Sssh – secret content only for our email subscribers!
“The money is in the list” they say.
There are many good reasons to start an email list. Visibility is the key reason we started a list. People still read emails and, with the social media channels becoming more crowded/difficult to be seen, email is a good way to get in front of the people you want to see you. The percentage of people who will open your emails is actually quite high. If you use an email provider like Mailchimp (that’s who we use) it is less likely that the email will end up in your junk mail. Of course you have to make the content interesting otherwise only the first email will be opened…
We are active on social media – on our facebook page, in various facebook groups we are in, on Twitter and Instagram. But these don’t belong to us and we don’t like our business to be subject to the whims of Mr Zuckerberg et al! We could build thousands of followers on our facebook page and then he could change the rules so we had to pay, for example. An email list is “owned” by us – no-one can take it away.
Whilst we have found some good social media groups, podcasts etc, the only small business email “newsletters” we receive are very dry, boring and trying to sell us something. We hate those. We like visual, interesting, educational (a bit) and entertaining. We try to make our social media like that, and our website too – it’s who we are (or like to think we are!). So we have set out to make our emails like that too.
Our goal at the moment is just to build our list, get people opening the emails every fortnight (perhaps even looking forward to them???) and getting people to know us better. That way when you are thinking about a new website (first one, sixth or somewhere in between), or a friend is, we hope you will consider us.
Our next instalment (in a fortnight) will take you through the steps we took to set up our email, using Mailchimp.
See you then!