How often should you send out an email newsletter?
How engaged are your fans? How much do they like you?
Today on T.I.M. Talks we’re going to address these questions by talking about the 4 very different kinds of email marketing.
Hey I’m also announcing the winner of the monthly TIM Talks drawing. Exciting stuff….
That’s today on TIM Talks #12
Hello and Happy Monday to you or whenever you happen to be listening to this.
Stoked to have you here with me on the podcast today!
We are in a short series on email marketing and today we’re going to address a common question:
“How often should you send out an email newsletter?”
We’re going to answer that question by talking about what I consider to be 4 different kinds of email marketing….
We’ll get to that in a second, but first I’m excited to share with you the winner of the March drawing to Sweetwater music.
Cole Mize.
Cole is founder of ColeMizeStudios and an independent hip/hop artist and an engineer & producer based out of Covington, GA.
Be sure to check out what he’s up to at colemizestudios.com/
I’m sure he’ll put that $100 to good use!
[alert type=”info”]Thanks to everyone else who entered, and don’t forget I’ll be doing a new drawing in April. This time for something different and very cool.[/alert]I am pretty pumped about it, and want to tell you what it is right now, but for that you must wait until the next episode, our first April episode this Thursday. That’s episode 13.
The 4 Very Different Types Of Email Marketing
How often should you send out an email to your email list? Is there a line that’s too little or too much?
That’s what we’re going to address in this episode.
Unfortunately, there’s not an easy answer. It really depends on what you’re doing.
I’m going to suggest a few different schedules for you, depending on what your goals are.
In this episode and in the next one we’re going to take a look at 4 different kinds of email marketing, which will inform the frequency of your email campaigns.
Each of these are different from each other, and there are different schools of thought out there over what is better than others. I personally believe they each have their place, and one isn’t better than the other.
They’re basically different categories that serve different goals.
So what are they?
- Scheduled Broadcasts
- Blog Post Broadcasts
- Marketing eBlasts
- Autoresponder Sequences
Your Content Strategy
And before we get into each of these, we need to talk about your editorial calendar. By that I simply mean your content plan.
Do you write blog posts on a regular basis? Do you have a podcast or a YouTube schedule?
What is your content strategy?
Having a content strategy will inform your email campaigns, and which of these four styles you’ll be most likely to embrace.
You may have something like a song story on your blog that goes out every week. You would need to send out a broadcast letting people know about your content.
That’s really what is at the heart of the word broadcast.
4 Very Different Kinds Of Email Marketing
Scheduled Broadcasts
Broadcast or Newsletter?
Many folks are used to the word newsletter.
A newsletter is basically an update with various bits of news and information all put into one email broadcast. And a “newsletter” could go out less frequently with more information in it.
Personally, I’m not a fan of newsletters like that. If you’re going to have a lot of information in your email I think it needs to be focused information (more on that in the blog post broadcast category).
But a broadcast again is exactly what it sounds like.
It’s informative and meant to drive engagement. To bring people back to your site, or whatever it is you want them to do….
But scheduled broadcasts can look all kinds of different ways.
The main thing about scheduled broadcasts is that they go out regularly, and typically they have their own unique content that drives engagement.
If you’re a YouTuber your email broadcasts should be kept pretty simple, and simply go out at a time that people expect them, pointing them to the video.
In this image, you’ll see a very standard scheduled broadcast that regularly comes from the guys over at Digital Marketer.
It’s simple, unique, and has one goal: It’s focused on driving engagement back to the content on their site.
If you’re launching a big campaign on your site, you might have more value packed content to really drive engagement.
But the main thing is you want to be consistent with a schedule, and you want your audience to know what that schedule is.
So… How much is too much and how little is too little?
With scheduled broadcasts, it depends again on your content schedule.
I’ll use myself as an example….
T.I.M. Talks is a twice a week podcast every Monday and Thursday, and I try to send out an email with each episode.
I’ll be covering the content of your email broadcasts more in the next episode, but these emails are short and to the point, and meant to drive engagement back to the podcast show notes.
So the answer there is twice a week, but again, that’s based on my editorial calendar.
Blog Post Broadcasts
Blog post broadcasts are simply syndicated blog posts to your email list.
There are different ways to set this up technically, but the big idea is that you send the exact same content to your email list so they don’t have to come back to your site.
This kind of email marketing is more about delivering value to your readers. If you’re an author this is a great way to keep your work in front of people, and to consistently keep your brand on their minds.
A few authors that do this are guys like Jeff Goins, James Clear, and Michael Hyatt.
Their blog promotes free blog subscriptions. The idea is people are signing up specifically to receive your blog posts in their inbox.
How often should you send?
Again it all depends on your content publishing schedule.
I would say if you’re going for a regular blog thing, then try to shoot for an every-other-week blog post. If you do more than two a week, I would send out something more like a weekly newsletter that has headlines with excerpts of the blog posts you wrote that week.
