When it comes to email marketing, there are 3 cool ways to serve content to your subscribers. And I'm not talking about social media, blog posts or infographics.
These content delivery channels are A/R or autoresponder messages, broadcast emails, and blog RSS emails. Most email service providers allow you to set up and use all three with your lists. Let’s take a look at each of these email types as well as when and how you may want to use them.
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1. Autoresponder Emails
Let’s start with a/r emails. These are emails to go out to your readers in the order they signed up. It’s a little hard to grasp at first, but it’s a very efficient way to email your list, and super cool in that it saves you SO much time!
Often the very first email you send to your subscribers is an autoresponder email. This would be the welcome email your readers receive in their inbox as soon as they sign up. You usually thank them for subscribing in this message and if you offered a freebie for signing up, you deliver it in this email as well. You might also tell them what to expect from you over the course of the next few days and/or ask them to reply with an answer to a certain type of survey question.
The autoresponder function also allows you to schedule emails to go out to your readers on a regular basis (in ConvertKit, this is called a sequence). The big benefit of using this type of email is that you write them once, get them scheduled and you know that every single person that signs up for your list will see every one of these emails. This is perfect for evergreen content and product promotions.
2. Broadcast Emails
Broadcast emails on the other hand are more like the emails you send through your personal email account. You write them today, and send them today, and whoever is on your list today will get the email. If someone signs up tomorrow or next week they will never see this email. It works very much like a Gmail account. The big difference is that you email hundreds or thousands of people at the same time.
This type of email is great if you send out a daily, weekly or monthly newsletter or if you want to send your subscribers content or a special offer that’s time sensitive, like the one I sent today, reminding my people to sign up for our Blogging Courses before the next deadline.
3. Blog RSS Emails
The last option is a blog broadcast or RSS email. This is a pretty cool feature and an easy way to automate some of your email marketing, but the downside is that it can be much less personal than the previous two.
With RSS emails, the autoresponder service generates and sends out an email as your blog posts publish. You can set it up to send out an email each time you publish a new post, or you can set it to create a summary email every so often (once a week for example) of all the posts published since the last email.
You may want to use all three types of emails on a regular basis, even giving your subscribers an option for which they prefer to receive. Mixing and matching these types of mailings to get your messages out in an effective way is a great way to do it. Having options gives you leverage and it allows you to make the most of every single email message you write.
Want to learn more about effective use of email for your business? Join our Emails That Convert Course. Click the image below for more information.
