I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve recommended the following focus for marketing lately:
Email newsletters + one social channel = your key marketing focus
Once you’ve got one key social channel nailed, you can add more. This gives you the opportunity to get into the rhythm of creating content for that one space. You’ll have time and energy to respond to comments, engage with other people on the platform, and – this is the most crucial part – learn what works for you and your audience on that platform.
If you’re trying to do Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and TikTok all at once and without any strategy for any of them, chances are you won’t see any progress on any of them.
So start with one, and add more once you’ve found your groove. The most important thing is to be learning and developing as you go.
Oh yeah – email
Look, I’ll be frank: I’m going to be talking about email marketing quite a lot over the coming weeks.
Why? Because I feel pretty passionate about it, and its ability to create a strong, sustainable, long-term foundation for your business.
Email is the only marketing channel that you own. On Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and any other app that comes along, the app or site controls your content and owns your audience.
With email, you own the contact details of anyone who has chosen to receive your emails. Yes, you’ll use a third party to store the data and send the emails, but they’re helping you out. That list of humans is yours.
Long-term, mostly hidden, yet highly effective
I have a theory that most creative business owners don’t get excited about email is because they don’t see other people’s email success.
On Instagram, you can see how many followers someone has, how many likes their posts get, and how many people are chatting away to them. It looks successful. It looks like something that’s working well for them.
When someone sends an email to their list of 500 or 5,000 or 50,000 subscribers, you can’t see the numbers on that. You don’t see the open rate or the click through rate or the open rate.
You can’t see how many first time customers are becoming loyal, repeat customers. You can’t see the replies or the shares.
Which is keeping successful email campaigns a secret.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe we need an area of business, especially marketing, where we aren’t comparing ourselves to others. (If you looked at the numbers above and thought, “500 subscribers? More like 50!”, I see you.)
But I don’t want you to miss out
The best time to start building an email list was five years ago. The second best time is today.
Because in five years’ time, with regular emails and clear strategy, you could be growing a beautiful, loyal, engaged customer base in a space online that is entirely yours. Where you set the tone and capture attention and cultivate a relationship that makes your customers’ lives better.
Even in six months’ time, you could be looking at a more engaged audience who are captivated by your brand and enjoy sitting down with a cuppa to read your emails and browse your latest.
Emails help to keep you top of mind when it comes to gifting occasions, as well as being an opportunity to tell your story through consistent and regular content.
I hope you’ll stay tuned
Next week, I’ll be sharing more about how to re-engage an old email list, because I know that lots of creative businesses have gathered email addresses at some point, but haven’t kept up the emails, and now aren’t sure what to do.
In the meantime, you can start getting creative and inspired with my free download of 30 email subject lines. This download will get you thinking about content for email, as well as your social media channels. Because who doesn’t love coordinated marketing content?! Grab the download here.
