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.

More important than that is understanding the answer to the question “what is email marketing?” in the real world. We all receive plenty of email marketing messages each and every day, most of them we lump into the SPAM category. They are wastes of time and space, they slow down and infect our computers, they try to sell us enhancement creams or steal our bank account information and of course they give the rest of us a bad name.

Therefore email marketing in the real world has fast taken on the definition of SPAM.  Again from Wikipedia, SPAM is, “The abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.”

In other words, email marketing for consumers is fast becoming aligned with fraudulent garbage. For sketchy, illicit or downright illegal business operations, email marketing has taken on the definition of the cheapest way to exploit loads of money from the unsuspecting public at large by poking and prodding repeatedly ad nauseam until somebody purposely or inadvertently caves in.

Now, what should email marketing be? I.M.P.O.R.T.A.N.T.

Now that we know what email marketing really is, by the literal definition and by the interpretations of both consumers and spammers, we should take a look at what email marketing should be. Email marketing should be I.M.P.O.R.T.A.N.T.

• Insightful
• Marketing
• (that’s)
• Personalized
• Optimized
• Relevant
• Targeted
• And
• Never
• Tired

Let’s break this down piece by piece so we have as clear a definition as we can. Email marketing should be insightful marketing. In other words, we should be using all of our judgment, knowledge, expertise and experience to deliver quality, handcrafted messages that not only will produce results, but also speak to the desires of our audience.

Email marketing should be personalized. First, that means building a permission based list of people who really want to hear from you. From there, it means using your name and showing pictures of yourself so your audience knows who you are. It means segmenting your list so that different people receive messages containing what they are most interested in, rather than a generic message of no real value.

Email marketing should be optimized. You should be testing every aspect of your email campaigns to see what works the best. Try different subject lines, content, layouts, color schemes, delivery times and more.

Email marketing should be relevant and targeted. Once again, segment your list into groups and learn what your audience is really interested in. Make your messages timely and full of valuable information that people can really use. Don’t just send what you feel like talking about; send what people want to hear.

Finally, email marketing should never be tired. This means that you shouldn’t keep sending out the same retread emails over and over again and you shouldn’t keep using that same template you had from your first email campaign in 2002.

Refresh your campaigns…bring in guests from other websites or companies to write on special topics…change your layouts so that they are more visually appealing and convert better in the process…think of new, fresh ideas for every email and always be trying new things… stay ahead of the curve and integrate new technology, services and methods instead of playing catch-up down the road.

So how can I answer the question, “what is email marketing”? How about, I.M.P.O.R.T.A.N.T.

I call this the “Hey what’s up? Buy this!” style of marketing, and it’s just not going to get the job done. Now, you don’t need to try to get all philosophical about trying to deliver exceptionally thought provoking messages. That wouldn’t be time or cost productive, and it still wouldn’t move your bottom line.

Giving Messages a Purpose

So how can you give each message you send out a purpose? As mentioned, you don’t need to do anything extraordinary in order to see results. If you’re trying to sell somebody a product directly, or get them to buy anything from your website, you need to entice them to do it. Don’t just say “Hey what’s up? Buy this!”, opt instead to try any of these tactics:

• Provide a detailed review
• Share a story about creating the product/service
• Share a story about someone else using the product/service
• Share any kind of story!
• Provide incentive to buy – Did you know that 80% of people on your list buy from a sale or from a free shipping offer?

Of course not all of your messages are targeted at creating sales. Some are targeted towards just sending people to your website, getting somebody to take another kind of action or just staying at the forefront of a person’s consciousness. The same rule applies, every message needs a purpose.

The only thing that’s as bad as “Hey what’s up? Buy this!” is the “Hey what’s up?” email that doesn’t seem to want to get anything done and isn’t even trying to sell me anything. Sure, what you sent out is claiming to be a newsletter, but did I receive any kind of news? Anything that is going to keep my attention, inform me, educate me, entertain me or be of any kind of use for me whatsoever?

If the answer to that was no, then why should I care? Listen, unless I work for your company or am prominently involved in it somehow, I don’t care that you hired a new VP of marketing.

Now, if Mr. or Ms. New VP of Marketing sends out a message with a nice little picture of himself or herself so I can see whose doing the talking and a nice little blurb explaining to me their excitement about the position, the changes I can expect to see, what else they bring to the table and so forth, I’m bound to be much more interested. The same message with a new perspective can change everything.

Don’t make one of the biggest mistakes in email marketing by not giving your messages a purpose. Even if your purpose is as simple as a sale on a new product or a free shipping offer, you’re still doing something more besides just saying “Hey, what’s up?!” Put this week’s email marketing tip to week regardless of what industry or sector you’re in and you’ll start to see improved results.

Don’t forget about our Race to 50 New RSS Subscribers with a chance to win a free email marketing consultation package.

If you can’t seem to come up with the content on your own, or you can’t put your message into words effectively, you can choose between these available strategies to get your campaign on track.

Digging into your organization – Even if you don’t have an entire marketing staff – or even a marketing person – you may still have someone on your team who can write effective email marketing newsletters. Your content doesn’t have to be literary gold, it just has to be personable and compelling so that people connect with you and your message and take the action you want them to. Of course, if your staff consists of one person, yourself, and you are swinging and missing with your emails than it’s time to look elsewhere.

Hiring an email marketing agency – You can opt to hire an email marketing agency that will handle the task not only of writing your newsletters but also designing them and potentially even sending them out and managing your list as well. The cost of hiring an agency or a consultant is prohibitively expensive for many people and companies but if you can afford it, you’re likely to see great results.

Hiring a freelance writer – Take advantage of the reach of the Internet to hire a freelance writer that can write your email marketing newsletters for you. The costs are significantly cheaper than consultants or agencies, although quality varies of course from writer to writer.

Using a service such as Need-An-Article you can get a very high quality email written for $10 or even less depending on its length. How do I know it’s a legitimate and trustworthy resource? Well, I’m one of many writers with experience in email marketing available for hire on that site. Of course, you can contact me directly as well if you need something written or simply need some guidance or pointers.

Finding writers that can develop engaging, effective newsletters isn’t just a bonus, it’s a necessity. The greatest product or service in the world won’t sell itself. Whether you’re up to the task, someone else on your staff is or you’re considering hiring a freelance SEO content writer, don’t overlook this crucial step.

To convert prospects and make sales, you’ll need carefully crafted email marketing newsletters which are fine-tuned to your audience’s needs and project the image and tone that you desire.