220: What You Should Include in Your Email Newsletters

What You Should Include in Your Email Newsletters (and Answers to 4 FAQs About Email) Do you email your blog readers regularly? Maybe you put ‘set up email newsletter’ on your ‘someday’ list ages ago, but still haven’t done it. Or maybe you have a newsletter list, but you haven’t sent one in months. You might think it’s optional – something you can do once you've finished everything else on your to-do list. You might even think email is dead (or at least old-fashioned), and that you’re better off building connections through social media. (Which is nothing new, by the way. I was talking about bloggers having similar concerns nine years ago.) The truth is, email is still one of the best ways (if not the best way) to connect with your blog’s readers. Email is a big part of my strategy on both of my blogs. It drives traffic, and helps us build our community, understand who's reading our blog, and monetize both directly and indirectly. If you’re not using it, you really are missing out. But what do you email? What is the content you include in your communications? Email can be used in many ways, and you can sent a variety of email types. But today I want to talk about creating a regular email newsletter, which for me is the foundation of my email strategy. A few of the most common questions I get about newsletters and email strategy: What tool should I use? (we use Drip and also recommend ConvertKit) What content should I put in my emails? What format should they be in – plain text, rich text, HTML? How frequently should I send emails? What other types of emails should I consider sending? How do I get more subscribers? (I'm not going to cover this today, but recommend you listen to episodes 68 and 69) Links and Resources on What to Include in Your Email Newsletters: How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money Comparing Email Service Providers for Bloggers 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs an Email Newsletter 3 Examples of Content You Can Include in Your Email Newsletter Other Podcasts On Similar Topics: PB117: Case Study – How One Blogger Used a Blog Post, SlideShare Deck, Lead Magnet, Email Sequence and a Webinar to Earn Over $28,000 PB107: Affiliate Marketing Tips – What Links to Use in Your Emails PB069: Create an Opt-In to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers PB068: How to Increase Your Email List Subscribers By 100% Or More Today 161: 3 Things Most Bloggers Don’t Pay Enough Attention To Tools We're Using: (These are affiliates and we get a small commission on purchases.) Drip - the current email service provider for ProBlogger ConvertKit - a tool we’re just starting to experiment with that looks very promising. Built from the ground up for bloggers. Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 220 of the Problogger podcast. My name's Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, and soon to come some courses, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog and to make some money from it as well. You can learn more about Problogger at problogger.com. And while I’m mentioning it, sign up for our newsletter, Problogger PLUS. You’ll see calls to action to do that wherever you go on problogger.com. That will keep you in the loop in terms of our new content, but also some of the new things we’ve got coming for 2018. In today’s episode, I wanna talk about email. It’s a fairly introductory... I guess the frequently asked questions that I get about email, particularly what should you include in the emails that you send. I think most bloggers know that they should be sending some emails and collecting email addresses,