The Freelancer’s Guide to Email Marketing
For the first three years of my freelancing career, I depended on word-of-mouth marketing to promote myself and acquire new clients.
My business enjoyed great natural growth, but when I wanted to kick things up a notch, I realized that word-of-mouth wasn’t going to cut it.
The limitations of word-of-mouth marketing
Word-of-mouth is by far the most effective form of marketing, but it’s also extremely limiting because:
- You can’t scale and systematize it. Word-of-mouth marketing is an organic process that relies on people to talk about who you are and what you do, often in a one-on-one setting.
- You have no control over it. While you can control the quality of service and type of results you generate for existing clients, you can’t control how often and to whom they will refer prospective clients to you.
Once I realized these two limitations, I started to brainstorm marketing ideas that are scalable, systematic and controllable, without compromising my brand (what people think and feel about me).
Ultimately, I decided to create an email marketing program, in which I send out one email every week about my thoughts, observations and insights within social media, marketing and business in the 21st Century, or a combination thereof. I call it “my weekly column” because I’m not a fan of the word “newsletter.”
Understanding the purpose
The purpose of my email marketing program is to stay relevant in people’s lives before they’re ready to buy what I’m selling, and to stay “top of mind” for word-of-mouth opportunities.
When I initially started my program, I knew that the majority of people on my email list would probably never become one of my clients, but I also knew that these people know other people who will undoubtedly need services that I offer somewhere down the line.
It’s not always about who you know. It’s also about who knows you, and who those people know.
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What the process looks like
Here are the steps I took to launch and develop my email marketing program:
- I exported all of the emails from my Gmail accounts (personal and professional), and then carefully went through each list to determine who might be interested in receiving my weekly column.
- After creating a list of people who might be interested, I uploaded the list to my Mailchimp account and sent out this introductory email.
- Every time I get an email from someone, or I meet someone in person and get their business card, I automatically add their email address to my list in Mailchimp. My thinking goes like this: If you’ve expressed some kind of interest in me and/or my services, and I provide you with non-spammy, high-grade, relevant content via my weekly column, there’s a good chance you’ll be interested in the content; if not, you can unsubscribe at any time.
Initial results and key takeaways
During the first six months of developing this email marketing program, I directly attributed five new clients, more than $10,000 in revenue, and another $60,000-plus in projected yearly revenue (not including existing clients and word-of-mouth). Some of the keys to this success include:
- I write when I have something of substance to say, as opposed to writing because I need to say and send something to my list. It’s vital to understand this difference if you want to have lasting success with email marketing (and content marketing in general). For me, I have something of substance to say on an average of once a week. Regardless, you should determine a frequency that will allow you to publish something of substance on a consistent basis.
- Instead of including an outbound link to my weekly column and directing my email subscribers to my blog, I copy+paste the entire text into the body of the email. When you ask people to open your email AND click on a link as well, you lose a lot of readers.
- Everything I write is based on personal experiences from my day-to-day life as an international digital marketing consultant, strategist and instructor. When you write content that comes from personal experiences, your content becomes inherently unique. The best stories are the ones that only you can tell.
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