Peanut butter and jelly, Brad and Angelina, sun and sand, puddles and boots, blogging and email. What do these all have in common?

They’re all better together!

A new study of over 6,000 HubSpot customers shows that among those who use email marketing , companies that blog get 2X more traffic from their email than those that don’t. In this data, "Email Traffic" includes two main sources: traffic from traditional email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns , and traffic from blog post email alerts (emails to people who subscribe to the blog via email).

These numbers show that blog emails and traditional emails from customers who blog, taken as a whole, generate more traffic than traditional emails from customers who don't blog.

Interpreting the Data

Email traditionalists might look at this finding and say, "Bah! You're conflating two types of email. Of course emails from blogs are going to generate more traffic! Content isn't that important to traditional email marketing."

But this is old-school thinking. Look at the critique closely. That emails from blogs are going to generate more traffic is intuitive to most marketers -- yet many of those marketers continue to pump out traditional emails bereft of engaging content. Blog emails work because they include remarkable content . Include equivalent content in your traditional email marketing -- and repurpose the quality blog content you already have -- and your engagement will shoot up.

Marketing Takeaway

As a marketer, I think this study has a simple takeaway: if you want to make email work, you need to focus on the content.

How do you focus on content? Create a blog that covers topics your buyer personas find useful, and come up with creative ways to repurpose that blog content (as well as content from other assets like videos, ebooks and webinars) in your emails. A good example of this is the State of Inbound Marketing Report we included in one of our HubSpot emails, featured below.

If you want to learn more about creating a great blog or creating compelling email offers, read this business blogging ebook , and our introduction to email marketing . And it's important marketers invest in the quality of their email content considering the rapid depreciation of email lists. Approximately 25% of your email list expires every year , and you'll have trouble rebuilding it (or even see more rapid rates of depreciation) without investing in consistently creating quality content. Or worse, you could become addicted to the crack of purchased email lists.

If you don't believe me, just read the story of  this marketer  who set off to do sophisticated email marketing -- marketing automation, actually -- without the right kind of content. The results were catastrophic. As he said, "We ... quickly discovered that marketing automation is a beast – it  devours content . If you don’t feed it, it dies."

What types of blog and email marketing content do you find the most effective?

Image credit: spcbrass