In the case study of Blogging, E-Mail Newsletter, Social Sharing: Putting It All Together, we take a look at how one of our clients used a number of marketing tactics to drive traffic to its website. Today’s blog will go more in-depth with the e-mail newsletter aspect of that strategy.
Last week, my blog entry talked about blogging forming the foundation of your content marketing strategy. That blog becomes necessary because before we create a newsletter, share content on social media or generate an ebook, we need content. A blog provides that original content.
With the e-mail newsletter, it needs an appealing design with good, quality content and also needs to feature calls-to-action to get readers to engage with the newsletter and head back to your staffing website (because that’s the goal!). We can re-purpose the blog content and supplement it with top candidates, hot jobs or other company news to reach a wide audience.
Who Gets the Newsletter?
Staffing companies have tons of contact information for candidates and clients. (Hint: Make sure to get that information as opt-in contact information so you can send them your content in the future.)
Those people might not be heading to your website on a regular basis. (I’m sorry, it’s true). But if you create a list of contacts that you conducted business with previously, then you will stay top of mind if you appear in their inbox on a consistent basis.
Since those contacts have a connection to your staffing company, then they are likely to click on a link in the newsletter – moreso than a bunch of random e-mail addresses. That connection helps the quality of your e-mail list, which is very important. An e-mail distribution of list of 10,000 addresses is worthless if there isn’t a good reason for those addresses to receive your content.
How Much Does It Work?
I have referenced this statistic in other blog posts and in the case study, but it’s very important. Email marketing is the most effective lead generation method! Taking that survey of marketers with the chart below, we see that well-designed, well-crafted e-mail newsletters work.
What does that chart mean? The 40 newsletters (each spike is a newsletter) accounted for more than 20 percent of the traffic to the website during that 42-month period. So in 3 percent of the days during the past three-plus years, the company’s website got more than 20 percent of its traffic.
Putting It Together
As I referenced earlier, the blog provides a solid foundation for a content marketing strategy. The email newsletter highlighted in this blog entry is a great supplement to getting the content to a wider audience and driving spikes of traffic to your staffing company’s website.
Next week, we will see how social sharing (just on LinkedIn!) helps with taking that website traffic to another level and adding another aspect to a really sound content marketing strategy.