The 3 Stages of a Successful Email Newsletter Strategy for Creatives

If I could delete all my social media and only sign up for email newsletters I would—assuming I could get the same content brands, bands and businesses that I follow on Instagram. I love sending out newsletters to my email list and I’ve found that it’s my favorite type of content to create for my website design business.

Email marketing—though it may seem complex & time-consuming, it’s actually pretty easy once you get the swing of things. And the ROI on email marketing once it works is pretty great statistically, so why wouldn’t you want to work on it for your creative business? The hard is making it a priority so you have time for it and it’s a long-game strategy—meaning you aren’t gonna see viral results like you, in theory, could on social media.

But in this blog, I’m going to go over the 3 stages of a successful email newsletter strategy so you can start growing your email list, nurturing your email subscribers and turning them into paying ideal clients.

Email newsletter strategy stage #1—growing your email list with freebies

Growing your email list is arguably the hardest part of email marketing (it’s been the hardest part for me at the very least). There are messianically two parts to this stage of your email newsletter strategy: have a freebie, have a landing page for your freebie and promote the freebie. <<< #unpopularopinion you also can simply promote your newsletter as a source of helpful content. BUT let me break it down further for you.

Step #1 Create a freebie

Let’s be real for a second—finding ideas for freebies (or lead magnets, carrots, etc. as they’re sometimes called) and creating said freebies is hard. <<< So if you’re sending out great content to your email list and are just stuck on the actual freebie, I would just skip to step #2 and design a landing page to highlight your newsletter. Then you’ve at least got something to promote and you can work on a freebie when an idea that doesn’t make you want to wash your cat more than create comes you can make it then.

But if you’re ready to tackle creating your freebie, here are some ideas:

• A checklist that someone can use to see if XYZ has every element in place that it should.
• A workbook that can be filled out with ideas or content.
• A sample of the products and/or services that you sell.
• In general, Canva graphic freebies do really well if you are a B2B business.
• Your services guide (TL;DR I’m not a huge fan of this one, but it can work, so you do you)

Step #2 Design a landing page

Now that you’ve got your freebie ready (or you’re just focusing on highlighting your newsletter), you need to create a landing page for your freebie on your website. I’m gonna say that last part again, your landing page needs to be hosted on your website. <<< Even though it can be easier to create a landing page within your email marketing system, it’ll help your SEO by keeping it on your website. Plus you’ll have more control over the design of your landing page, which is also super important.

All you need to do on your Showit website to set your landing page (this will be a similar process with other website builders too) is to create a new blank page on your website, embed the subscriber form onto your landing page on your page and publish your new landing page.

For your landing page only you’ll want to remove the header to give fewer “escape hatches” for people who are on your landing page to get distracted by. Contrary to what a lot of people think, you should still have a footer for your landing page—BUT if the main footer on your website is more complex, you can create a specific one that’s got the bare minimum links (like your legal pages) on it for your landing page.

Step #3 Send traffic to your landing page

Once you’ve got your landing page published, it’s time to send traffic to it. Since your landing page is on your website, if you’ve used quality keywords on it, your page will start ranking in Google, but you should also post your freebie on all social channels that you’re on. You can also send this freebie to any existing email subscribers that you have to nurture them more.

Email newsletter strategy stage #2—nurturing your email list with newsletters

Now it’s time to send email newsletters to your email list, so you can nurture them into paying ideal clients—aka build trust with your email subscribers.

^^^This is probably my favorite stage of email marketing, if not stage #3.

What should I include in my email newsletters?

This will depend on what kind of business for this nurturing phase of your email newsletter strategy, you need to focus on providing helpful, high-quality content that solves your ideal client’s problems. You can either point to a piece of evergreen content that you have created (i.e. a blog post, podcast, etc.) or you can provide value within the email that doesn’t require clicking to something else. I’d personally experiment with a mix of these 2 ideas and see what your email list likes.

Both of these come with a list of pros and cons, but neither is a bad idea. Pushing your email subscribers to click through to a blog post will help with your website SEO, assuming that they actually click through to the content. And on the flip side, having content directly in your email newsletters can be a way to get replies back from email subscribers, opening up the door for conversation and trust building.

That’s why it’s important to have a welcome sequence set up for when someone joins your email list—this will help “train” your subscribers to click on links, reply to emails, and well…read the emails lol.

How often should you send email newsletters?

The data on how many email newsletters you should send per month or week varies a lot, and even those answers are very different depending on whether you’re an online service provider, an ecommerce business, or anything in between. But I think we can all agree that in 97% of cases, daily emails are going to be too much, especially if you’re a solopreneur.

The key is to pick a frequency that you’ll stick to. For most of you reading this, that’s probably going to look like once a week or even once every other week. <<< And while you can probably find success sending email newsletters less often, I personally wouldn’t do any less frequently, twice a month, or you risk your email list growing cold. And I’d highly encourage you to aim for once per week if you can.

What day of the week should I send email newsletters?

Yet again, the date is a mixed bag when it comes to this ^^^ question. The reason why? <<< It really depends on who your audience is and what you’re selling. Generally speaking, weekdays are gonna be better than weekdays for most people—but this again depends on who YOUR ideal client is.

Some people find success with sending email newsletters the same day every week—BUT that’s the one thing I personally had to ditch because I found it boring. Plus, when I’d run into holidays that I didn’t want to send emails on, I’d end up having to skip that week or send my Wednesday newsletter on a different day. I didn’t like either of those options, so I stopped sticking to a specific day of the week—but if neither of those things bugs you, then pick a day of the week and proceed.

But one thing is clear in the midst of the mixed data—no one is going to open, read, or like emails that are low-quality, aka boring and unhelpful in solving a problem your audience is facing.

Email newsletter strategy stage #3—selling to your email list

Now that you’ve warmed up your email subscribers, it’s time to sell them something. Enter email marketing sales campaigns. <<< Basically, a fancy term for sending out launch emails saying “Hey, I’ve got this thing that can help you with XYZ—wanna buy it?” Yes…I realize that’s oversimplifying things a bit—but selling really is simpler than it seems most of the time, it’s the imposter syndrome that gets in the way of selling being easy.