Prep for the Holidays EP1: Creatives, Warm Up Your Email List BEFORE Market and Selling Season!

Episode 1 in our new minisode series - Prep For the Holidays - is all about email. It's time to work on growing and warming up your email newsletter list before the holiday selling season! Kickstart your holiday sales strategy with actionable email marketing tips and suggestions to get you going.

Don't have an email list? We tell you how to get started - you don't even need a website! We'll also talk about re-engaging a cold list and practical steps to maintain and grow an established email list.

This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout

You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the and she Looked Up podcast. Each week, we sit down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. I'm your host, melissa Hartfield, and after leaving a 20-year career in corporate retail, I've been happily self-employed for 12 years. I'm a graphic designer, an illustrator and a multi-six-figure-a-year entrepreneur in the digital content space. This podcast is for the artists, the makers and the creatives who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the and she Looked Up podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:59

As always, I'm your host, melissa, and this week marks the start of our Prep for the Holidays mini-sode series that we're going to be running now, which is beginning of July, all the way through to the end of the holiday season, and the series is designed to be a bunch of short episodes that are five to ten minutes in length, with each episode covering off one particular item on your holiday prep checklist, so that, when we get to November, december, we can focus on packing, shipping and customer service instead of feeling like a million things are going and it all starts to feel a little crazy and out of control. So that is the goal behind this series, and the episodes are meant to be for anyone who is a maker, an artist, a creative services provider or a content creator, because I think for all four of those groups, q4 is a big part of our overall sales for the year. So if you fit into one of those four categories, I think this series will be for you, and we're kicking it off today with a topic that I actually had two topics narrowed down for the very first episode, because these are both things that we probably should have started working on a few months ago actually, if I'm really honest, but it's July now and it's never too late to get started. So the one that I chose is your email list and email marketing. So a while ago, I heard a source and I heard a stat, and I can't remember where the source was, but it was something along the lines of people who purchase from you in Q4 tend to be people who were hearing consistently from you in Q1 and Q2. That is not a stat that seems out of line to me, so I'm going to go with it for the purpose of this episode, and I know we're past Q2, it's the beginning of Q3, but it is never too late.

Speaker 1: 3:02

One of the things that's really important with your email list is that you keep it warm. So that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be selling to them in every single email that you send out. You don't need to do that. I know for a lot of creatives that's really awkward, but you don't need to do that. What you do need to do is show up consistently in their inbox so that when it is time to sell in other words, black Friday, cyber Monday, your holiday sales, all of that kind of thing they know who you are, they remember who you are, they're familiar with you and they're ready to buy because you've built up a bit of a trust factor through the emails that you've been sending them throughout the year. So this is why it's really important.

Speaker 1: 3:47

If you just email them cold the day before Black Friday, they're going to forget, they're not going to know who you are, they're probably not going to open your email. It's going to be weird. They're going to go who is this person? They may unsubscribe, they may report you as spam all the things that you don't want. So that's why it's really important to start working on your email list now, if you haven't already. So we're going to talk about what to do if you don't have an email list, what to do if you have an email list but you have neglected it a little bit, and for those of you who are regularly emailing your list already, we're going to talk a little bit about some things that you can do as well. So, first of all, like I said, the idea of your email list is to keep your audience warm. There is a lot of information out there about how a cold list is almost as bad as having no list, because a cold list can get you into some trouble, like I said, beginning of the episode with spam reports, people unsubscribing, people forgetting who you are. You don't want that, so you want to keep your list warm, and that means being consistent with sending emails out.

Speaker 1: 4:54

So if you don't have a list, now's the time to start one, and there's a few ways that you can do this. First of all, you don't need a website to start an email newsletter list. Most of the email service providers out there will have a free account that you can start, and they will give you access to create a landing page on their platform that you can send people to to sign up for your list. So you don't need an email list, you just need that link for the landing page. Once you have that, you can start promoting that link on your social media channels, getting people to sign up.

Speaker 1: 5:29

If you mainly do in-person markets, that's a great hook to get people to sign up for your list. Let them know that if they want to know where you're going to be this summer, fall, winter to sign up for your list, because you'll be sending out emails with your market days and times, that's a great way you can also start. You can also create a QR code for the link and you can put that at your booth at markets so that people can scan it with their phone and sign up right there. You can use a clipboard at markets to get people to sign up. You can have a little spin the wheel on your table where, if they sign up for your email list, they can spin the wheel and they get like 5% off, 10% off, a free little something. People love that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 6:17

Anything you can do to make it easy for them to sign up those of you who already have lists. You can use all of these tactics as well if you aren't already, but that's if you aren't already. But that's what you want to do. You want to start working on getting people to sign up. If you have an Etsy shop, you can put a link to sign up for your email on your thank you card that goes in your package, or you can put the QR code on your thank you card All those things.

