Videographers and content creators tend to focus on creating the best video and audio and often don’t think about marketing. In this beginners guide to email marketing for content creators you’ll learn why email marketing is important and some good fundamentals. I’ve created a beginner’s guide to email marketing for content creators and creatives to help you achieve independence from platforms and social media.
What is email marketing and why is it important
Email marketing is about marketing to people that are interested in your content, product, or service. Usually it’s over a period of time where you build up a relationship where you build up value. Later on if you launch a new product or service you can promote it to your email list. It’s an important part of every business from streaming subscriptions, to buying wine, or software. You can offer a lead-magnet or something of value to someone in your space in exchange for their email address. Often times if you’re looking to try an app or wine you want to try it first for free. The app will get access to your contact information and later on try to upsell you on the paid version to unlock more features. It’s especially important to content creators that want to scale from free-lancing and trading time for money to products and services where they can scale their business beyond service or geographical location. You can start building an email audience in your specialty over time of prospective customers and also from past customers. Over a period of time you can send useful emails to your subscribers based on why they originally signed up.
What software to use for email marketing?
Mailchimp is one of the most popular programs for email marketing, but I transitioned to Convertkit for it’s power, simplicity, and the community support for creatives. My disclaimer is that I am an affiliate of convertkit, but I pay for it as well because it’s great software. I’ve used it since 2015 to build up a list of people that are interested in everything from the travel videographer lifestyle, online business, videography, and more. Convertkit is free for up to 1000 users so there is nothing to lose.
Whichever software you use I highly recommend you start building your list as soon as you can
Do you need a website to build an email list?
It certainly helps to have a website to build an email list, but with convertkit you can also create hosted stand-alone forms to start out. I use wordpress as my website platforms. I then layer on a theme like Astra and use another plug-in like Thrive Architect to get fancy with big buttons to create a sales friendly page. For my website I like to use Siteground because they are a fast and simple webhost to use. Again I am an affiliate and paying user of these products, but it is not extra cost to you. Having a website allows you create content on your website to attract organic traffic from google. You can also embed forms from convertkit on your website seamlessly.
If you don’t have a website you can create stand-along hosted forms as mentioned. The problem with this is you need to find traffic for these forms. For example, you can share these links on your youtube channel or facebook page where there may be an existing audience on the platform. This is not a viable long term solutions and I recommend that you have a website with some content before you consider starting email marketing.
Create and offer and building forms
To start building an email list you should already have something of value that you can offer as an incentive for signing up. Next, you also need to create a form on your email marketing software to show what your offer is and offer fields to enter their email address. For example you can offer a free course in exchange for some information including their email address. You can watch the video to learn how to build a form using convertkit.
Creating Email Sequences and Rules
Once you have a list of email subscribers you have to send some emails to them. A series of email(s) over a period of time is called a sequence. You can have multiple forms and sequences, but you may want to send specific emails to people interested in a certain topic. For example. If you are interested in making passive income with your drone footage I would have a separate form and email sequence for this. Convertkit has powerful integration and rules. You can integrate convertkit with platforms like shoppify, wordpress, gumroad, woo-commerce, teachable and more. Rules allow to create a rule when someone enters their info on a form or makes a purchase on one of the platforms to send their info to the appropriate sequence. For example, someone that buys my footage set or enrolls in my course will receive a specific series of emails (sequence) defined by the rule.
Sequences and Broadcasts
Once you have subscribers going through you sequence you want to make sure that each email is carefully crafted. This can be more of an art of science, which is out of the scope of this post. Generally the school of is that you want to deliver what they signed up for. You want to deliver value at the beginning over a series of emails over a period of time. Later on you can mention and pitch y our product. If it’s a course then make sure they are enrolled or you can provide an external link in the email. In future emails you can give valuable information related to the topic of the course and in the future you can pitch and sell your product or service. This is the general idea. As far as how often to schedule the emails it depends on you and your product. I have some sequences that are several months and some that are shorter. In my Convertkit course I share some of my actual sequences to give you a more specific idea.
A sequence is a series of emails over a period of time, but a broadcast is the one email that is broadcast to all or a majority of your subscriber base. Usually you can save theses broadcasts for a big launch or announcement. The broadcast feature in convertkit allows your to experiment with different subject lines to see, which subject line gets more opens.
Reading the Analytics and Making Adjustments
When you have subscribers signing up for your newsletter and reading your emails you want to pay attention to the statistic on specific emails, sequences, forms and even broadcasts. On landing pages and forms you can see how many visitors have seen your forms (impressions). Subscribers are people that have seen your form and signed up and this calculation makes up the conversation rate (between 1.95% and 5% according to Sumo.com). If your conversion rate is low you may want to experiment with different offers, headings, colors or buttons.
For sequences you want to pay attention to open and click rates for your email(s) and even for the entire sequence. According to convertkit that average open rate is 20–30% and a 2–5% click rate.
If you are getting lower than these metrics you may want to consider adjusting your subject lines and the actual content of your emails.
email marketing analytics for sequences[/caption]
Summary
This should be a solid starting point for your to consider why you should start email marketing, what software, and some of the main steps to consider. The most important decision aside from the software you use is to start as early as possible. Once you have set up the email marketing system and have set up your offers and forms then the email marketing machine starts working for you. If you want to go deeper and learn email marketing with convertkit then check out the Convertkit Essential Email Marketing guide for Content Creators and sign up for more email marketing tips only for subscribers.