This is a guest post by Paul Cunningham from Blogging Teacher.
To your subscribers, your mailing list is like a cup of coffee. Too hot and they can’t drink it. Too cold and it loses its appeal. But when you get the temperature just right they will enjoy what you serve up to them.
Subscribers will find your mailing list too hot if you send them new messages too frequently. On the other hand, if you go months or even years without sending them anything then your list will go cold as their attention shifts elsewhere.
Keeping your list at just the right temperature doesn’t need to be a lot of work. In fact with the right systems in place it can be very simple, and allows you to efficiently leverage your efforts by reusing content in multiple ways.
Here are three methods you can use to keep your mailing list warm.
Publish Your Blog Posts to Your List
When you are already writing blog posts it makes a lot of sense to deliver them via email to your mailing list subscribers. You might think that all blog subscribers would prefer to use RSS, but in reality RSS is not a heavily adopted technology and many of your readers will not have even heard of it, let alone understand how to setup an RSS reader and check it daily.
Email on the other hand is familiar to almost every person who is on the internet today, and your subscribers are already used to using it every day.
The leading email marketing service providers like Aweber have features that let you send your RSS feed via email to your list. Aweber calls this a Blog Broadcast. It is easy to set up the feed, a nice template, and a schedule, and then all you have to do to maintain it is keep writing your great blog posts.
If you are a frequent blogger then you can set the Blog Broadcast to only send once or twice per week on certain days, to avoid annoying your readers with too many emails.
Autoresponders
Autoresponders are simply automated messages that are sent to your list on a fixed schedule. Mailing list subscribers will appreciate getting bonus content from you via email at regular intervals. This content can be the same style as your blog posts, but by keeping it exclusive to your mailing list if acts as both a signup incentive as well as a way to keep your list warm with original, valuable content.
It is perfectly fine use autoresponders to promote products or services to your list, but try to keep a high ratio of free content to promotions so that your subscribers don’t feel like they are just constantly being pitched to buy something.
Newsletters
The final technique I will mention is newsletters. A regular newsletter can be very valuable to your list subscribers if it efficiently delivers good information that they can fit into their busy schedules.
An example of good newsletter usage would be a monthly email in which you include:
- 1 short personal message
- 1 piece of original content such as a short article, tip or tutorial
- Links and summaries of your best blog posts from that month
- 1 advertisement or product promotion
Newsletters take a little bit more work to put together because each one is unique, but you can still get good long term value out of them by including a link to your newsletter archives so that new subscribers can look back through your previous editions if they want.
Pulling It All Together
Once you have decided to use these techniques to keep your list warm it is important to take a step back and look at the overall picture. Trying to do too much at once can turn away your subscribers, or worse burn you out and make your list marketing inconsistent and ineffective.
Aim for a steady, reliable pace that you can maintain in the long term. My suggestion is to use a combination of those three techniques that will result in:
- 1 blog broadcast per week
- 1 autoresponder every second week (middle of the month, but on a day that your blog broadcast doesn’t also go out)
- 1 monthly newsletter
This type of schedule sees you making contact with your list at least once per week, delivering lots of valuable free content, and keeping them at just the right temperature so that they stay subscribed.
Paul Cunningham writes articles, tips and tutorials at Blogging Teacher to help bloggers overcome the many challenges they face building a successful blog. Follow him on Twitter at @paulcunningham.
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