Speaker 1: 6:42

Anywhere that you are getting in front of people, make sure that you have a way for them to sign up to that list. And once you start getting people on your list I don't care if it's one people, one person, 10 people, 200 people start emailing them and start emailing them regularly. Do you need to email them every day? No. Do you need to email them every week? Again, no. But I do recommend that you try to email at least once a month. That sort of seems to be the minimum that people need to see you in their inbox to remember who you are, to remember why they're subscribed to you, all of those types of things. So yes, try for once a month. I email my services business once a month. I email my illustration business subscribers twice a month, so you don't need to do it every week or every day.

Speaker 1: 7:33

If you've got a huge list and you generate a lot of income from your email, then, yeah, by all means up your frequency, whatever you are comfortable with, but just keep it consistent. You can plan your emails ahead. Most email platforms have a scheduling feature that allows you to schedule when those emails go out, although that's often on the paid accounts. So that's something to think about. But if you make use of that, then you can actually write all your emails for the rest of the year this week and schedule them to go out at one month or two week intervals, however often you email. So that's something that you need to do.

Speaker 1: 8:15

If you don't have a list, now's the time to start collecting. If you have an email list, but you're not particularly consistent about emailing them, now is the time to commit to being consistent. If you haven't sent an email out in a while, that's your task this week is to go send an email out and put a date in your calendar for the rest of the year, at least once a month, when you're going to send another one out, just to keep yourself on track If you already have a list and you're emailing them regularly and you're doing all those things. That is fantastic. Your job is to keep marketing that list, all the things I already mentioned. You may even want to create a lead magnet to get people to join. You might even want to consider paid ads to drive people to your newsletter signup. Those are sort of the advanced tasks that you can consider doing. They're not mandatory by any means, but if you're kind of hitting that plateau where you want to kind of take things to the next level, that's definitely something that you could do as well.

Speaker 1: 9:17

A really important thing to remember with your email, you don't need to sell in every single email that goes out If you are not sure what to send people out. If you are not sure what to send people, we have an episode it is. I wrote it down here. It is episode 92, where we talk about 20 email newsletter ideas for creatives that are not super salesy. And if you it's a fairly long episode because we go into depth. We go in depth for each one of them, but if you want a short version that just outlines them all, you can sign up for our email list over at andshelookedupcom and you will get a free printable download that lists all the different ways that you can email your newsletter list without being salesy. See, that is how you get people onto your list.

Speaker 1: 10:04

So this is a perfect example. I'm offering you a little freebie to kind of get you over there and signed up on our list. You don't need to ask. You don't need to sell in every single email that you send out. There's no need to do that. But you do need to make sure you ask for the sale. So let's say you send an email out today where you talk about what you're working on or the next few markets that you're going to be at. At the bottom you might just want to put a little banner that says you're offering I don't know. I have one at the bottom of my email list that says just a reminder you can get three cards for the price of four, or you can get four cards for the price of three over on my website. Your email list is also a really great way to drive people to your website instead of Etsy, and it's one of the few assets in your business that is truly yours outside of your own website.

Speaker 1: 10:58

When you have your customer information in your email list. Then it's so much easier to get in touch with them. I know a lot of people rely on social media. Social media algorithms are not the best right now for a lot of us, and so there's a very good possibility that you could be putting out all this information about the markets you're going to be at and the projects you're working on and your work in progress, and people aren't seeing it in the way that you are hoping they're seeing it. But if you have an email list, you can email them regularly with all that information, and the people who are interested will have the opportunity to open that email and read it. So that is your task for this week Revive those newsletter lists. If you are not emailing regularly, if you don't have one, it's time to start one, and if you're already rocking your email list, then keep doing what you're doing and see what you can do to push it to the next level.

Speaker 1: 11:50

That is it for this episode. We'll be back in another few days with another episode from the prep your prep, your way to the holidays. Checklist, mini sound series. That is a mouthful and I have to figure out a better way to say that, but that is it for today's episode. I hope you found this helpful. Please feel free to drop me a note at andshelookedup at gmailcom if you have comments, or if you're on YouTube, you can leave a comment in the comment section. That's it for now and we'll see you soon.

Speaker 1: 12:22

Thank you so much for joining us for the and she Looked Up Creative Hour. If you're looking for links or resources mentioned in this episode, you can find detailed show notes on our website at and she looked upcom. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more business tips, profiles of inspiring Canadian creative women and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the show via your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. We always love to hear from you, so we'd love it if you'd leave us a review through iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Drop us a note via our website at andshelookedupcom, or come say hi on Instagram at andshelookedup. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.