What To Do With Your Old Emails
Once the email has been sent, new email marketers choose to move quickly to the next email without much thought on how archived emails can be utilized post-blast. However, as any SEO professional will tell you, website content positively affects rankings over time, and those emails that you’re not saving are excellent sources of content for your website. There are many customers who would benefit from this content too, and thus it’s important to consider how to best use old emails after they’ve been sent.
Just by including your old email messages on your website, you are already utilizing your old emails for both useability and SEO purposes. Even so, we’re going to review what else you should be doing with your archived email messages so that they don’t go to waste.
Bookmarking Websites
Websites like Digg and Mixx are perfect places to promote the useful content in your old emails. With these websites, people post links to content on the Internet, and other users vote on that content. If you newsletter gets enough votes, your link’s visibility will go up on the social bookmarking website, leading to an influx of users and website links. A new trend in email marketing software is to include options for your own subscribers to share the email on social websites, see our email marketing reviews for more information. Each social bookmarking website is a little different, so participating in the community before you start posting is key.
RSS Feeds
An RSS feed is like a personalized newsfeed for your site visitors. Many might not want to get even more emails in their inbox, but instead will be happy to receive RSS feed updates in their news readers. This idea is excellent because it not only helps keep people engaged in your website, but you can also submit your RSS feed to a variety of RSS directories and aggregators, netting you additional website links. Also, for those that are interested, Google allows Adsense in your RSS feed, meaning you can monetize your feed and get paid from subscribers’ clicks.
Forums & Message Boards
If you already participate in multiple forums, then you know that most forums provide you with a signature box, in which you are free to place links to external websites and talk about yourself. This signature box is the best place to advertise your latest email newsletter and will net you some inbound website links as well. Obviously, forum etiquette is hugely important. Don’t go spamming forums for links, really contribute to a few quality forums and your newsletter’s visibility will increase.
Social Websites
So you’ve put the email on your website, now what? Well, first things first, it’s always a good idea to advertise the fact that you have new content on your website. Popular social networking channels are absolutely perfect for this. You should send an update on Twitter and on your Facebook page highlighting the latest newsletter with a link to the archived copy on your website. Doing this accomplishes two things: promoting your newsletter & linking back to your website. The link back to your corporate website is important, especially over time, as the more links you have the higher your rankings will be in the search engines. Additionally, inbound links to your archived emails will ensure that they are crawled by Google and included in their index, making it easy for customers to find your old emails with a simple Google search.
These are just a collection of creative ways to get some good mileage from your archived emails. Just make sure to at least do one of the above for each email that you send, and you will see the long term benefits of increased visibility and ultimately, an increase in customers. Check out our review of Vertical Response for more details.