
Also, in this post, Yaro says that email marketing works well for non-internet marketing topics because many people don't use email marketing well in those niches.
Email Subscribers are High Quality Prospects
Yaro also says that email list subscribers are higher quality prospects than RSS subscribers.
I agree. People treat their email address as sacred. They don't just give it to anyone for fear of being spammed.
I know that I'm a lot more picky with my email subscriptions than my RSS ones. I have 78 feeds on my RSS reader, but I'm only on a handful of email lists.
Also, most people check their email regularly because they don't want to miss an important message from a friend or from work. However, RSS subscriptions can be ignored because you can always go back and read the blog posts later. Checking email is the more important activity for the vast majority of internet users.
Email Marketing Increases Your Repeat Visitors
If most of your target audience does not know what RSS is, you can't rely on it to increase repeat visitors quickly.
However, with an email list, you can point your email subscribers back to your blog.
Email Marketing Gives You Another Income Stream
With an email list, you have another avenue for monetization. You can sell ads, add affiliate links, or link to your own product if you have one.
Email Marketing Allows You to Reuse Old Content
Yaro makes another good point for email marketing. He writes:
Email marketing, at least in some forms, is linear, has a narrower topic focus and allows you to reuse content over and over again as each new subscriber moves through your sequence in order, starting from the beginning. As a result of this structure and refined purpose, email marketing requires less content than blogging, yet is a better conversion tool for selling.
Can you image if every blog reader you have started from the beginning of your blog - your first blog post - and then moved through each post since then consecutively? This is what email marketing is like, but that’s okay because of the nature of and the purpose behind the list.
Should You Get Rid of RSS?
RSS versus email list doesn't have to be an "either or" proposition. You should use both tactics. While email is widely used, RSS is getting more and more recognized as an efficient way to process information from blogs.
Also, RSS and email lists appeal to different members in your target audience. By using both, you'll reach more people.
Feedback
I don't have a lot of visitors on my main blog, but as it grows, I'll be getting an AWeber account so I can start building my own email list. I'll let you know how it goes.
Have you tried building an email list? If you have, what has been your experience with the process?
RSS Feeds Over Email
from my personal experience I rather get rss feeds than email I am much more likely to read it if it's RSS.
Keep both!
I've been marketing online now for over a decade - both RSS and email lists are equally valuable! They can reach a totally different segment of your audience.
Data points, Barbara
RSS can pull double duty as e-mail as well.
I recently wrote about an app on my blog called Nourish which allows you to turn any RSS feed into an e-mail newsletter. This allows you to kill two birds with one stone, providing RSS feeds to the techies yet still having e-mail for the e-mail lovers and using the same content for both which saves time.
You get the best of both worlds!
So true: email is undervalued
A lot of young and tech-savvy people dismiss email as a valuable marketing tool because we simply delete marketing materials that come into our inboxes and use it primarily for our own social and business purposes. We forget that the older generation uses email completely differently than we do. For instance, no young people participate in chain emails anymore. For us, that died five or ten years ago. But chain emails still live on with the older generation. I get them from my parents every day. If any part of your target market is over 50, email is a very powerful way to reach them.
Mailing Lists and RSS compliment each other
I certainly agree that Mailing Lists and RSS feeds are complimentary, not mutually exclusive and both are critical features of any revenue-aspiring blog. I have found that my feed subscribers tend to want to stay right up to date at all times, and I have more success monetizing them from their click throughs to the site primarily through ads and affiliate links. My experience with mailing list subscribers is a little different. On my mailing lists I have better success selling products directly, through a strategy which involves sending a series of emails to whet appetite & pre-sell followed by an onsite sales letter tailored to the mailing list. I find the mailing list subscribers far more accepting of this kind of courtship.
I value both sets of subscribers. At the same time experience has taught me to treat each of them somewhat differently and to tailor the content to each group accordingly.
On the overall subject of the value of mailing lists I absolutely agree with you. I have consistently achieved more revenue per subscriber than revenue per (website) visitor.
Great post, food for thought.
Regards,
Dex
Replies
@Chris Monnat
Thanks for the link!
@Jay and Meta Make Money Online
Excellent points. Thanks for sharing your experiences.
I too as of recent have been
I too as of recent have been thinking, looking into setting up email subs on some of my main blogs.
I just hate to fork over the AWEBER monthly fee. I want to start with a free option, till the list grows, then upgrade to a paid service.
You should write an article on reputable, but FREE email service providers.
Mailing list providers
Missy, I'm not sure how many FREE reputable e-mail mailing list providers there are (if your looking for a hosted solution). Mailing list apps are difficult to build/maintain because of spam filters and such. To get a legitimate message to it's final destination without it being filtered takes a bit of an infrastructure which equates to a cost the provider needs to pass onto it's customer.
Personally, I have never seen the point in paying a monthly fee for a mailing list app because I don't use it enough. I prefer to pay only when I use it. You might want to look at Campaign Monitor. It's a really nice app and you only pay when you send a message (and it's cheap).
Post new comment