Content creators, you NEED to start an email list

I feel like any online creator, at some point, has thought to themselves, "Hmm... maybe I should start an email list."

Perhaps you're not sure where to start or if you are doing it in the best way possible. The reality is, there are so many different ways you can learn about email marketing, and today I want to share the method that I think has performed the best and explain how to go about it. So welcome to email marketing 101 for creators - let’s go!

Why is having an email list so important

Before we dive into strategies, let's first talk about how important email marketing is. Based on a report by Salescycle in 2022, 59% of survey respondents said that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions - which is more than half. And from that same report, it states that 50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once per month.

I could find and list statistics for days. There are so many statistics out there, sharing the benefits and popularity of using email marketing. I will be honest; even though I knew how important it was, it took me a while to find my groove and a method that worked for me and my brand.

But the point is, email marketing is super important for content creators, entrepreneurs, and small business owners—anyone that’s trying to run a business needs to be leaning into email marketing.

This allows you access to your audience directly. You don’t have to worry about posting something and it never appearing on your community member's feeds; it’s being delivered directly in their email. If you make yourself known to provide strong value in your emails, it’ll also increase your chances of getting those emails opened. Overtime, as you build that trust, you’ll be able to share your offerings with that email community.

I like to think about it like this: Communicating with your audience on social media is like having a group coffee date and talking to everyone at the same time. Whereas if you have each of these people on your email list, it’s like having individual coffee dates with each person in your audience. Where you can direct your attention to one person, versus the many. Even though technically, you are sending out these emails to everyone.

How creators can use email marketing

Something that a lot of beginner creators don’t necessarily realize is that there are different types of email strategies. When we think of email marketing, we often first think of the kinds of emails you get from like, Old Navy, or H&M telling you about their latest sale, right? But there’s so much more to email marketing than 50% off email blasts. And when you start thinking about it differently, you realize there are ways for you do use email marketing as a creator that feel more aligned and more in tune with what your audience wants. So, I really wanted to dive into these three kinds of email marketing formats, and that way, you can figure out which one would be best for you and your brand or, like me, do a mixture of all three.

Email Newsletters

The first one is probably one of the more obvious, which is email newsletters. I’m sure most of you instantly think of an email newsletter when thinking of marketing. I would say most brands start here because it’s something you can write and produce each week and send it out to everyone on your subscriber list. This is where a lot of creators start because it’s the most similar, production-wise, to the typical content creation process. If you want to add another layer of complexity and strategy, you can even send your newsletter to just a specific segment of your list, if you have categorized your email subscribers.

And what I mean by segmentation is, if you have a freebie that is specific to a topic (and we’ll talk more about freebies or lead magnets later), you can connect those subscribers to that topic. So, if you are writing an email all about that topic, you can send it to just that group of people. These are normally called segments in email marketing. (For example, if I have a freebie about how to grow on YouTube for instance, then I could send a newsletter to that segment specifically about YouTube strategy)

So an email newsletter honestly can be a lot simpler than you think. My email newsletter has grown and developed over time, but it’s funny to use the term "grow" because I’ve actually simplified it a lot over the last couple of years.

We really studied what people were finding most interesting in our newsletter and ended up condensing it to share two articles, usually pretty short and sweet, three trending reels because we noticed a lot of people really enjoyed us providing them trending reels that they could just replicate each week. And then we also direct people to other free content and resources that would benefit them as a content creator. (We can provide value, and direct traffic to the content we want the audience to see. Also, I’m saying “we” here, because Shelby from the Creatorly team writes the weekly Creator Letter)

But overall, the email is quite short, which is strategic because a lot of people don’t spend very long on an email - you want to make it skim-able, and make any calls-to-action you want your reader to take very clear and obvious.

Evergreen Email Funnels

Moving onto another type of email marketing, evergreen email funnels. This is when you set up a series of emails that begin going out once somebody has joined your email list. Sometimes we call this a funnel, or sometimes a sequence. But the point it is - this is pre-planned, you’re not writing these out each week, and no matter what time someone signs up, everyone on the list recieves these in the same order, on their own schedule. It’s self-paced, drip content basically.

