Writers and Creators: Back to Basics — It’s Time to Own Your Customer List

Why building an email list is critical to the health and success of your business

As creators we love social media. We eat, sleep, and breathe it. This is where our customers hang-out, so we’ve got to be there too. But there’s a dirty, little secret the social platforms don’t want you to know.

When you build your business off someone’s platforms they own your business.

If all your customers are on Facebook you’re at Zuck’s mercy. Even on Medium — if all your readers are here it only takes one rule change to shut down your income.

Whether we use Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, or anything, those companies own the platform, not us. If we want to reach more of our followers we’ve got to pay to play.

We can’t take our followers with us.

We can ask them to leave, but we can’t transfer them to another place. The site owns our audience, not us. Yes, we’ve got to hang-out on social, but we should sell on our platform. Where we control the message and where we know our message will be delivered.

We’ve got to build a list we can take with us.

For example… my cousin and his wife tried to open a beauty salon years ago. They purchased the rights to the salon and rented the chairs to a couple hairdressers who worked there.

There was a falling-out due to the change in ownership.

The hairdressers left and took all their clients with them (the clients had relationships with the hairdressers, NOT the empty building my cousin bought.

With no customers the salon went out of business a few months later.

The hairdressers owned their customer list. Think of them as the list-owners. My cousin, who owned none of the customer list, got all the responsibility for the business costs, but had ZERO control over the income-producing asset (the customers).

We’ve got to control our list.

As creators we need email more than ever

We need it now. Not after we write our book or build our product, but before. If we launch our book to an empty room we’ll have no sales. As indie creators it’s our job to sell our work.

No one’s coming.

If we don’t promote our work it won’t get sold. This is work that helps our audience. We improve their lives by delivering it. But if we can’t let them know we’ve got something to sell (the way we want to deliver the message) no one will buy.

The noise is thick and getting thicker.

Social is distracting. It’s too easy to swipe away from your content. With email we get a captive audience. There’s nothing to do but scroll down your content once it’s opened.

With email we own the moment. You’re a writer. Our customers are readers. They enjoy reading. Email requires reading. We contact our readers on a regular basis and keep them coming back with content they enjoy.

Email isn’t dead.

We use it every day. I’ve got six email addresses myself. We’re arse-deep in email. And the beauty of it now is we don’t use it much for socializing, compared to how much we use it for business, buying, and selling.

We must control our income stream.

As creators everything is on our shoulders. Why would we allow the most-important asset in our business to be owned by another company? Yet, we do this every time we build our audience on the back of another platform.

Email marketing isn’t just pitching your work

We’re building a relationship with our audience. Sure, some of our content will be “hey, buy my thing…” but most of your emails will give value to the customer.

Most creators do email all wrong.

I’m on dozens of email lists of creators from many genres. Most of these folks are scared to contact their audience too often, for fear they’ll make them upset. So, they contact their audience monthly or quarterly and magic! The audience doesn’t remember subscribing and resents the sales pitches as the only messages from the creator.

We can do better.

When you email consistently you build a relationship with your audience. When you build a relationship they stick with you, buy most of what you have to sell, and they tell others to buy your work too.

The right email relationship is lop-sided.

We give valuable content our readers enjoy. We give until it hurts then we give a little more. We make measured, rare asks. The asks keep the lights on and the asks pay for the summer home. The gives keep the readers happy.

As I writer I buy my reader’s time.

Books are relatively inexpensive, but to consume them the reader must spend her most-valuable resource with no chance of getting it back. We get no more time. Once it’s gone it’s gone.

If I write a bad book and my reader buys it, I have taken a piece of her life she can’t get back. I must live up to my part of the relationship and provide only my best work, so that time is never wasted.

If we build that relationship correctly our audience will stick with us a long time.

We never stop reminding our audience we’re still here

No will cares about our work like we do. This is why we’re most-qualified to promote it. I know, it might feel like we’ll annoy our audience if we contact them on a regular basis — maybe they’ll leave and never come back.

I’d like you to look at email marketing differently.

As creators we’ve got to understand we’re helping our readers with our work. We make their lives better. If the readers consume our work their quality of life improves.

If our work makes our customer’s lives better isn’t it our duty to let them know we’ve got more to offer?

When we hide and don’t contact our readers we actually do them a disservice.

They’re not sitting around waiting for use to come up with more ideas. Our customers have their own lives, problems, and work. So, we do the reminding. We send them valuable content between asks. We keep them coming back, because our work improves their lives.

It’s time to own your list. We want what you’ve got to offer. Don’t be afraid to remind us.

We’re waiting for you.