6 Balancing Promotional and Engaging Content in Email Marketing
Struggling to find the perfect balance between promotional and engaging content in your email marketing? Discover expert insights from a Founder and a Creative Director, offering strategies to captivate your audience while driving results. This article opens with a tip on offering solutions to subscriber problems and concludes with advice on providing helpful tips and entertaining content, featuring a total of six invaluable insights. Get ready to elevate your email marketing game with proven approaches from industry leaders.
- Offer Solutions to Subscriber Problems
- Follow the 1:3 Email Principle
- Understand Audience Segments and Timing
- Implement the 70/30 Content Rule
- Utilize the 80/20 Content Strategy
- Provide Helpful Tips and Entertaining Content
Offer Solutions to Subscriber Problems
As an eight-figure business owner who earns seven figures from email marketing alone, here's my take: The people who sign up for your email list want you to offer them solutions to their problems. That means you absolutely can include promotional content in every email. It's a balance: yes, you want to create content that's entertaining and inspiring, but you should also be offering the solutions your clients want. Remember: If you can solve their problems, you're doing them a favor by talking about your offer.
Follow the 1:3 Email Principle
I follow the 1:3 principle—one promotional email for every three emails focused on engaging content. For example, depending on the timing and campaign, I may send nine emails centered around fun, storytelling, and informative content (with a subtle sell), followed by three promotional emails during a special sale. This approach works particularly well in the lead-up to events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, ensuring subscribers are primed and more open to promotional content. It helps maintain the balance between building trust and driving conversions at the right moments.
Understand Audience Segments and Timing
Truthfully, I think it's all about understanding your audience and the various segments within it. A promotion is only valuable if the product or service on offer is already seen as valuable to the customer. Likewise, sharing educational or helpful content can only maintain your audience size for so long, before they start feeling bored and unsubscribe. The balance between content and promotions is delicate, but my advice would be to plan some kind of offer two to four times per year. Work out when it makes sense for your business to have an offer and then plan those emails to be delivered on a specific date. Is it seasonal, Black Friday, an anniversary, or something else? The rest of your emails can be delivered around them to support and engage the audience. Good luck and happy emailing.
Implement the 70/30 Content Rule
Balance promotional content with valuable, engaging content by following a 70/30 rule—70% of our emails focus on delivering value, such as educational tips, industry insights, and actionable strategies, while 30% highlight promotional offers. This approach ensures that we're consistently helping our subscribers improve their marketing efforts and see us as a trusted resource—not just a sales channel. By prioritizing value and only promoting relevant offers, we build stronger relationships with our audience and drive long-term engagement.
Utilize the 80/20 Content Strategy
Balancing promotional content with valuable and engaging content in email marketing is crucial for maintaining subscriber interest and trust. My approach revolves around the 80/20 rule, where 80% of the content is focused on providing value, and only 20% is promotional. This strategy ensures that subscribers receive insightful information while also being aware of our offerings.
To provide value, I prioritize creating content that addresses the pain points and interests of our audience. This includes sharing industry insights, helpful tips, and case studies that demonstrate the impact of our services. I also incorporate engaging elements like infographics, videos, or interactive polls to enhance the subscriber experience. By positioning our emails as a reliable source of information, we foster a deeper connection with our audience.
In addition, I regularly solicit feedback through surveys to understand what topics resonate most with our subscribers. This approach not only helps tailor future content but also encourages engagement and shows that we value their opinions. By striking this balance, we can effectively promote our services while ensuring our subscribers feel informed and valued.
Provide Helpful Tips and Entertaining Content
Alright, so here's the deal: when you're doing email marketing, you don't want to be that person who only shows up when they want something. You know, like the friend who only texts when they need to borrow your truck. At Vortex Ranker, we've figured out that if we want people to actually read our emails and not just delete them faster than spam from a Nigerian prince, we gotta give them something they care about.
Our secret sauce? We keep it 70% helpful stuff and 30% "Hey, maybe you should hire us." So instead of bombarding people with "Hire us, hire us, HIRE US!" we send out things like quick tips on getting your Google Business Profile to stop hiding in the search results. We even toss in some memes now and then—because let's be honest, everyone loves a good SEO meme. It's like adding cheese to a burger. It just works.
We've even had clients reply, saying, "Hey, I tried that tip you sent, and it actually worked!" And honestly, that feels way better than begging people to hire us. It's like planting a seed of goodwill—when the time is right, they'll think of us. Plus, we toss in stories of other businesses we've helped, which makes the emails feel less like a pitch and more like a friendly "Hey, look what we did, you could do it too!" chat.