I’ll be honest: this is a lot of work upfront because you may want to write, like, 12-20 emails to create a nice long sequence. This can feel overwhelming compared to just writing one email per week.

But, the cool thing about this is once you put in a lot of upfront work to create this series of emails, all you have to do is watch every email subscriber be placed in this funnel, and your email marketing platform (we use Flodesk and I will have my link in the show notes for you - I believe my link will give you 50% off the first year of your subscription fee) will do the rest of the work for you.

This is so valuable because it ensures that each subscriber gets the same information, gets the same experience, and doesn’t miss anything important from you. If you just were to send only timely, weekly emails, then if someone joins next week, they aren’t going to see what you sent last week, right? This ensures that all your subscribers get all your best content.

So, you can have this be a one-week email series, a month-long email series, or can literally keep building onto it and make it go on for multiple months or even a year. It’s totally up to you. I have a pretty specific method that I am trying out and really starting to see results. (I’ll have more full results to report back in a few months time, because the thing about email marketing is, it does take time for all of this to happen. But here’s what I’ve set up so far)

And I have to shout out Molly Keyser here as well - she taught me a lot about email marketing and funnel strategy specicially in my interview with her for the podcast - so check that episode out to learn more directly from her!

➡️ I start with five back-to-back emails that are welcoming the subscriber to my email community. No sales, just welcoming them and providing free value. (I find these get the highest open rates of all my emails - upwards of 70% which is incredible. the industry average is 20%)

➡️ After that, they will start receiving emails every seven days on Thursdays. Flodesk is awesome and allows you to set emails up to send on specific days. That way, they’re not receiving these emails at the same time they might receive my newsletter. (because my newsletter goes out on Mondays. For a new subscriber, it will just feel like I send two emails per week) This weekly email series will go on for 5 weeks.

➡️ And that’s when my sales promotion emails begin, where they will get five back-to-back emails pitching one of my digital products, for a week.

➡️ Once this is ended, it will go right back into weekly emails and keep repeating this process.

I am still building onto this all the time and making updates when needed.

Sales emails

Now, this is leading me to the next email marketing option which is sales emails. I really just bundle this in to both my email newsletter and my evergreen email funnel. It’s very rare that I just send a direct sales email unless I am launching something new. However, like I said at the top of this segment - this is probably the form of email marketing that you’re most familiar with, it’s what most traditional retailers are doing all the time. And as a creator, when you have a special occasion like a launch for example, it can be good to employ this method.

For example, when I launched my Instagram Road Map course, and even when I re-launched it this year, I did create a specific series of emails to tell people about it and essentially sell my course.

But otherwise. I just integrate these sales strategies into my newsletter and email funnels.

For example, in my email newsletter, I always include links to my products or affiliate links when it makes sense in my articles. And at the bottom of the email, we always mention a few resources and most of the time those are affiliate links or direct links to my products.

In the email funnels, of course, I have an entire back-to-back email series, like I just mentioned, that sells my products.

How to build an email community

But now the kicker, you need to actually get people to your email list before they can get sent any of these email types. So let’s talk about some ways you can start to build your email list.

Lead magnets/freebies:

The best way to build your email list is by offering a freebie, or what we sometimes call a lead magnet. (because it attracts your “lead” or potential customer) I’m sure if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve heard this term thrown around a lot, but let me explain.

A freebie can really be anything you want. It can be a simple PDF guide that provides people valuable information all packaged nicely in this free resource.

For example, I have something called a gear guide, and it is very visual and provides links to all of the content creator gear that I love and recommend. (Imagine like a classic catelogue spread of products and short descriptions of why I love them) This guide not only includes affiliate links, so if somebody were to purchase the products using those links, I would get a very small commission at no extra cost to the subscriber, but this also adds them to my email list, where I can communicate with them, get to know them more, and eventually share other products and resources I think they would find valuable.

