Email Marketing for Content Creators: A Beginner's Guide

1. Why Creators Should Use Email Marketing : Welcome to my course on how to use e-mail marketing as a creator. In this course, I'm going to show you why it's important to use email marketing and how to do it so that you can take your content creation business to the next level. The reality is, is that you do not own the places that you upload your content on, unless it's your own website, your e-mail list, or a text messaging list, whether it's YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, any of these platforms you don't own, you don t know if they're going to close down or even if they're going to change the rules and limit your reach to be able to reach your audience. When you're a business relies on an audience to be successful. You want to make sure that you can always reach out to them to let them know changes that are going on and how to find you if a platform goes down. So what is email marketing? Email marketing is simply the use of email to communicate directly with your audience so that you are not having to fight with an algorithm to get seen, but your landing into everyone's email inboxes. The basics of email marketing is just you allow your audience to opt in to receive emails, then you're able to communicate with your audience in a direct way away from social media. The benefits and why you should consider diving into this course is that you don't have to abide by the generic rules of the social media platform you're on when you have your e-mail marketing, you own the contact details. So if every single social media platform crash, you're still able to reach your audience. This allows you to sell your products and affiliate products more easily and more effectively than just on social media. Finally, you can share your content with your audience to ensure that they don't miss it. So you're not basing it on an algorithm, but you can share out and make sure everyone knows that you had this new piece of content come out. Finally in this course, I'm going to show you how to set up email marketing, which is going to involve building an email list, nurturing that e-mail list, and communicating with that e-mail list. Now, let's dive into the course. 2. Build Your Email List: So the very first thing you want to start with with email marketing is starting with building up your email list. So this is getting the contacts into a way that you can then email out to them and nurture them. So it's very simplest form. All you need to have is some form of opt-in form to start building your email list. So you don't even need to have a lead magnet, anything like that. All you need to do is have a form that says, stay up-to-date with my content. Put your email below. That can be where you start if you're like, I don't have time to create a lead magnet. I don't have time to do any of this stuff. Just go on something like convert kit, create a landing page that just says stay up to date with my content and have them put in their email. So that's the simplest form. However, with a little bit of additional effort, you can drastically increase the rate at which you're building your email list. The basics of this is that when someone comes onto your side and it's just stay up to date with my content. That's like if they are a true, true fan of you and they want to make sure they don't miss a single thing, then they're likely going to select that and say, Yes, I actually want to stay up to date. However, if they're just someone who likes your content, they're probably not going to go ahead and give you their e-mail to stay up-to-date. So if you put a little additional effort into giving them something extra for them, giving you their email, your drastically going to increase your email opt-in rates. So what this is generally called as a lead magnet or a freebie. So it's something you're giving away for free in order to get that person's email and generally wants that email gets on your list there known as a lead. And that's why it's called a lead magnet because it brings leads to you. Some properties of the best lead magnets are that they're simple. They solve a basic problem your audience has very quickly. They can be delivered automatically, and they're relevant to the products that you want to share and sell. So whether you have affiliate products that you want to sell or if you have your own products, you want to make sure that your lead magnet is a natural step to those products. So if you are an affiliate of a video editing software and you talk about video editing on your channel, then maybe you, you give like a five-step guide to video editing or a guide on how to reduce your editing time by 50 per cent, then that makes sense. Someone who wants that lead magnet is probably also going to be interested in your content on video editing and interested in your software that urine affiliate of. That's what you want to be thinking of and you want to think about what are the problems, what are the struggles that your audience is having whenever you're going to build your lead magnet. Obviously, if you're doing something on video editing, you don't want to build a linked magnets. That's like my ten favorite things of my morning routine. That's not gonna be as related to your content. It is probably not a problem that your main audiences having because you're not constantly putting out content on how to get a great morning routine. So that's what you want to be thinking about. Whenever you're thinking of the lead magnet, you want to create different types of lead magnets that you can create. Really common ones are PDF guides. Some our checklist webinars can be one, either ones that are done live or ones that are evergreen. So someone can opt-in and then they get to see the video that's already pre-recorded. Live events can be really good for short-term getting a lot of people in your e-mail list at once. But it's