Email Marketing Tip OTW: Reusing Blog Posts for Newsletters

In this email marketing tip of the week, I’m going to focus on a topic that’s near and dear to anybody who has tried to manage their own email campaign before: finding good material for your email newsletters. One of the hardest aspects of maintaining a consistently timely set of email marketing newsletters is filling them out with quality, targeted content.

You can save yourself a lot of time and frustration if you opt not to create completely fresh material for your email newsletters. Instead, you can reuse blog posts or articles from your website for the content of your newsletters, filling them out with high quality, interesting and engaging material without needing to come up with new topics.

Reusing previous content for email marketing newsletters

Now I certainly suggest that you do more than just copy and paste a random blog post into an email. You certainly won’t be showing much effort, originality or enthusiasm on your end. Instead, you can do any number of things that helps to make your newsletter engaging:

Showcase your latest material: If you frequently update your blog or your website then you already produce a great deal of content. Just because someone is on your email list, it does not mean that they religiously check out your website. Additionally, even if they do, they may not read each and every article or post.

Therefore, a great and simple idea for an email marketing newsletter is to include all of the posts from the last week or two. Include an introduction that talks about some of the important issues you’ve been covering, and then provide an intro blurb to each article, linking back to the article on your website for full reading.

Highlight older classics: We all have some of that content somewhere on our website that we are especially proud of. Maybe when it first was released it made a huge splash in your industry or niche and you received a ton of positive feedback. Or maybe it helped you create a good deal of fresh new customers and sales.

If you haven’t done anything with those gems from yesteryear, bring them back up into the mix. If they had a big impact then, they will still have a big impact now. If the information in the content was extremely time sensitive, just update it to reflect the latest news, information or trends.

Include an introduction with your newsletter about why these articles were so important when they were first released, and why they still apply today. You can even do a “lessons learned” update about something that was once accurate or successful and has since proven out to be flawed.

Make a theme: When you have a lot of content build up on your website or blog you can easily sort them into specific themes. If I was a guy writing about high school football coaching strategy, I could make a theme around unique defensive zone schemes or motivation techniques. If I was a home improvement expert, one newsletter could have a theme of upgrading your kitchen and another could be on cheap landscaping tips.

When you create a theme for one of your email marketing newsletters, you are showcasing each individual piece of content as well as showcasing your entire collection. They all will receive more attention and feed off the attention and interest that each one of them creates.

Additionally, the benefit of themed newsletters is that you can then create a series of newsletters separate themes, and you’ll be set on your content for quite some time. You can even turn the newsletters into pieces of a larger, all encompassing guide or tutorial program.

So for this email marketing tip of the week, I want you to stop worrying about how to fill out your newsletters with fresh content. Turn to the content you already have on your blog or your website, and fit it into one of the above strategies for easy and effective email marketing newsletters.

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