The only thing to note on the blog post broadcast strategy is that it doesn’t drive immediate engagement, simply because they’re no reason for the reader to come back to the site. Unless you included some kind of native ad or promo within your blog post to drive engagement to a landing page or something.
There’s not necessarily a right or wrong here, it’s just different approaches.
Marketing eBlasts
And now for something completely different.
You couldn’t have something more different from blog post broadcasts than marketing eBlasts.
People in the digital marketing space call these eBlasts because they tend to go out to massive email lists with very specific marketing offers.
Groupon is a great example of a marketing eBlast.
If you sign up for a Zulily account or a living social account, you get these on a very regular basis, but each of them are intentionally designed to sell you something.
How often should you send out an eBlast style campaign?
Probably hardly ever.
Many people I’ve seen though write their emails like marketing eBlasts. They load them up with a lot of graphics and big CTA headlines and that’s all they ever send out. I’m going to talk more about this style of email campaigns in the next episode.
By the way that’s episode 13 in just a few days called “what to send people” or something like that…..
As far as how often to send out emails like this….
As an artist, you may send out a marketing eBlast based on a campaign or record release or something which would only be maybe two or three times a year.
But it also depends on what your audience is used to.
More on this in the next episode….
Autoresponder Sequences
Now it gets interesting.
When you think about how often to send out broadcasts, there’s a very important thing to understand about human psychology.
When a person first signs up to your email list, they are the most engaged in that moment, and it’s really important to follow up with value and to set the tone.
You must begin building a relationship with them right away.
You also want to start driving engagement to your music, your products, your services, your books, your art, or whatever you’re trying to promote.
But this is most easily done through an email autoresponder sequence.
So this makes answering our question even more interesting.
How often should you send out an email newsletter?
Well with an autoresponder sequence, these obviously aren’t “newsletters”.
A typical autoresponder sequence can go out daily for several days, depending on what you’re doing. Eventually it will end though, and your subscribers should go on the normal weekly broadcast list, or whatever schedule you’re doing.
In the picture above, you’ll notice a very plain looking email.
It’s part of a strategically designed autoresponder sequence, meant to build a relationship with the person receiving it. It’s very focused and targeted, much like a long form direct response sales letter. This of course is very different from a marketing eBlast.
It’s plain, and highly engaging for the person reading. It’s written without a lot of bells and whistles precisely to come across more personable and like a “normal email” from someone you might know.
But autoresponders could look all kinds of different ways. Here’s the main reason autoresponders rock:
As your list begins to grow, you can’t possibly do manual follow ups or write and rewrite regular broadcast emails every time someone signs up.
You need somethings scalable.
Even if it’s a two part sequence welcoming and giving away something to your subscriber, autoresponders are super important to be using.
W.I.I.F.T.
Always, always add value.
Don’t send out “hey there check me out” emails.
How many of those emails should you send out? Very few and very seldom.
Why?
Because you’re not letting them know what’s in it for them.
So when it comes to the question, how often should you send out an email newsletter, first answer the question, what’s in it for them?
If that answer is something that you know people will go crazy over, then let them know unapologetically often.
And this really brings me to one more thought before we transition….
How engaged are your fans?
How much do they like you?
You see sometimes, we get scared of sending out regular email broadcasts because we’re afraid that we’re annoying people. If we’re scared that they don’t really like our music or couldn’t be bothered, then why are they subscribed to your list in the first place?
Let them unsubscribe.
In fact, tell them to!
But if you have something they need and want, if you have something that benefits them and they love you for it, send it confidently and send it often.
Today’s Action Step
Guys today’s takeaway is simple.
If you want to dive a little deeper in this subject head over to growyouremaillistfast.com and you’ll see where you can sign up to receive the first two modules of my new course on email marketing for free.
The first module covers the things we talked about today in more depth, and the second module covers getting started with your email marketing provider whether it’s Mailchimp or Aweber or whoever…. In that module there’s a bonus tutorial video on Aweber specifically.
After those modules we focus on getting more people to sign up on your list… how to start getting hundreds and even thousands of subscribers to your list doing a few specific things both on your site and in your marketing.
So again head over to growyouremaillistfast.com for more details on that.
Thoughts Or Questions?
Leave your comments below!
I’d love to get your thoughts on this whole subject of email marketing and growing your list in our comments section of today’s show notes.
Alright guys that’s it for this episode. In the next episode, we’ll be looking again at these 4 areas of email marketing and talking more specifically on the kinds of emails that actually work.
We’ll be asking the question: “What should you actually send people?”
Also in the next episode, I’ll be letting you know about April’s giveaway. Oh my gosh it’s gonna rock. I’m excited about it….
Until then, keep sharing your art with the world, and we’ll see you next time right here on TIM Talks.