Email marketing is changing – and this is a good thing. For a LONG time, there’s been a certain set of norms and practices in the online marketing world when I came to building communities. Namely – you have to build a big list of subscribers so that you can sell them stuff. So far, so good.
But dig under the surface of this and it starts to get kinda icky. We use an ‘ethical bribe’ to get people to subscribe – give them a freebie (often of dubious quality) in exchange for their email address. Then, once you have that email address you can send them newsletters, marketing materials, sale letters, pictures of your dog – whatever you want. This has before such common place than within the email marketing world we raretly even question this practice.
But think about this for a minute – the person signed up to get your freebie, not to have lots of additional stuff sent to them. And while you might be thinking ‘but I don’t spam people – I only send them useful stuff’, ask yourself the question – ‘did they ASK for the additional stuff?’
No matter how useful your newsletter and content might be, the fact is, the norm of automatically adding people who’ve signed up for a freebie to a newsletter list does so without their consent. And while YOU might be super respectful of that email, many others aren’t
GDPR came into force a few weeks ago and I’ll admit, at first it seemed like one enourmous beurocratic headache. But once I realised that not only was it not nearly as complex as I’d feared, it could actually lead to a great cultrue shift in the way we do email marketing.
And that’s got to be a good thing. No more bait and switch. No more 20% open rates on your emails. You’ll only have those people on your email list that actually WANT to be there. Who have consented to be there. Who genuinely desire to hear from you, engage with you, and yes, may very well want to hire you.
In this week’s podcast episode, Holly Worton and I discuss this new era of email marketing, and make a case for not just accepting it, but embracing it.
What You’ll Learn
- What the new culture shift with email marketing looks like
- Why list building will no longer be the most important thing in marketing
- Why this will help us disentangle our worth as entrepreneurs from the size of our list
- How this will affect the numbers game we all got used to playing
- What we need to focus on instead of just counting the numbers
- How to focus on creating real connections with people rather than blasting out a message
- Why conversational marketing works better than broadcasting
- New things you can do to truly connect with people as individuals, not as numbers in a list
- Why consent leads to healthier relationships
Things We Discussed
- GDPR
- For more GDPR fun: The G-D-P-R Song
- For even more GDPR fun: this spectacular Privacy Policy
- Tara Gentile article: List-Building Is Dead! Long Live List-Building! In Praise Of The GDPR
- Qoya
- Tanya Geisler
- Tracie Nichols
- Lara Heacock
- Jenny Mahan
- Jo’s Garden Party + link to the replay
- Joanna Penn’s Patreon account
- Amanda Palmer’s Patreon
- Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking: How I learned to stop worrying and let people help
- 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
- Rebecca Woodmass
- Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin
- Kelly Diels and her Blazing Epistles of Righteousness