What Happens When Indie Creators Use Email to Automate Their Sales

Whether you write, paint, teach, code, dance, or make — email will help

I was both an early adopter and late-bloomer with email. I was early in that I understood the power of email and started list-building over twenty years ago. I was late when I realized I had been doing much of my older emailing all wrong.

Now that I’m a writer, and most of my freelance income is based off my writing, I see the power of email firsthand.

I’ve made (almost) all the mistakes.

I took (almost) all the wrong turns possible.

…and now I’m through the tunnel.

As writers and creators, the last thing most of us want to do is spend our valuable time marketing our work. But we’re responsible. We’ve got to ensure the future of our craft. The only way to ensure that future is to remind others we’re still in business — we’re here to serve them with our best work.

Email isn’t just for coupons and spam.

As writers and creators we can use email to automate much of our hard-selling (which makes it not hard at all). We can automate our thank-yous, our list-building, and our bread and butter products.

We can spend the time to write an email today and have the same email sell for us tomorrow… and every day after. I don’t like repeating my efforts. You probably don’t either.

When you use email you can stay a one-person shop for a long time. You have the ability to sell one-to-many, instead of one-to-one. Yes, we can do this with social too, but social media isn’t in the same league as email when it comes to precision and predictability.

I have no idea when you’ll see my social post.

I know you’ll see my email at 7:25 p.m. on Tuesday.

I don’t have to compete for space in your in-box.

I know you’ll receive my emails in the order I wish you get them.

I don’t have to pay to contact you. Once I’ve paid my service provider, every email I send it almost free. Maybe tenths of a cent, if that.

We get more time to practice the craft we love

One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is we get more time. When we post on social, our little piece of the world might disappear in seconds. Maybe an image might get a couple hours of attention before it’s buried.

Email is forever.

Not forever in the reader’s in-box, but forever in terms of your initial effort. You only have to write the email once. There’s up-front effort, but you once you write it, every person who subscribes to your list will get the email. It’s new to them, so you don’t have to feel like you’ve repeated yourself.

The entire sequence is new to each reader.

This the beauty.

Every subscriber feels as if you’re speaking to her (if you write your emails correctly). It doesn’t matter if you wrote them ten minutes ago, or ten years ago.

Once you put the effort in the initial set-up, the maintenance part is a lot less work. You get your time back. You have more time to practice the work you love, so you can spend less time promoting it. Email does all the heavy-lifting for you.

…and not only does it do all the heavy-lifting, email takes all the rejection off your shoulders.

Selling is hard. You’ve got to have thick skin. Maybe you’ll close one sale out of one hundred people. Think of knocking on one hundred doors and getting ninety-nine slammed in your face. Email takes all the slams for you.

I’m an introvert — like, a serious introvert.

I hate face-to-face anything. I don’t even like ordering pizza over the phone.

There’s no way I’d knock on one hundred doors to sell my work. But I can do what I do best — writing. I can write an email sequence that walks the reader through the process. The email does all the asking for me. Automatically. Relentlessly. Binary. Email never gives up. Like I would, if I had to sell my work in person.

Our income becomes more predictable

I sell a tiny, micro-course, automatically, to new email subscribers and current readers. I have the message dialed-in, so I can predict a certain number of sales for a certain number of qualified subscribers.

I can almost set my watch by the sales numbers.

This took a lot of time and testing to set up. And I work to make the process better every week. But, through the power of automated email, I took the sting out of the unpredictable business model of freelance income.

We make the bulk of our income from the big project, like books, courses, and flagship-level projects. But those projects take a long time to make, and require big launches.

With email we can offset those big gaps between paydays with automated, smaller products we can sell. Products with a lower price-point and lower barrier to decision-making.

This combination, of both large and small-ticket books, courses, products, and services, make a very solid business model for a freelancer. It’s hard to trade time for money every day. These additional, automated, email income streams make a nice buffer.

My little, automated product pays all my business expenses for the year (in a single month).

We own our list no matter what happens

When you use email correctly, you own your customer list. You don’t own your list on Amazon. You don’t own your friend’s list on social. Those major platforms own your followers.

Send one post that hurts one person’s feelings — you lose your account.

Post one picture and a troll reports you, just to hurt your business — you lose your account.

Send a Tweet that made someone cry — no more income stream.

These huge platforms want to maintain their business model and their integrity. You don’t matter as an individual. You have no recourse. You can go to sleep tonight and lose a multi-million dollar business tomorrow morning. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Not so with email.

Yes, you can lose your hosting account, but you get to keep the names.

You can always open another hosting account a paste the emails over.

Email is an insurance policy for your business. Not only is email an automatic way to keep in touch with your biggest fans, but it’s an insurance policy against imminent business disaster. You have room to make so many more mistakes once you own your list. Don’t worry, you’ll make plenty of them, so it’s best to give yourself a long rope.

Email will save your creative business

Email isn’t some magic bullet. Not everyone has the stamina to set up an entire campaign and keep the conversation moving. But many creators do. You might too.

This isn’t the only answer. A good marketing plan uses a combination of different engagement points. But email is one of the best, and most-consistent.

Email is (almost) free.

Email is automatic.

Email is awesome.

If you’re an indie writer or creator and you’d like to develop your own email list, from ‘zero to hero,’ tap the link below and enroll in my free, Tribe 1K email masterclass.

The class took me two months to develop.

Read the testimonials of all the folks who went through the course before you decide. They’re happy campers. You might be one too.

We’re waiting for you.

(Grab My Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers.)

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.