not as good for long-term because once that live event is over, no one's gonna be opting in for it anymore. So one thing you can do is make your live events then become opt-in lead magnets, exclusive content. So if you're like, I don't want to create any of this, but I know that my people are interested in like an additional podcast episode or an additional video that I do, or you get my shorts a day early or something like that, you can do exclusive content as well. A one-on-one call. So if you're a coach, one thing that can actually be your lead magnet is a discovery call that they can meet with you 20-minute discovery called Get to know about your services, and they also have to give you your email to sign up. Other things can be templates. So I create Notion templates. I could use those as a lead magnet or challenges. So if you wanna do something that's not just a onetime thing, But you wanna do a one-week challenge where you email them something every week. That's another type of lead magnet. So when you're creating your lead magnet, you want to think first about what is a common problem that your audience has. Again, lead magnets are going to do best when they actually solve a problem, not when they're just additional information given to someone. For me, I have a business called science grad school coach. And one of the common problems that my audience has is how do I get started in my research? How do I develop a new research idea? And how do I write research papers? These are probably the most common problems that they have. So I built two different lead magnets. One is my 30-day research jumpstart grad guide, which I'm going to talk about in a little bit. And my other one is my scientific research paper checklist. Both of them help solve those specific problems. Now the second thing you want to be thinking about is what is the quickest way you can solve their problem. So you don't want to think about, oh, I'm gonna give them this really big extensive course on how to solve their problem. That is something that's probably going to be a paid option. But what is one way that you can say, Okay, you don't know how to do anything right now, I'm going to at least give you the path. I'm not going to tell you how to do everything on the path, but I'm gonna give you the path or one lead magnet that I saw once was a Florida gardening calendars. Because this person was like, the biggest problem I, people have is knowing when to plant because planting in Florida is different than planting other places. And so she just created, here's the calendar of when you should be planting what based on Florida. And that lead magnet did incredibly well because it was a quick way to solve problems. Instead of teaching people the science and everything they need to know about how their plants should thrive in Florida, it was just one problem that they were solving quickly. And then what is the best form that this solution has? So if you're trying to teach someone about software, you might have an exclusive video tutorial as your lead magnet. You might have a step-by-step guide walking them through each step that has hyperlinks to your videos that are on YouTube or to your blog post on your blog. You want to think about what's the best form that's going to solve that problem, the easiest for your coming in. So that when you're creating your landing page to do this, It's really simple for people to go. Okay? This, this is going to solve my problem really quickly. It's worth giving my e-mail address for. Some examples of my lead magnets is my 30-day research to jumpstart guide. This is just a guide. So what I did is I created all the tasks you need to do to basically plan out a research project and get started doing the research. And then I categorize them into four weeks. For each week, they have very specific tasks that they need to do. And once they do those tasks through all four weeks, they're going to have their project started. So this is a really simple thing. All you need to do to create a 30-day jumpstart guide in your niche is simply just say if I was starting from zero, what are the tasks I would do to get to this x point? And then categorize them, buy into four categories. Then give each week a category and list the tasks they need to do for each week. My other one is the scientific research paper checklist. The scientific research paper checklist is literally, again, just a list of all the things you need to do to write, plan, and submit your scientific research paper. And then I just organize them under categories and put checkboxes next to them. I also have a content planning workbook. It's one of my older lead magnet that I do on my Alena raster brand. And so this is just a workbook that helps them figure out what keywords should I be targeting? How do I want to make this content and helps them plan out 52 ideas for a content planning workbook. And then I have my tech Maddox fault. So telematics is a piece of business software that I'm an expert in. And so I just created this basically course where I organize and upload my telematics tutorials too that are also on YouTube. So it's actually free content, but it's organized. And I give them a guide in the beginning for how they should be going through that content. So how do you create your lead magnet? So let's say you have your idea how do you create your lead magnet? You can use chat GBT to help you get ideas for a lead magnet, maybe even to help you think about what's the best form for that would be. But you want to make sure that your lead magnet is specific to your experiences and your advice. Because if it's just something generic that anyone's going to give when they actually get it, they're going to have a sour taste in their mouth because they wanted your stuff, not chat GPT stuff. You can then use Canva to create PDFs or slides. My first two lead magnets I actually made on Google Docs. So they're really, really