If I gave you four dollars every time you gave me a dollar, how many dollars would you give? I can understand you might be cautious at this magic money machine (are those real dollars?) but if it was real, you’d be a fool to ignore it. Email marketing for creative entrepreneurs is that magic money machine.
So why do so many creative entrepreneurs ignore email marketing which on average produces that four-fold return? (Campaign monitor)
I can understand your caution which is why I’ll show you a bit about the why and how to start email marketing so you can start seeing great returns on your business.
What is email marketing and why should you care?
Email marketing is a planned approach to send emails for a business goal, usually selling a product or service.
Although there are many methods to get a message to a potential customer, email has some unique characteristics and really strong advantages. these include
- People have to sign up to get an email. That shows strong desire and intent.
- It’s an incredible personal method of communication. You don’t see a string of comments like you would on Facebook, so it feels like each message is just to you.
- Emails compete against less competition than ads or social messages.
- You can automate email marketing, so you don’t have to do anything when someone new finds out about you.
- People check their emails on the go and multiple times a day, unlike snail mail letters.
Basically, your messages feel like they are coming from a friend, not some corporate business. This helps you build trust so that when you do offer your product or service, they say “I was waiting to buy that.”
How to get started with email marketing for creative entrepreneurs?
To get started, sign up for an email marketing service. There are many options out there with advantages and disadvantages but the two I’d suggest you check out are MailChimp and ConvertKit.
MailChimp is free to get started with and integrates with many services making it easy to tie into whatever you use.
ConvertKit isn’t free (Update: ConvertKit now has a free starter plan!) but has extra tools for sending specific messages to the right people. You can more easily send out automation sequences and have an easier to use interface. You can do these same things in MailChimp, but it’s not as easy.
Get people to sign up
Once you have your service, you need to add an email sign up form on your website and give people a reason to subscribe. In general “get my newsletter” isn’t enough.
- Offering a free course or download can motivate people to sign up.
- Alternatively, you could offer them your best blog posts as a PDF.
- Or you could provide an additional resource to complement a blog post that someone is reading (a workbook for example).
Plan a nurturing sequence
This is a series of emails designed to let a new subscriber know about you and, ultimately, make them more respective to when you ask them to buy something.
These usually start sending when someone subscribes and then continue at a regular interval.
A simple sequence you can plan is sending some of your most popular content that you have, or answering common questions about the industry you are in.
Sit back and enjoy the results
Once you’ve got those steps in place, you can start improving.
You can ask questions and find out more about your subscribers which can help you improve what you offer, you can improve the emails you are sending and so you get more clicks and more sales. And you can make more sales which brings revenue to invest elsewhere.
Best of all, this all runs on autopilot while you work on other aspects of your business.
Learn the basics of email marketing for creative entrepreneurs
Email marketing is a really valuable tool for creative entrepreneurs.
If you’d like to learn more, sign up for this basic five-part email marketing course. You learn a bit more about the basics of email marketing so you can repeat that one dollar for four dollars trade.
Leave a Reply