Using email to promote your content marketing Published April 9, 2015 The importance of promoting your content can not be underestimated. Your blog could be an online field of dreams when it comes to useful and entertaining content, but the adage that “if you build it, he will come” may not be true. You need to spread your incredible content far and wide using as many channels as possible for it to live up to its full potential. Although social media is becoming an increasingly popular tool for sharing content, many of the web’s most popular writers still swear by their email newsletters. Adding a content link to your email can be like adding fire to gasoline, if you do it properly. How to promote content marketing in your email newsletter Depending on the amount of content created, marketers could either blast an email to their subscribers every time a new post is published or they could send out a regular email with links to multiple articles. Either way, they should take the time to ensure that all the posts have a unique introduction explaining why the article may be of interest to their readers. This tends to drive a lot more engagement than a bland message sent by automated email software. If you’re linking to a white paper or another form of long-form content, it might be worth creating an artsy HTML email urging subscribers to take a look. Sharing video content in a email marketing campaign Video has become one of the hottest topics amongst email marketing experts over the last couple of years. It has become feasible to embed playable videos within the body of an email, although they are not compatible with all email clients. Marketers who provide a clickable thumbnail which takes subscribers to a video on the web are seeing success in some quarters. In fact, a recent study by Forrester Marketing Group has indicated that emails with links to video inside tend to attract more than double the amount of click-throughs. Links to online videos seem to be a better option than embedded videos at the moment. This will probably remain the case until embeddable videos work on all of the major email clients. Even then, it might still be better to steer subscribers to your website, as this is the goal of most marketing emails anyway. Make sure your content stands out on mobile Video has become one of the hottest topics amongst email marketing experts over the last couple of years. It The ever-increasing proportion of has arguably the most prominent email marketing trend over the last couple of years. In October 2013, an Experian Marketing Services study suggested that half of all unique emails were now opened on smartphones or tablets, so it goes without saying that your email newsletter needs to be optimised for these devices. What’s more, it’s worth ensuring that the web pages on which your content is stored is also optimised for mobile, so that it has every chance of drawing great levels of engagement. Social media is great for sharing content but email gets your content in front of people that need to see it. Don’t leave your audience wandering through virtual cornfields searching for your great content. Add it to your email newsletters and watch the traffic spread like wildfire.