7 Ways to Repurpose Content for Email Marketing

The content creation process can be time-consuming. Coming up with new ideas and ensuring each original post is better than the last can be overwhelming. But when you learn how to recycle content, it can be a game changer. In this article, we’ll explore how to repurpose content for email marketing and seven ways to do it effectively.

How Repurposing Content Works in Email Marketing

Repurposing content for email marketing simply means taking an existing piece of content from various sources—like blog posts, video content, podcast episodes, and social media content—and adapting it for email. Content repurposing saves time, guarantees consistent branding, and facilitates efficient communication.

When crafting your email marketing campaigns, it's essential to begin with an engaging introduction that grabs your subscribers' attention and sets the tone for your message. How to start an email is a critical consideration here, as a compelling opening can make a significant difference in the success of your email marketing efforts.

Let’s look at how repurposing content works in email marketing.

Choose existing content from other marketing channels

Chances are your marketing strategy incorporates multiple channels—this may be your website, social media platforms, or printed copy.

For example, if you sell hosted cloud PBX systems, you probably have YouTube videos explaining the benefits of these cloud-based solutions. This piece of content could be used to engage with potential clients via email. 

Alternatively, you could use popular posts from your Instagram page that have received the most engagement.

Adapt and organize content for email format

To effectively repurpose content for email, first organize your content into key themes—often called content pillars. This can help you focus on marketing goals, bring a sense of organization to your content strategy, and make it easier to adapt content format.

The most common content pillars are:

• Promotion: High-quality content designed to promote your products and services
• Education: A type of content intended to be informative or educational for your audience 
• Connection: Connecting customers to your brand or each other
• Entertainment: Pieces of content designed purely for entertainment and enjoyment 
• Inspiration: Thought-provoking content that encourages your audience to take action 

Combine different formats with consistent branding

Consistent branding is essential when it comes to marketing. Having a clear identity helps make your brand instantly recognizable to your target audience. 

Different types of content, such as Facebook posts, blog articles, or even white papers, can form the basis of your email campaigns and help cement your branding to a wider audience. 
Customers will begin recognizing your brand when they see consistency across different channels. In particular, combining your social media and email marketing strategy provides a seamless and connected brand image with consistent messaging.

Ensure relevance and timeliness of outreach

Before selecting and sharing existing content, it’s important to consider whether it’s relevant to email subscribers. Moreover, is it relevant at this particular time? 

Keep in mind seasonality, customer behavior, and trends. Have any social or political situations changed the way your content might be received? Do your email subscribers have the same interests and problems as your social media audience?

Considering this, recycling content could be excellent for engaging email subscribers in a timely manner. If you repurpose content quickly, you could even direct recipients to your social platforms and encourage them to take part in a trending hashtag or view “not-to-be-missed” content on other channels.

Using Google Analytics or social media analytics can provide excellent insights here. You may even use AI to enhance experiences for customers and subscribers. 

7 Ways to Repurpose Content for Email Marketing

The benefits of content repurposing are clear. But what are some practical ways you can do so for email?

Transforming Blogs into Interesting Content

Blog content can easily be transformed into engaging emails. There are a few different ways to do this, including: 

• Creating a roundup email: Send out weekly or monthly email newsletters to drive website traffic and direct customers to your top-performing content. 
• Send relevant infographics: If your blog is data-driven, create a user-friendly infographic suitable for email, summarizing data from the blog post so it’s easily accessible.

Create an email course: If you consider your blog post to be educational, repurpose the content into an email course. This involves sending a series of “lessons” or even “challenges” to your target audience. These could be summarized versions of your blog posts and signposts to more relevant content.

Adapting Visuals for Impactful Email Campaigns

When you reuse an original piece of content for email, consider how to adapt the visuals. Even short-form videos, such as Instagram Reels, will need to be reformatted into a beautiful graphic that will sit properly in an email.
For example, a company like Vonage creates Instagram guides for sharing insights around call center best practices and industry trends. This works brilliantly as social media content, however, the videos and busy visuals may be less engaging for email recipients. Instead, these can be broken down into infographics and still images that are more digestible.

Engaging Subscribers with Quizzes and Polls

Social media polls are a great way to engage your target audience. Extend this to email subscribers by inviting them to take part in a social media poll or reformatting the quiz to use in the email itself.

You could even tell social media followers that the results will only be shared with email subscribers to encourage more sign-ups. When gathering subscriber information, use effective email finder software to maximize your subscriber list potential and minimize bounce rate.

Spotlighting Social Media Posts within Email

Using social media analytics to understand which content resonates with your audience will supercharge your email marketing efforts. You could recap your top-performing posts on Instagram or encourage subscribers to view your most popular YouTube videos. This is a really effective way to promote your social media channels using email. 

This also informs subscribers about what they’ve missed. Just make sure you don’t show them everything! Find the sweet spot: tease them with just enough to pique their interest. Also, provide an incentive for them to follow you on social media and use your call-to-action as a way of showcasing your brand personality.

Sharing Updates and Achievements

Collecting and repurposing testimonials and reviews for your email campaigns is an excellent way to build trust and confidence among customers. If you operate in a competitive market, this is particularly beneficial for standing out. 
For example, customers considering buying Only Domains domain names might be swayed after reading an email with a convincing customer review or case study.

Complemented with additional information such as updates about new security features, it makes your email that much more impactful. You could even use this as a way to request reviews from subscribers.

On top of this, consider sharing milestones, policy updates, and relevant company values with subscribers, as it’s not only your LinkedIn followers or clients who might be interested. 
Today, many consumers are becoming more interested in brands’ environmental and ethical values, so it’s worth shouting about your ESG initiatives. If you have existing white papers, look into ESG software companies that can help you extract data from reports to make the information more accessible and engaging for email subscribers.

Email Recap of Event Highlights

When you run business events to raise your brand profile, you likely showcase these on your social media channels, website, or blog. So, why not share with email subscribers too? 

Keep it short and sweet. Make use of infographics to ensure the content is easily digestible in email format. You can then link this to the existing content on your website so people can read a more detailed story about the event.

Reposting Revamped Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that isn’t time-sensitive or reliant on current events, so it’s perfect for repurposing. Because it doesn’t go out of date, you can recycle this content in multiple ways, including:

• FAQs: These work particularly well for more complex, technical topics and products such as a PBX system
• Listicles: Think ‘5 Ways to Drive Revenue with Messaging’
• Testimonials: Customer reviews never go out of date!

How-tos and tutorials: Consider breaking these down into an email series

Look at your email marketing and content calendars and pencil in times when you want to reuse evergreen content from other marketing channels. Revamping this content can keep subscribers interested and ensure your messages don’t become stale.

Conclusion

There are many ways to repurpose content as email marketing, and it can be a hugely worthwhile marketing strategy. 

Besides ensuring consistent branding across multiple channels, you can use analytics to leverage your top-performing content from other platforms to more effectively engage email subscribers. Whether you’re bragging about company updates, offering insights into industry trends, or sharing a quiz just for fun, reusing content will save you valuable time without compromising on quality.

The most important thing to remember is that repurposing content should allow you to use original content to engage email subscribers in a way that meets their needs but also works for your business. You’re already creating the content anyway, so make it work for your email marketing too, and you will see great results.