simple, but they are still my main to lead magnets on my business. And then you can use an e-mail marketing service to collect emails and deliver. The systems that I have personally used is convert kit. I think this is a great one. When you are first starting out. To be able, you can just create a landing page and convert kit and it will automatically deliver your lead magnet as well. Good job. E is an all-in-one business tool that I used for about two years and then I just recently switched over to tech, which is another all-in-one business tool that handles all of my e-mail marketing as well. Other systems that I know about I have not used to, not like recommending, but just so that you know, you different options are MailChimp mail or light and active campaign. These are all different systems that allow you to send emails and create automated workflows so that you can deliver your lead magnet. 3. Nurture Your Email List: Once you have your email system setup, you have your lead magnet and you have a page that you can send them to, you're going to then put that link into your content that you give out or into your lincoln bios. And then your audience is going to start signing up for your lead magnet, which is great. But before you just launch it out into the world, one thing you want to think about is how you're going to nurture your email list. And you might be like, I'm a content creator. I've already done all the nurturing. My people love me. There may be completely valid, but if you want to use your email list to sell, to make money, you want to really think about what are you doing when they first join your e-mail list. You really want to think about what are you doing when they first join your e-mail list? And how are you going to develop a relationship with them so that it is easier to sell your products when you would like to add a minimum. When someone joins your email list, you want to let your audience know what to expect from being on your list. Are you going to email them every single day? Are you going to just share tips? Are you just going to tell us when a new content pieces out, just let them know what they can expect. However, when someone first joined your list, It's also a great time to introduce them to your products or affiliate products that solves the same problem as your lead magnet. So I came to you because let's say I am having problems getting fit. And you have a you did a seven-day workout plan as your lead magnet. Well, right now, you know that in this moment I'm having an issue with my workouts. So right now is a great time to tell me about a course that you have or a private group that you do workouts with hay, is accountability a problem? Here's my private group or even affiliate products that you have that you really love that may help me in my current situation. So this is one way to create an evergreen stream to your products instead of having to post just to get people to find out about your products. So if you don't have any products right now, you're like, I just started creating content. I don't even know what products I want to make. I don't have affiliate products, but I think I should create an email list. Great decision. But here's an example of what you should do if you have no products to share it all, you should at least send one email. In this e-mail, you're going to deliver your lead magnet, assuming that you have one, let your audience know the expectations for the email list. So how often are you going to email? How long is your welcome sequence going to be? So I'm going to email you once for the next five days, once for the next day. And then from there after then it's going to be weekly emails for me. And what type of content are you going to share? Are you going to share every single time you post a video or are you going to share a weekly roundup of all the content that you post or your top content. And then you can ask your audience for feedback. Especially if you're thinking about creating courses, you're thinking about creating any kind of product. This is a great time to ask your audience for feedback. This also helps your email deliverability because when people are responding to you, That helps the algorithms out there see your emails as valid. And so they're more likely to end up in more people's inboxes. So a couple of questions that you can ask is what are the biggest problems in your niche? So for you, what is the biggest problem you're experiencing right now in working out? What's the biggest problem you're experiencing in research, something like that, to start getting really quick market research data for the people who are actually going to be in your audience. The other type of question you can ask is what type of content would they like to see? Maybe you're doing a lot of one type of content right now, but it allows you to get more information from your audience directly to know what other types of contents should you consider creating. Now, products. I'm going to suggest a little bit of a different approach. So you still want that first welcome email, but then you want to have some more emails as well. So if you have your own or affiliate products that you want to share, you can create sequences to inform your audience of the different products that you have. The best products to promote, the ones you want to promote earliest in that sequence. Solve the same problem as the lead magnet. And you always want to make sure it's a product you truly love. You don't want to be promoting affiliate products that you don't use or don't care about just to get the money from the affiliates. Especially on your e-mail list, because people are going to unsubscribe from you if they buy that product and you could have really helped them with something else. But this company made a bad product and new marketed it. Anyways, then the goals of the sequence is to first over-deliver, to nurture your audience. So you