Daniel Burstein

Email Marketing: How do you create excitement around the content you have?

December 9th, 2013

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

I like to think of email marketing as more of a newspaper than a television ad.

When you’re creating a television ad, you can create one (or a very few ads) and place them across endless media buys. After all, a customer should be exposed to the ad at least three times during each purchase cycle, according to old school advertising conventional wisdom.

However, with a newspaper, you have to give the customer a reason to keep receiving that daily delivery on their driveway every morning. Sometimes it’s easy to find fresh, compelling content such as the recent health care website kerfuffle. But other times,  it’s a slow news day and you just have to fill some slots (“mosquito bite victim”).

Many marketers I talk to who are just starting out in content marketing seem to face many slow news days. They often struggle how to find valuable, compelling content for potential customers.

At MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013, I pulled Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute, aside during lunch to share some tips about email marketing content. Here’s what Joe had to say.

 

Here are a few key points I took away from Joe:

  • Stay away from pitching; focus on the long-term relationship.
  • People don’t care about us, our products or services. They care about their own challenges.
  • Think of yourself like a publisher or media company.
  • Give value every day, so when you do have a sales message, customers will let you in.
  • Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint – content marketing starts, and there is really no end.
  • Create a content marketing mission statement: What is the outcome for the reader?
  • Leverage employees, customers and influencers to become the trusted, go-to resource for your customers.
  • The position to hire first and foremost? Managing editor.

Related Resources

Email Marketing: How CNET re-engaged inactive subscribers

Email Deliverability: Only 39% of marketers maintain an opt-in only subscriber list

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2014 – February 17-20 in Las Vegas

Daniel Burstein

About Daniel Burstein

Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS. Daniel oversees all content and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the editorial direction for MECLABS – digging for actionable information while serving as an advocate for the audience. Daniel is also a speaker and moderator at live events and on webinars. Previously, he was the main writer powering MarketingExperiments publishing engine – from Web clinics to Research Journals to the blog. Prior to joining the team, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications – a boutique communications consultancy specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware, and BEA Systems. Daniel has 18 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement and field marketing communications.

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