You can also do templates; one of my most popular freebies is a simple content calendar that’s hosted in Notion. All they have to do is have a free Notion account and duplicate this template onto their own account and use it for completely free. You can create templates in Canva, presets in Lightroom, a Google Drive document, other productivity platforms, anything that you are using in your own life or business, you can create templates out of those and provide them to your audience for free, and again, this is another opportunity to have them join your email list.

I also have one other freebie, which is kind of a mixture of both of these. It’s hosted in Notion, and is an Instagram growth guide in the form of a digital workbook. So somebody will take this Notion template and duplicate it to their account, which will allow them to fill out the questions and databases inside this Notion page, but throughout the page, it’s also providing them value.

This really goes to show you that the options are endless on what type of free magnet you can create, as long as you’re providing them value, they’ll really have no reason not to stay on your email list because this is the precedent that you will continue providing them value throughout your emails as well.

How to naturally mention your freebie in your content

The next thing I want to chat about is how to naturally integrate your free resource into your content. I will be completely honest with you. This is something that is still very challenging for me. I would say over the last few months I have gotten a lot better at this, but I’ve always really had an issue with mentioning my products and free resources, but then, after having a few talks with a friend of mine, Molly, who was actually a guest on this podcast last year, I realized that my audience would love to know if I have a free offering.

And I think a lot of us creators need to change up our mindsets on “promoting ourselves” I think that’s a common block for a lot of us. It’s something I’m still working through because I know what I’m offering is helpful, I just need to remember to tell my audience about it more!

Especially because I know that my freebies are actually valuable and could help my audience in some way. I don’t know why I had felt guilty mentioning my freebies, but after realizing that really, this is helpful to my audience, I have found it a lot easier to mention my resources in nearly every piece of content I create.

When you create these free resources, you’re creating them for your current audience, or the audience you’re trying to build, right? So assuming that you are creating social media content on the same or similar topics as your free resource, it should be pretty easy just to add a quick mention that you have a free resource that can help them deeper or provide them the links to all these things you mentioned, so on and so forth.

How to make it easy for your audience to grab your freebie

Something that got a lot of buzz towards the end of 2023 was chatbots, specifically a platform called ManyChat. I really avoided this for a while because I was really nervous that it would come across like spam, and that people would feel like it’s inauthentic and not really me. But I think it’s all about how you use it and how transparent you are about it.

If you are not familiar with ManyChat, let’s first talk a little bit about what that is. So this is a chat automation that can be connected to your Instagram, and you can set this up to where if somebody comments a specific word or phrase on your post, they will automatically be sent something in their DMs. This could be a message or a link, whatever it is you want.

Now what bothers me is when I see other content creators doing this and not being upfront that it is a chatbot, like, pretending that it’s really them who is going to message them. I just don’t feel like there is a reason to treat your viewers like that.

So, instead, I think the best method is to use the knowledge of it being a chatbot as kind of a joke. For example, “comment the word "gear" below, and my little robot assistant will send you my gear guide.”

I mean a lot of people already know that it’s a chatbot, so I think being upfront and honest just makes people feel even more connected to you because they know you are investing in a resource that will allow them to get information sooner directly in their messages, versus them having to go through the trouble of clicking in bio and finding it on their own. If anything, being upfront about it even more so shows how much you care.

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Here’s what I want you to do when you have time later today.

📧 Find an email marketing platform that would work for you, even if you have to start with something that offers it for free, I completely understand. I’m pretty sure MailChimp still has a free email marketing tool up to a certain number of email subscribers. So you can start there and maybe upgrade to something like Flodesk in the future, but the point is, go find an email marketing tool that you like and that fits your needs. Sign up for it, create a few email newsletters so that you are a little bit ahead.

🖼️ Go into Canva and create at least one free resource and have that connected to your email marketing platform.

🗣️ Then just start mentioning your free resource in your content for your viewers, and as your email subscriber list grows, start working on your evergreen email funnel and just watch as you see this list grow and your lead/sales grow with it.