want to give them even more than your lead magnet did. And then share the products that can take them even further. So you're giving way before you ask to receive anything. So if you have one product you want to share. So in my case, I have my 30-day research jumpstart guide and then I have a course called research accelerator. And this is the exact sequence that my people go through. They get a welcome email where I deliver their lead magnet and I tell them what they can expect and all of these things. And then the second e-mail if they get is one day delayed and that's additional tips relating to the lead magnet. I think I get them the three best place to discover new research ideas is my first one. And then my second email is a, another additional tip related to that lead magnet. So I think the next one I give is why you shouldn't spend so much time reading research papers on your fourth total e-mail. You're going to give a third quick tip and use that as a segue to introduce the main product that you're talking about. So this is the first time that they're likely going to hear about the big product that you want to share with them in this sequence. And so you're just going to introduce them and tell them what it's about. On your fifth e-mail, you're going to share the benefits of that product. So these are the five things you're going to be able to get from this and give them all the information for where they can sign up. And then finally, you can share testimonials if it's your own products. So this is your social proof. Or you can share personal experiences related to that product. So if you're doing an affiliate products, you may want to share your own personal experience and how it has helped you be able to grow further because you have this product in place. Now, if you have multiple products, you're going to have a little bit of a different sequence and you can do some mix-up of the previous and this one. You always still want to have your welcome email. You don't want to be going ahead and pitching a product in that welcome email because you already need to tell them a lot to introduce them to your email list. Now, the second email is you can share tips related to the lead magnets. So this is an over-deliver that you want to give. Then your third e-mail, you can go ahead and share a product that solves one problem that they may have. Again, you always want to, when you're sharing multiple products, you want the earliest one in that sequence to be the most directly related to the lead magnet. Because you already know since they opted in there right now, ready to hear about products most directly linked to that, then you can in the next one, share some tips and let them know about another product. Then finally, you can share your experience with an affiliate product is another type of email you can send. And you can change the delays between these emails or how you're going to schedule them out or anything like that. The goal of this sequence is again, to nurture and over-deliver to your audience, to create super fans, and then share products so you can make them money, so you can keep creating content. So hopefully this gives you some ideas to help you start figuring out how you're going to nurture your audience. And then next we're going to talk about how do you communicate with them outside of any automated things. How are you communicating with them and how do you make even more money with your email list? 4. Communicate With Your Email List: So now it's time to start communicating with your email list. So this is going to be the regular work you're going to do to keep up with your e-mail list. Let them know about what's going on and share products with them. So the goal of building an email list is to be able to communicate with your followers directly. So if you're just building your email list, nurturing them and then never sending another email. The whole point of your email list is null. And I know a lot of people will say, I don't want to send an email because when I send an e-mail, I see unsubscribes. This is not anything to worry about. This is just your own lists self-cleaning itself. Every time you send an e-mail, you're gonna remind people that, oh, I'm on an email list. So as you get a larger and larger list, somebody is going to see that e-mail and be like, Oh, I don't need that help anymore or I'm not interested in that creator anymore. And they're going to unsubscribe. And this is perfectly fine. It actually helps keep your own cost down because as you grow your e-mail list larger and larger, you actually sometimes have to pay per contact or per email. And so this is a way that you can decrease those costs by just self-cleaning. So don't worry about unsubscribes happening to your list. The whole point of your email list is to communicate. And you don't want to stop communicating because you're worried people are going to unsubscribe. So the email frequency is a really important thing to think about as a content creator. So as a content creator, you understand the importance of consistency and creating content. If you create five Instagram post and then don't post for four months, you're not going to perform well the same thing with any other platform. And email marketing is no different. If you have a nurture sequence and then you don't talk to them for six months. They're not going to remember who you are. They're not going to have that trust built with you over you constantly sharing things with them and it's going to make difficult your email list is not going to be a good place to be able to communicate directly with your followers because you haven't been communicating directly with your followers. You want to select a frequency that makes sense for you and your audience. Are you trying to become like best E vibe and your audience really wants to get those daily or weekly communications from you? Or do you just wanna do more like