Why Your Non-Glamorous Email List will Make or Break Your Business
…and what you can do to ensure your readers keep coming back
Email is not sexy. It’s not supposed to be. But this one, dusty marketing phenom can make or break your small business. Email offers something no other platform can give you — an equal playing field no matter the size of your business.
You get the same rights to your readers in-box space as the billion-dollar conglomerate behind you.
Until they figure out a way for companies to pay their way up your email queue, not with paid ads, but in organic in-box ranking, you’ve got the same shot at making a connection as the deepest pockets in the biz.
When you bet all your eggs on social or organic traffic you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox.
I don’t know about you, but, as a one-man creative shop, I don’t want my income eliminated overnight. Social can take your livelihood and they don’t owe you an explanation. Google can tweak a line of code and all your organic articles become invisible.
You can like, friend, hug, clap, and SEO your way to a large audience, but there’s no insurance policy like a great email list.
The essentials of a great email plan
- A valuable, free giveaway in exchange for your customer’s email. The key word is valuable. Not a two-page pdf checklist, but something you would pay real money for. A customer’s email can be worth tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the relationship. Look at the lifetime value in exchange for your giveaway and work hard to earn that email.
- An opt-in page that converts. You must have a great hook with the right information necessary to help your prospect either decide to join your list or move-on. Make your website a landing page with nothing on it, but the option to join your list. Alternatively, use the upside-down website, with the ‘welcome mat’ opt-in at the top and all the navigation below the fold.
- An automated welcome sequence that’s not self-serving. Your reader doesn’t care about you. She cares about herself. What can you do in every email that will keep your reader on your list and ensure she’ll open the next email?
- Relationship-building emails. You don’t ask for the sale right away. You build the relationship. Like a repeat visitor to a restaurant, we want the reader to return to our list first. We’ll worry about the sale later.
- We give until it hurts a little, then we give a little more. Remember, your reader wants value. Not how great your product is, but how you’ll give her a transformation from her current situation to a better situation, and how your work will support that change. If you provide real value with every email, it’s much harder for readers to unsubscribe.
- We skip the fancy. Simple text emails look like they come from a friend, not a mattress store. We open emails from friends, not organizations. You don’t need many images. Text works great. Pictures can be sprinkled, but sparingly. This lack of images will help keep you out of the spam or promotional folders too.
- We encourage participation. Include links, worksheets, and other behavior-inducing activities in each email. We want your readers to get used to clicking on things. Eventually, we’ll build enough trust to deliver an offer.
Email helps make your income predictable
When you set up an autoresponder welcome sequence, every reader gets the same treatment and the same story, no matter when they join your list. Not only do they get the predictable treatment, but we send them predictable offers.
Once you send an optimized offer to a large-enough group of people, you can predict the closing ratio for each offer.
Once you know the closing ratio the math is easy. If you send X people through your email sequence you’ll make Y sales. Your job becomes list-building and relationship-cultivating. The email process does the selling for you.
Selling shouldn’t be exciting.
As creators are time is best spent creating, not trying to convince people to buy our work. If we let out email process do the heavy lifting for us that leads us with more time to do the work that matters most.
Whether you’re a freelancer or small business owner the income is less-predictable than a nine to five. Email helps smooth the income generation. Get enough people through your email system and you’ll have consistent sales.
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This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +429,678 people.
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