Assume They Will Be Delighted to Hear From You
Mabel doesn’t spend time wondering whether someone will be pleased to see her. She approaches people with her whole body wiggling, ready for pats, nose rubs and plenty of attention. She assumes that people are delighted to hear from her.
Not everybody wants a puppy they have only recently met pressing her nose against theirs, but most people are still happy to give her a pat. Mabel doesn’t let the possibility of rejection stop her from saying hello.
It made me think about the way we approach email marketing.
Your subscribers have already said yes
If someone has joined your email list, they have chosen to hear from you. They have given you their email address and asked you to stay in touch. Why, then, do so many of us worry that emailing them will be annoying?
We overthink what to write, wonder whether we have anything important enough to say and put off sending anything. Meanwhile, the people on our list may have forgotten who we are or why they signed up.
Perhaps we need to borrow some of Mabel’s confidence and assume they are delighted to hear from us.
Your email list takes the conversation off social media
I spoke earlier about not seeing posts from some of the people I follow. Social media platforms decide what appears in our feeds, so we cannot assume that our audience will see everything we publish.
An email list gives us another way to speak to our people. We can share what we are creating, tell the stories behind our work and let them know when we have something available to buy.
We also have more information about what happens next. We can see whether people are opening our emails and clicking our links, rather than sending them to somebody else’s platform and hoping for the best.
Don’t email only when you want to sell
I have joined plenty of email lists because I genuinely wanted to hear from the person behind them. Sometimes I hear nothing for months, then an email suddenly appears because they are launching or selling something.
That irritates me. I didn’t sign up to hear from them only when they wanted something from me. I signed up because I was interested in what they had to say.
There is nothing wrong with selling through email. Your list is an appropriate place to talk about your offers because your subscribers have chosen to be there. However, selling feels far more natural when it forms part of an ongoing conversation.
What can you send when you aren’t selling?
I email my subscribers every Friday with a roundup of my week. I might share something I have been drawing, a story from one of my walks or an idea I have been thinking about.
If I’m creating something new, my subscribers will often hear about it before I begin promoting it elsewhere. Occasionally, I mention my shops, The Dot Catcher or The Dot Catcher notebook when they are relevant to the conversation.
Every email doesn’t need to contain a grand lesson or a perfectly polished piece of content. It needs to give your people a reason to remember you and remain interested in what you are doing.
Write to the people who asked to hear from you
If you already have an email list, send them something. Tell them what you have been doing, share a story or talk about something you are working on.
If you don’t have an email list yet, consider how one could support your business. Even a small list gives you somewhere to continue the conversation away from the unpredictability of social media.
Assume they’re delighted to hear from you. After all, they signed up.
If you have an email list, when did you last write to your people? If you don’t have one, what is stopping you from starting?
If you’d like to see what I send to my own subscribers each Friday, you can join Stories from the Dotty Side.