monthly or biweekly roundups? Hey, this was what was going on over the last two weeks. Just to let you now, do you wanna do twice a week? This is something you can play around with B, wanna think about suddenly sending e-mails is another thing added onto your plate. And so you want to balance between sending emails frequently enough that your audience is still warm to you, but not sending emails so frequently that your audience is tired of it and you're getting burnt out. The common frequencies is weakly sending an e-mail. This is my current frequency. So every time I publish a YouTube video, I send out a weekly e-mail and letting them know that I've published that YouTube video, indigo, check it out. You can also do biweekly. I know several big brands do like a biweekly round-up. These are the different posts and videos and blogs that we've done over the last two weeks. You can do monthly. Again, if you do monthly and then you're going to send out like a five-day launch sequence. That's going to feel really weird to a lot of people versus doing weekly. And then one week you have a five-day launch sequence. Or you could do an even more frequent of twice per week, I would say getting daily unless they specifically signed up for a daily newsletter. Doing daily is probably a little too much for most people's inboxes. And the whole point of your frequency is you want, the goal is to get your audience accustomed to receiving your emails and opening emails from you. This makes sure that when you are going to share a product with them or something like that, they know the regularity and it's not weird to suddenly just get 0. I'm selling something to you. It's like, Oh, this is a normal email. They're going to open it up and then it's used selling something. So two types of emails you want to really be sending our emails in forming of them are of recent or past content. So your past content is still valid, but a lot of people might not know about it. So if you have just a, this is past content related to this topic. I wanted to let you guys know this, especially if you have to miss a week of creating content, send them out, pass content and just say, Hey, go check out this content. And then the other type of information you should be sending is sharing a product that they could benefit from and you could or could not make money from. So you can share products that you can't make money from just because it's a good fit for your audience. It's something your audience should know about. But you also want to be using your email list as a place where you can make money to fund your Creator lifestyle. And so you should also be considering sharing products that are affiliate products or your own products to let them know, Hey, I have this out today, Check this out. Or even when you create videos around products, making sure that you're sharing it. Then for me, I found that the best mix is to keep this at about 75% free content and 25% paid product mix. This keeps you from burning out your audience by pitching products. Too often where they just assume every email you send is going to be a sales e-mail, then there are always some ways to pitch in emails. So there's generally two main ways you're either going to include a product relevant to the content that you're sharing or sharing, content that mentions a product. So basically, this type of way is that e-mail is actually about free content, but that content is related to a product. You're informing them. And you can do this through two main strategies. Either just in the body of your email, telling them, oh, and if you're interested in this check out this product or in the PS section, so you sign off. Thanks Elanor, I stir and then I say PS. If you're struggling with this, still check out my right, your research article course so that you always, if you're going to do it in the same e-mail as content you want to make sure that it is linked to together. Well, the other way to do it is to dedicate an entire email to a product pitch. I did this just recently. Whenever I launched my membership, I had an entire multiple emails dedicated to the launch of my membership. And those emails informed them about the membership and what was going on. And my audience was so used to receiving e-mails from me that those emails were still worth opening and we're still valuable even though they were products being pitched technically to them. I give them free content every single week. So a few emails that are pitching a product isn't a huge deal in that mindset. 5. Next Steps: I hope you enjoyed this course on just a beginner's guide into e-mail marketing for content creators. So I want to let you know about a few next steps after taking this course. The first next step is to dive into your project, which is just simply sharing your lead magnet or your email sequence in the project section. So create a lead magnet, build up your landing page, and get ready to start having e-mails come in. You can then also create your nurture sequence and add that into it with what you decided to do with your sequence. Also, please leave me a review below to let me know how you enjoyed this class and how it was helpful for you starting on your e-mail marketing journey as a content creator. And then finally, some things that you should think about learning. Next includes using chat GBT to make email marketing easier. This will be a new course I have coming out in just a few weeks. So if it's past that time, look in the description below and there'll be a link to that course. Also understanding your email analytics and then using them to optimize your emails to sell better for you. These are all things you can do once you move past the beginner stage, you have everything set up, then it's a good time to start looking at optimizing and understanding your Analytics. I hope this course has been really helpful for you and please don't forget to leave me a review down below.