Coming up with new ideas for email marketing campaigns isn’t particularly easy. Sometimes, inspiration simply flees, leaving nothing but a blank template in its wake.
It’s at times like this you may be tempted to ‘borrow’ inspiration from elsewhere, and while the obvious place may be your own inbox, chances are you actually have a treasure trove of ideas to which you can turn that are a little closer to home.
If you conduct any form of content marketing campaign – even at its base level in the form of a few blog posts each month – you can do a lot worse than repurpose that old content for your email marketing efforts.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing this and, in fact, it’s a practice that’s encouraged in marketing circles.
Most blog posts, for example, have a pretty long shelf life, which can be extended further if you take the constituent elements of the content and reuse them for other purposes.
Today, we’d like to explore that idea further by offering six brilliant ways anyone can repurpose old content for their email campaigns.
1. Pick your most popular blog post and re-use it
Take a look at the analytics from your blog and pick out one that has been received particularly well by visitors (high hit count, low bounce rate and significant time-on-page is what you’re looking for).
That blog post, clearly, struck a chord, so why not use it again? Break it down into a much smaller piece that befits email and base your next campaign around it. Chances are, you’ll see similarly positive engagement emerge as a result.
2. Set that last webinar in stone
If you’ve recently held a webinar and it went down particularly well, take the recording, give it its own landing page and promote via email.
If that proves successful, you can do this repeatedly in the future, thus extending the life even further for what may otherwise have been a dormant piece of content.
3. Turn presentation slides into email content
Modern presentations, when designed correctly, are incredibly engaging. If you’ve used one yourself recently, or had a colleague who reported a particularly satisfying event with theirs, take a look at the slides. Can they be used as part of an email campaign?
They probably can, so take the key imagery, text and boil it down into a nice, concise email with an accompanying landing page, if appropriate.
4. Promote an old eBook
If you’ve ever written an eBook, you’ll know how much effort is required to create these fabulous pieces of content.
That effort should never be put to waste, either, which is why you should take every opportunity to promote old eBooks via email.
A little like your blog post investigation (see number 1), it makes sense to take a hunt through your reports and sniff out the eBook that was downloaded the most. Refresh its landing page and start promoting the eBook again with a simple email campaign.
Remember: more downloads equals more potential leads, so get it out there as often as possible!
5. Create a blog post round-up
This is a common content marketing technique and one that can have a fantastic impact on audience engagement.
If you’re posting blogs regularly, send a monthly or bi-weekly email to subscribers that consolidates them and provides a round-up of the topics. Include click-throughs to the blogs themselves and you’ve instantly got a very engaging email campaign and several more hits on your website.
6. Make use of your best selling products (eCommerce)
If you run an eCommerce store, you have the perfect opportunity to regularly repurpose content.
Pick your best selling products, or those that are viewed most regularly and use the imagery and text from the pages to create new email campaigns.
Providing you’ve segmented part of your subscriber list for those who have specifically asked for product updates, this is a form of content repurposing you can do very regularly and to great effect.
Wrapping up
There are only so many unique ideas. Look harder, and you’ll notice that the web is littered with repurposed content. This is because marketing campaigns thrive on the team’s ability and willingness to revive old ideas.
Don’t be afraid to dig into the archives for email marketing inspiration. If you follow our tips above, you’ll find an awful lot of it right on your doorstep.
