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Email Roundup: The Best from Blogs
Does your blog has a faithful following? If so, it probably brings in a decent amount of income for you. Or maybe you’re just starting out your blog, looking for ways to monetize and grow. Either way, you need to tap into the power of email marketing.
Email marketing keeps you connected with the readers you rely on and allows you to automate important series, so you can take some tasks off your plate and do the work you love.
And when you’re an entrepreneur (like all bloggers are), any tool that saves you time and energy is worth the investment.
The 8 best emails from blogs
But what emails should your blog send? You want to keep your readers informed but you don’t want to overwhelm them either. Good email marketing is about balance, and luckily it isn’t as hard as it sounds to figure out what emails and what series of emails will build your brand.
In fact, these 8 blogs already send great emails to their devoted readers.
Read on to discover what works, why, and how you can borrow from the best.
1. Easy Cheesy Vegetarian
The best thing about email is that it’s such a personal form of communication. You know how important it is to the success of your blog to be present: to interact with your readers through comments, comment on any shares, and stay in touch.
This email from Easy Cheesy Vegetarian does a great job keeping the personal touch front and center. The very first thing the reader sees is a short, personal note from the blogger herself, telling the subscriber exactly what they’re seeing (i.e. that this is the newest post on the blog) and inviting them to get in touch and share.
When people talk about email, they obsess over how to get people to engage with their emails and share their blog posts. After all, having devoted readers vouch for your blog and share with their like-minded friends is one of the best ways to grow your audience organically and free of charge. But people forget one of the easiest ways to ensure your emails accomplish this: Just ask.
If you’re looking to grow your audience—and what blogger isn’t?—consider adding a personal note to your readers asking them to share your email with their friends.
2. Aesop’s Digest
You’ve probably heard of the Australian brand Aesop, but did you know they also run a blog on their website? They send emails that share some of their best content with their readers, ensuring they don’t miss anything Aesop has to offer.
This email does a great job of sharing timely information: You can see they offer a gift guide for Mother’s Day as well as information on an upcoming festival. If their readers don’t see these posts right away, they lose their value.
So, in order to make sure their loyal readers have the most up to date information possible, this email points subscribers to the most time-sensitive articles, including the latest edition of The Paris Review.
Speaking of The Paris Review, another aspect of Aesop’s email your blog should implement is to offer information that isn’t directly related to making sales. Consider your ideal audience, who they are and what they like, and then include curated articles and links to pieces that relate to your readers’ interests, even if they aren’t on your blog.
Your readers will appreciate that you send more than just promotional emails.
3. Lyndi Cohen, The Nude Nutritionist
Bloggers know that content is king and this email from Lyndi Cohen The Nude Nutritionist knows it, too. Great visuals might bring in traffic from Instagram and Pinterest, but if you don’t have stellar content, people won’t stay on your site and they won’t keep coming back, time and again.
So don’t forget about plain text emails. Depending on your audience and your niche—like this nutritionist whose content is meant to empower and inform—consider sending plain text emails instead of HTML.
For instance, this email still includes a link for subscribers to keep reading as well as a quick and encouraging personal note for the holidays. The link pushes people to her site and the encouraging note is true to her brand identity and builds the trust and community her subscribers have come to expect.
Plain text emails executed well can save you time and still deliver the results you want from your email marketing strategy.
4. El Camino Travel
The El Camino Travel blog is all about empowering readers to be travelers, not tourists, and their emails focus on what makes their brand unique: great style and a personal touch.
El Camino Travel has clearly spent time developing their brand voice, which shines through in their emails. As a blogger, you know how important it is to develop recognizable branding. Your images, your text, the design and style of everything you produce should be recognizable to your readers.
For instance, the colors in this email from El Camino Travel match the colors and design of their website from the orange header, beige body, and blue accents. When a person signs up for your emails, they expect to get the same design and messaging they saw on your website or social profiles that motivated them to sign up in the first place. If they get an email that’s unrecognizable, they’ll feel cheated, like discovering a great song from a band and realizing the rest of their songs aren’t as good.
5. Cereal Magazine
Based out of the United Kingdom, Cereal Magazine shares stories on travel and style, focusing on unique design and destination. As you would imagine, their blog and their emails are beautiful and highly valuable.
Cereal’s emphasis on style and design carries through to their emails. Beautiful images accompany each story they share from their latest issue, catching the reader’s attention through visuals and a short snippet of writing. The sleek, minimalist design not only matches the aesthetic of the magazine itself but also ensures there are no distractions from the CTAs that invite the subscriber to click through to Cereal’s website.
6. UX Notebook
This email from the UX Notebook is another email that’s light on the visuals and heavy on the content.
You know what makes your blog unique, what keeps your readers coming back to your site for more. Maybe it’s your quirky tone or your educational information, but whatever it is, it’s the special something that people like to see. So be sure that your emails cater to your strengths.
You won’t overwhelm your subscribers by playing to your strengths. That’s not to say you should send the exact same information in your emails that’s already live on your blog, but you should use your emails to share the information your blog is known for.
7. A Beautiful Mess
This email from A Beautiful Mess shares some of their favorite products and recipes from across the blog. They also feature some of their top products for sale.
This email provides two separate options for readers to click through to their website and shop, one CTA top of the fold and one beneath it. While you don’t want to provide too many CTAs and overwhelm your subscribers, keeping two similar CTAs as primary helps direct traffic where you want it to go.
If you want to include multiple areas for your readers to click through, consider adding in line links. That way, your readers still have the option, but your primary goal of the campaign retains its focus. If you offer too many conflicting links, your readers won’t click on any of them.
8. Dense Discovery
Dense Discovery, the newsletter for Offscreen Magazine, shares important news their readers want to hear.
Dense Discovery also makes it simple and easy for readers to support their publication by including subtle links to sponsor their next issue, booking an ad, and sharing with a friend. They make it easy for their readers to give back, and they make sure the issues their customers love keep coming.
Wrap up
As a blogger, email marketing can help you grow your audience and cultivate a richer connection with the readers you already have. You know how to create killer content, so carrying that through to email marketing is simple: an extension of what you’re already doing. There are few things you could be doing that are as simple (and powerful) as email marketing, especially when it comes to turning your blog into big business.
Some tips for when you start creating your emails:
- Maintain the branding your readers recognize
- Share the types of content your blog is already known for
- Make sure to keep your primary goal for your email campaign clear by using prominent buttons for your CTA
- Make it easy for readers to support your blog by including links to share the email and contribute
- Maintain the same style and design aesthetic across all your channels, including your email marketing
Your blog can be your business and email marketing can help you make it happen. Whether taking the next step for your blog means monetization or growing your audience, email marketing can be the tool you need.
