Email marketing is a fantastic way to stay engaged with your radio station’s listeners. You can use it to encourage them to come back to your website regularly. I am a big proponent of setting up automated email campaigns. Few stations have the personnel they need to constantly be writing new emails. But if you let the people in your database sit for too long without send them any email, they may be surprised when they get message after months of silence and view it as spam. By automating your email campaigns, you can stay in constant touch with your listeners without overburdening your staff.
There are two types of automated email campaigns: RSS-to-Email Campaigns, which are used to send out emails linking to content that you’ve just published on your website, and Drip or Autoresponder Campaigns, which are used to recycle evergreen content on your website. The campaigns discussed below are RSS-to-Email campaigns for new content.
RSS-to-Email Campaigns
Here’s how an RSS-to-Email Campaign works: Your Email Service Provider (your ESP, such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, etc.) pulls your latest website posts and drops them into an email template, then sends the email out. Think of the RSS feed as a pipe that pushes your website content out to the ESP. If there’s nothing new in the pipe, no email goes out. And you can set these emails to go out on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
You can set up different RSS feeds for different types of posts on your website. For example, if your station’s website is built in WordPress, it already has different feeds for the posts that you put in different categories. They look like this:
https://example.com/category/categoryname/feed
This means that you can set up a different email campaign for different types of posts. By doing so, you can allow listeners to tell you what type of content that they would like to have sent to them. Here’s how:
1. Set Up Your Email List with Groups
In your ESP, set up “groups” or “segments” for your email list. As part of this, you’ll be adding a checkbox question to the registration form. It might look like this:
What would you like us to send you each week?
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Concert Info
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Contests
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Local Music Info
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Morning Show Recaps
2. Create Corresponding Categories for Your Website Posts
In the backend of your website, set up categories for each of the groups. When you add content to your website, categorize it accordingly so that it is included in the proper email campaign.
3. Set Up an RSS-to-Email Campaign for Each Category
Get the RSS feed for each of the categories you have set up. For example, if your site is built in WordPress, the feed for the Contests category might be https://wkrp.com/category/contests/feed. In your ESP, use that feed to set up an automated email campaign. For example, you might set up the campaign to say, “Every Thursday at 3:00pm, check the Concerts RSS feed for new posts. If there are new posts, drop them into an email template and send it out to everybody in the ‘Concerts’ group.”
You don’t want to send out all of your automated campaigns at the same time. You may want to send your morning show recaps out daily at noon, your concert listings on Thursday mornings, your local music updates on Sunday nights, and your contest info on Monday mornings. Not everybody will get every email; they’ll only receive the emails they opt into.
By setting up multiple automated campaigns, you can continually engage with your listeners by sending them just the information that they want.
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