Your brand’s content marketing strategy plays a huge role in your overall marketing ROI. And a great way to get the most out of each piece of content is to promote it via email marketing.

Email marketing is still effective today (and will continue to be for years to come). In this article, you’ll learn how you can use email marketing to improve your content marketing strategy to drive synergistic results from both channels.

What is content marketing?

Before we dive into how to improve your content marketing with email, let’s do a quick recap of what content marketing is.

Content marketing is a type of marketing that consists of strategically creating, publishing, and distributing content that’s valuable and relevant to a defined target audience. Typically, the content produced does not explicitly promote a company, and rather, is meant to generate interest in its products or services.

Do your content strategy and planning right, and content marketing has tremendous ROI. The content you put out can continue to pay dividends (in terms of more brand awareness, engagement, traffic, leads, and even revenue) for years to come.

Effective content distribution is a vital pillar of successful content marketing, and email is one of the most potent channels of content distribution.

Why email marketing is integral to content marketing

Email marketing has an average ROI of $38 for every $1 invested. What’s more, when it comes to B2B, email newsletters are the most-used type of content marketing for 81% of B2B marketers, and 31% of businesses consider newsletters as their highest-performing lead generation tactic, per CMI’s 2020 B2B Content Marketing Report.

Email marketing helps you build relationships with your subscribers who have voluntarily signed up to hear what you have to say and offer, unlike other marketing channels. Email lets you remind your audience of the value your company brings to the table without being overbearing.

Email marketing is a great tool for improving your content marketing, but getting it right can be more of an art than a science. Here are three strategies to help you improve your content marketing through email marketing.

1. Determine which content you want to promote

The people who sign up for your email list essentially give your company a chance to prove its value. They found your blog posts helpful, educational, entertaining, and subscribed to get your best content delivered straight to their inbox. So do your best not to disappoint them.

How? By picking the right content that catches their attention the moment they open your email. It should be super relevant to their interests and be beneficial to them in some clear way.

Long story short, be sure to determine which content you want to send out to your subscribers and at what frequency, as sending the right content consistently will prove the value your company provides, retain subscribers, and ultimately turn them into customers.

2. Know what your audience wants

You have defined your target audience. But it’s broad. When you dig deeper, you’ll see your audience is composed of several cohorts of individuals with buyer characteristics.

Naturally, your email marketing will be the most effective when you tailor your content to each cohort.

So, how do you personalize your emails? Divide your email marketing strategies by cohort and target each cohort with a specific campaign. Your cohorts could be YouTube subscribers, past customers, new customers, or website conversion customers.

When you develop relevant email marketing content for each audience cohort, your subscribers will respond substantially better in terms of email open rates, click-through rates, and content engagement.

3. Offer value, not just promotion

A crucial factor in successful email marketing is to do more than simply promote your company.

Your audience is already surrounded by (and fed up with) countless overly self-promoting brands offering little value. So if you wish to stand out in this noise, don’t be one of those excessively promotional brands.

Your audience wants — and expects — more from your email content marketing than mere ads about your latest and greatest products. They signed up to receive sublime content, and if all they receive is promotions, it won’t take long for them to unsubscribe.

Rather than just sending promotions, use your email content marketing to provide helpful and actionable content that helps people solve their problems. If you sell skincare products, for instance, you can use your email newsletter to share quick and easy daily skincare tips.

Your audience will appreciate how your emails are more than mere ads for your brand. And the more valuable your content is, the more loyal your subscribers will remain to your company.

So, how do you offer value with your email marketing? Here are a few content ideas that your audience might find value in:

• Daily tips & tricks
• Curated content from your blog, YouTube channel, or even from external authoritative publications across the web
• Thought-leader or expert interviews
• Screencast tutorials, educational guides, webinars, or animated explainer videos
• Event invites
• Exclusive offers and special deals (these are promotional yet valuable)

Based on the email content that’s well-received — say, curated articles on a particular subject — you can pivot your overall content marketing strategy to meet your audience’s needs better.

Put simply — to better create email content that’s valuable and not salesy, develop your content marketing strategy with a customer-first focus and not a profit-first focus.