Part 5 Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: Email Marketing

This blog is the final piece in a five-part series all about digital marketing. In this post, we’ll dive a bit further into Email Marketing.

In Part 1 of my series on the different aspects of digital marketing, we covered a brief overview of all of the elements that make up a well-rounded digital marketing plan. In the rest of this series we’ve been looking at each of these elements separately so that we can get a better understanding of each, and then use them to create our own digital marketing strategy.

Isn’t email marketing…boring?

Email marketing is probably the least exciting part of digital marketing and (I believe) gets a bit of a hard time. But it is so important; way more important than most people believe, and are therefore willing to spend time on. In comparison to social media, how exciting that is and how publicly people can see how popular you are with your followers, it seems pretty boring. You can’t really show off how many people you have on your email list, you know? On top of that, did you know your social media posts organically reach only around 6% of your followers? Email marketing gives you a much more direct and personal approach to your audience.

How often do you have someone that you love following on social media, you interact and engage with on a regular basis, and then you suddenly realise that you haven’t seen their posts for 2-3 weeks? So you head over to their profile, expecting them to have not posted for that amount of time, and see they’ve been posting away and you just haven’t been shown their posts in your feed because for whatever reason the algorithm decided not to show them to you. That happens to me all the time. On the other hand, how often do you go a day without checking your emails…? I’d be willing to bet it’s not very often.

I listened to an awesome podcast on Jenna Kutcher’s Goaldigger about this recently, and I would highly recommend you listen to it too! You can find out more about it here. The bottom line is, email subscribers are worth a lot more to your business than social media followers who are owned by whatever platform they found you on.

What do I do with my mailing list?

This will depend a bit on what industry you work in and what how you present your brand. If you’re a musician, you should definitely be making use of your mailing list. Your audience wants to hear from you! They want to come see your gigs, and buy your albums and other products. You could send out an email once or twice a month with upcoming gig dates, a link to your latest YouTube video, a link to your album that’s on sale, or a special coupon for gig tickets for being on your mailing list.

With your mailing list, you don’t want to constantly be selling yourself either; give your followers something of value for being on your list. Serve, serve, serve, and then sell. There are some amazing, easy to use platforms; my favourite is Mailchimp. It’s super easy to build nice looking emails, and a great way to build your list. Here’s a handy list of things to check when you’re sending out your emails too:

Okay, so how am I supposed to get people to subscribe in the first place?

There are lots of great ways to do this! First of all, make sure you have lots of obvious places on your website and across your social media channels where people can opt-in to your email list. An easy way to grow your list is also to offer people a discount on a product or a freebie for signing up to your list. So for example, you could give a 10% discount for one of your CDs or tunebooks, or a pdf checklist of the best ways to work on a certain technique for your instrument, or a free e-book you’ve written.

Using email marketing to connect with your audience

In the podcast I’ve recommended above, Jenna talks about how she sees social media as being your virtual ‘handshake’, a way to let people get to know you, and how your mailing list is where you can truly serve the people who want to connect with you. Ultimately, people are on social media to have fun and connect and aren’t always in the frame of mind that they want to be sold to. However, the people on your mailing list want to buy what you have! They most likely already know who you are and what you do, and actively want to stay connected with you. There’s another great article here about how email marketing can be more powerful than social media. I hope that this gives you the push you need to get started on building your mailing list, and to learn a little bit more about why it’s so important!

Up next: how to create your own digital marketing strategy

If you need to catch up, you can read Part 1,  Part 2, Part 3 or Part 4 (phew!) on my blog. Next time, we’re going to take everything we’ve learnt about digital marketing in this series and use it to help you build your own digital marketing strategy. It’s not as scary as it seems, I promise! Keep an eye out or sign up to my mailing list to get my blogs delivered right to your inbox. As always, I welcome your comments and questions below!