SmartrMail Guest Post Guidelines

Hey there 👋

Thanks for your interest in contributing to the SmartrMail blog.

Our blog is filled with practical tips, inspiration, and authoritative guides that help merchants improve their email marketing.

And to ensure our blog is always up to date with the latest best practices and advice from industry experts, we welcome and regularly publish guest posts that meet our editorial guidelines.

So if you have unique insights, advice, or just some tips on commerce email marketing strategy that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.

But first, please take a moment to read our guidelines below before sending us your pitch.

What we're looking for 🔍

SmartrMail is the easiest way for merchants to send best practice emails and automations that generate sales.

So our blog, unsurprisingly, primarily covers commerce email marketing. With a particular focus on small to medium-sized merchants who run their store through platforms such as Shopify and do not necessarily have much experience with email marketing.

Any content that helps these people improve their email marketing is therefore right at home on the SmartrMail blog.

To ensure that this content is helpful for our audience, there are a few things we look for:

• Content should provide actionable insights that merchants can implement right away. It should not just be broad general advice that leaves readers unsure of how to implement.

• All content should be factual and informational. We do not publish opinion pieces.

• Include real-world examples to demonstrate a point or tip.

• Images, charts, and/or videos should be included to make the content more engaging.

In terms of the format, we welcome the following forms depending on the topic:

• Step-by-step tutorials

• Beginner/how-to guides

• Case studies

• Data-driven articles

• Listicles

To get an idea of our writing style and tone, be sure to check out some of our existing content. Some examples that should give you a particularly good idea of how we write include this post, this post, and this post.

Key things you’ll notice from our writing style is that we prefer first-person over third and we use a conversational tone.

While our blog is primarily focused on commerce email marketing, we occasionally also publish content that aims to help merchants with their broader marketing efforts and running their online store.

Even though we’ve more selective when it comes to accepting submissions covering these broader topics, if you feel like you’ve got a particularly engaging idea still send it through for consideration.

A few things to avoid ❌

If you keep what we’re looking for in mind, you’ll be well on your way to writing a post that fits perfectly on our blog.

That said, there are a few things to avoid that you should also be mindful of:

• Avoid writing about SmartrMail in-depth. Mentioning our key features is fine (and encouraged if it fits naturally with the post) but it’s best to leave in-depth tutorials and walk-thrus to us.

• Don’t write about general email marketing. It should always be targeted to merchants.

• We do not accept guest posts that have been pre-written, published elsewhere (including syndicated content), are on topics we’ve already covered, are overly promotional, etc.

The nitty-gritty 🔬

Finally, we have some more specific guidelines that help us ensure posts meet the expectations of our audience:

• Posts should be a minimum of 1,000 words and a maximum of 2,000.

• The title should be a maximum of 60 characters.

• Use basic language that everyone can understand (explain any jargon).

• Break things up with plenty of subheadings, and if relevant, numbered lists, bullet points, etc.

• Paragraphs should be scannable and no more than 3-4 sentences long.

• All content should be submitted in a shared Google Doc with edit permissions granted.

• Include a short description of your post of between 100 and 155 characters to be used as the meta description.

• Include links to back up any research or statistics you’re mentioning and to link to examples.

Links 🔗

Speaking of links, while we encourage you to link to authoritative sources, avoid including an excessive amount of links.

You may include links to your own domain (again, don’t go overboard) but any link included should be of value to the reader. Such as by linking to more examples to further illustrate a point you’ve mentioned or expanding on something you don’t have the space to go into in more detail.

That means we avoid links to product landing pages and homepages (the only exemption being your own homepage if you wish to include one in your author bio).

There are also certain websites we do not allow links to under any circumstances (including if it’s your own domain). These sites include essay writing, proofreading and translation services, sites with explicit content, pharmaceuticals, gambling, etc..

The process 📥

If you’re happy with the above guidelines, send us through your pitch using this Google Form.

And if we think there’s an opportunity, we’ll send you an email to get the ball rolling!