A Better Email Newsletter – Blog Updates By Email

June 7, 2013 / in Blogging, Content Marketing, General Information / by Jason Terry

Post written by Jason Terry, Entrepreneur | Social Coach | Web Developer | Scuba Instructor | Guitar Player | Cruise Traveler | Lego Collector

More and more companies are adopting the concept of blogging to promote their business and stay top of mind.  One of the questions that we get is how to deliver new blog posts to people that aren’t necessarily connected to you or your company through social media.

For example, you might be blogging every week and updating your status on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter… but there’s probably a good group of your customers that aren’t connected to you through social media sites.  The only real tie you have to them electronically might be their email address.

Another scenario is that you are currently doing a monthly newsletter and want a more efficient way of creating the content for that newsletter.

Wouldn’t it be great if their was a way for your email subscribers to get an email update automatically when you post new content on your company or personal blog?  The good news is that there are quite a few solutions that can do this for you. 

Our current favorite that solves this problem is MailChimp.  I won’t get into the technical details, but it is fairly easy to create a recurring email in MailChimp that monitors your blog for new content.  When you post new content on your blog, MailChimp notices and can send an email to your subscribers immediately, or on some sort of scheduled basis that you choose.  (Many companies choose to do a digest on a weekly or monthly basis.)  It is important to consider how often your subscribers will get email based on how often you are updating your blog… you don’t want to annoy them by filling up their inbox.

I worked with Julia at Kansas City based Corbin Bronze this week to set this process up.  It took us less than half a day working together, and she’s very happy with the results.  She appreciated the fact that we had complete control over the formatting of the blog posts within their existing, branded email newsletter template.  In other words, they were able to use their existing email template with their logo and custom header, and the new blog content gets inserted into the body of the email message.  We were able to make the title of the blog posts appear in a larger font and specify the color to match their corporate branding.

Efficiency is key.  Spend your time creating great content for your business every week, and make sure you have a process in place that lets you get that content out to as many of your contacts as possible in as many ways as possible including your website, social and email.  If you need help, you know who to call!