Your email subscribers are your biggest fans. They should hear from you!

You may have a growing cohort of newsletter subscribers because someone had the good sense to tell you to put a newsletter signup on your website. But do they hear from you?

Unless you’ve been collecting email addresses without permission, via black hat interfaces, or in some other untoward fashion, the people who sign up for your newsletter—and stay subscribed—did so intentionally. They want to hear from you.

Email marketing is one of the highest-return marketing activities you can do and measuring its success is incredibly easy. But many smaller brands have gotten away from it, investing time in other digital marketing strategies or simply throwing up their hands saying “I don’t have time!”

No more. Here’s your call to action—email your subscribers more often!

Own Your Audience

Many brands, especially eCommerce brands and brick-and-mortar stores, can get caught up dumping money into SEO and other broad digital marketing efforts. They dump post after post into social media platforms or blog into the abyss hoping Google or ChatGPT picks it up, appeasing the SEO/AEO/GEO gods.

But consider this: over at Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like, they own the algorithm, they own the feed, and they own your users. If they don’t feel like showing your posts to users, they won’t. Depending on the latest algorithm updates, it’s not unusual for 80% or more of you social media followers to not see your posts. These audiences are low effort, low intent, and Instagram can take those users away any time they want.

Contrast this with email marketing. Folks who are subscribed to your emails and bother opening your emails are much higher intent. And Gmail’s Promotions tab notwithstanding, there’s no third party deciding whether or not your email is seen. Every subscriber has equal opportunity to see every single email. People guard their inboxes with much greater scrutiny than they do their social media feeds.

These users are so much more likely to turn into, or stay, paying customers.

Push the Button, Get a Dollar

Many brands we talk to, especially high-volume eCommerce brands (as opposed to service-based businesses) find that every time they send an email, they get revenue back. Someone makes a purchase every single time.

This is an opportunity you can’t replicate anywhere else. Especially for smaller brands where 20–30 transactions in a day feels pretty good, the impact of being able to generate income at will is incredible. Of course, there are diminishing returns, but if you aren’t checking in with your subscribers every week, you’re missing out.

Provide Something of Value

Of course, you shouldn’t be blowing up inboxes with AI-generated slop, low-value content, or for service-based businesses, sales asks ad nauseam. The internet is currently overflowing with low-effort content.

Instead, focus your email marketing efforts on consistently providing value and sharing what makes your brand your brand! Being a brand with a unique voice and values is crucial to standing out from the crowd in today’s online marketplace.

Get Out of Your Head and Start Writing

If you’re sitting there psyching yourself out (surely no one wants to hear from me), here are some tips and thought patterns to help you get moving:

• Push out a brag on new wins for your company.
• Highlight a related company (probably not a competitor) doing work that aligns with your brand’s values.
• Embrace unsubscribes. That just means your email list is cleaner.
• REI sends an email almost every day. Your subscribers won’t mind an email once a week.
• Being an expert in your field means some things start to feel rote or second nature. This is not true of your subscribers! Don’t be afraid to cover topics that seem basic or introductory.
• Reuse your content. Anything you put in an email should also become a blog post, and sure, it could even make it to social media. And vice-versa, your blog posts should always go out as emails!
• A short sales pitch to round out an email with real value is a great double-whammy.

Have other tips for getting out of the funk and back into the email marketing groove? Let us know in the comments below.