Should You Build an Email List on Your Website?
Why email lists may do more harm than good for professional writers.
You see prompts to sign up for email newsletters on almost every website you visit, and for good reason. Email marketing can be one of the most successful advertising channels for a business. Plus, even non-marketing emails build upon brand awareness and the overall customer relationship.
So, if email list building is so effective, should you be doing it for your own writer’s portfolio site? In this article, let’s take a look at the cost versus benefit of a freelance writer engaging in list building on their own portfolio site.
The Allure of Email List Building
Throughout my time as an authority health writer and then as a copywriter, I saw so many professionals put in crazy amounts of effort to build their email list.
Now, it’s one thing if they’re selling courses and products, but it’s a whole other thing to see service-based businesses take on email list building.
Regardless, people ranted and raved about how easy and effective it was to grow their list. Many said they had anywhere from 200 to 2000 people on their email list, and I was super impressed!
Let’s look at all the amazing things that can happen when you take advantage of an email list in the right situations - and when it’s done effectively.
Subscribers Come to You
Yeah, once you have everything set up (and no hiccups in the funnel process), subscribers can come to you. But you still have to draw them towards your site in the first place with paid ads, social media, SEO tactics and/or networking.
So there’s still more work to do once you have the email systems set in place.
However - in ideal situations - the right people come to your site, they are compelled to sign up for your newsletter, they type in their info 100% correctly and it all goes smoothly!
Direct Contact with Leads
One of the reasons why email marketing can be so effective is that you are directly in contact with your lead. You don’t have to spray and pray for an online ad to hit the right people.
You send an email, it goes to their inbox and bam! A conversion could be in the works… As long as your emails don’t go to spam and your email maintains a good reputation. And, as long as your contacts actually open your emails.
Reaching the Masses
Yes, once you have a good list, you can send out one email to everyone and get the word out about your writing services. Seems way better than sending individual cold pitches, right?
But just as we say in almost every cold pitching blog we create, sending out generalized messages is rarely effective in landing work.
While value-building emails, brand awareness and general messages are fine for an email blast, potential clients want to know what your services will do for them specifically. When pitching for work, you want to make sure every pitch is targeted to every prospect - and you can’t do that with a general email list.
Automated Marketing Forever
A huge draw to email lists is that they can run and send automatically with the right email software. You obviously have to get everything set up, but then your workflows and campaigns can run whenever you want.
As long as you keep up with a consistent email schedule, you’ll have a better chance of retaining people on your list for months or years!
The Ugly of Email List Building
For every successful email list building, there may be even more unsuccessful lists. And if you commit to maintaining an email list in a business that can’t really support it, you’ll find yourself on a pretty vicious cycle of having less time, less income and more stress.
Heaping Initial Efforts
When I started Ambitious Writer Society, it was the first time I had to use list building software, funnels, CRMs and the like. What a massive learning curve!
It took me months of part-time work to plan out how everything would go, build things out and tweak all the automations. Then some extra time when I found mistakes with the first several email subscribers and/or AWS students (sorry).
Now that I’ve learned from my mistakes and have a better handle on things, the process is easier, but still time consuming.
Just keep in mind that getting everything ready to send out your first newsletter emails is pretty extensive. Not to mention, if you want to offer a lead magnet to get people on your list, that takes time too.
When I had the idea to start Ambitious Writer Society, it took about 10 months from when I started creating our first writer’s resource to when the first newsletter emails started rolling out.
Never Ending Upkeep
While a benefit to email lists is that they can be automated, it doesn’t mean you can sit back and do nothing once it’s set up. You’re either creating new content for the email list, trying to draw more people into the list or troubleshooting problems.
Is the work terrible? Not really, especially once you’re familiar with your tools, software and options. But it does take up time during your week, which leaves you less time to work on actual confirmed projects.
Misuse of Your Time and Energy
What I see so often is that writers will get so tied up in creating email campaigns, managing them and figuring out how to draw people into their email list that they neglect spending a majority of their time on income-generating work - like client work and cold pitching.
This is often the case when a writer is - unknowingly or not - trying to avoid their paid work or avoid the dreadful act of cold pitching. They’re simply more comfortable writing no-pressure blog posts and emails, and that’s where they stay for a majority of their week…
List Building with the Wrong People
While you could argue that email subscribers on your list are potential clients, if they don’t book your services within the first 6-18 months, will they ever?
Unless you add constant automated checks into your email list, such as trigger links to funnel out people who never click on your emails, you could be sending emails to people who would never be your clients anyway.
They could be people who only want free information and would never pay for services. Or, they could be duds that got on your email list when they never should have in the first place.
Paying for the Tools
Now, let’s talk about what it takes to really run an email list. While some website hosts like Squarespace offer email services along with your website. It’s usually an upcharge.
Some CRM tools are very costly and others are more reasonably priced. However, as a solopreneur writer, you may want to conserve what business expenses you’re taking on.
Another problem: While you’re putting effort into your email campaigns in hopes of getting work, you only have a limited amount of time each week to get things done.
Say you have 200 contacts on your email list. Even if 20 your email subscribers ended up booking your services, you have a limited number of projects you could take on. You couldn’t work with 20 clients all at once.
Sure, you could schedule out future projects, but most clients aren’t willing to wait 6 months to start a project. Most will just look for another writer in that case.
So, if you can’t afford to take on a surge of projects from your email subscribers, is it really worth the effort of constantly maintaining that email list?
So, Should Writers Have Email Newsletters?
You are the steward of your own writing business and career, so it’s up to you how you do things. If my advice is worth anything to you, I’d steer clear of building an email list if you’re offering 1:1 writing services.
If you’re planning to sell products like content courses to your clients, then it might be more worth it since more people enrolled in courses doesn’t necessarily equate to more work time for you.
However, if you’re just trying to build up your client bases and gain experience, I highly recommend that you focus on gaining clients through cold pitching and networking.
