Evergreen Content as a Tool for Building Subscriber Engagement

If you manage content for a winery, you know evergreen content can free up loads of time for other tasks.

But are you using it to build subscriber engagement and increase sales? Here’s how to do that.

Why I Love Evergreen Marketing Content

My love affair with evergreen email content happened back when email automation first arrived on the scene.

As a small business owner, evergreen content provided an obvious benefit: I could write content for several emails at once, which could then be sent automatically on a timed basis.

I soon realized that this was just the beginning!

My eyes flew open with this realization.

During a rainy week in the quiet time of year, I hunkered down at my computer and wrote content for seven newsletters.

A new subscriber would receive the first email immediately after confirming their address, with subsequent emails timed to follow monthly.

Open this window to read why new subscribers should receive their first email from you immediately >

With six months of quality email content cued up for automatic distribution triggered by any new subscriptions, I was now free to focus on client work.

My email marketing would continue to work for me on autopilot.

The Vital Essence: Engagement

As mentioned above, evergreen content is great for freeing up your time, but this article is about building engagement. And when we talk about building engagement, we mean increasing sales. Clear?

Anyone who has worked with me knows I am a gigantic fan of creating personalized, relevant content. Every email you send your subscribers is an opportunity to learn more about their preferences.

Whether a subscriber is just learning about wine, a zealous foodie, or a lover of collecting age-worthy greats, you can give them the content they thirst for.

You become a little more esteemed in the eyes of your subscribers with each email that resonates, building their connection with your brand.

I will provide some specific tools for building engagement at the end of this article. In the meantime, fix it in your mind that engagement is the goal of evergreen content.

Increase your Reach

Evergreen content extends benefits even beyond engaging your audience or automating your marketing.

It allows you to reach a larger audience.

Evergreen blog articles hosted on your website will continuously attract new organic search traffic, providing healthy nourishment to your sales funnel.

The visitors Google sends your website through organic search are from outside your sales funnel — audiences you may not have targeted yet.

Why does this matter? It matters because you can discover what content people are searching for and cater to them. Successful wineries grow their audience in this way by regularly developing new content.

The Benefits of High-Quality Evergreen Content are Cumulative

Regularly adding relevant content to your site is universally acknowledged as one of the most significant factors in a successful SEO strategy.

To put that more directly, Google goes cuckoo for good content.

Each piece of high-quality evergreen content you develop for your website adds a cumulative benefit to your visibility.

How? Evergreen content will continue to receive traffic and engagement over time, gathering backlinks and social signals. This accumulation of backlinks further increases your visibility, creating a compounding effect, increasingly elevating your content in search results.

Love! Love! Love!

So now that makes three people who love evergreen content: you, me, and Google! We should hang out — we all love the same things!

Dynamic and Conditional Text

I often say that every email you send your subscribers is an opportunity to learn more about their preferences. And, learning about our subscribers’ preferences allows us to better cater to them.

Your subscribers will tell you what interests them by what they click on.

Through the wonders of conditional text, you can use this information to provide increasingly beneficial and engaging content.

How does conditional text work? Email service platforms generally provide a means to display different text snippets within an email depending on whether a user profile has a specific tag.

Here’s how it might look, depending on which email service provider you use:

{% if subscriber.tags contains "Under30" %}
This text will show if the subscriber has the "Under30" tag.

{% else %}
This text will show if the subscriber does not have the "Under30" tag.
{% endif %}

As you can imagine, this opens things right up for personalization. In the above example, if the subscriber has the Under30 tag in their profile, the text that gets displayed is the text you’ve customized for subscribers younger than age 30.

Your conditional logic can get more complex, using “else if” conditions to provide age-relevant content to each of your winery’s demographics.

Demographics are just the Tip of the Personalization Iceberg

When email marketing managers first discover conditional text as a tool for hyper-refining personalization, they can go a little crazy.

Imagine a subscriber’s personalized marketing email that references the name of the tasting room host that last served them within an anecdote in the email.

Or:

• Kid-friendly events at or near your tasting room that are sent only to subscribers with kids.
• Special offers on library wines that are sent only to subscribers who have attended a library tasting.
• Free bring-a-friend tasting offers for subscribers who have brought guests to your tasting room.

The point of all this is that the more your subscribers feel that your content speaks to them and their needs, the more likely they are to buy from you.

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