Why Influencers Need Email (So You Can Stop Leaving Money on the Table)

Allea Grummert (00:12)

Hey there, welcome to Happy Subscribers, a podcast that explores how bloggers and content creators can create more purposeful relationships with your audience through email marketing. I’m Allie Grimmert, email marketing strategist, copywriter, email platform expert, and founder of the done for you email marketing agency, Duet. I started as a personal finance blogger in 2016 and have since helped hundreds of bloggers and creators like you maximize your email marketing for more impact, more traffic, and a better connection with your subscribers. Be prepared for some advanced email talk.

as well as tactical tips to help get your valuable content into the hands of your audience faster and easier. I’m excited you’re here, so let’s do it! We can create a deeper, more meaningful connection with the community you love and serve through email.

While I started out as a personal finance blogger and have worked with lots of content creators who are specifically bloggers, where they have a website and blog content and everything lives in one place and the goal is to send traffic there, there’s also this other element of being a creator online that I haven’t talked much about. But it’s really been on my mind to firmly state that even influencers

People without a blog need email. And I see so many opportunities for earning revenue and building connection with your audience that I just had to record a whole episode about it. So I know that this space feels different than the blogging space. Both have a lot going on. Y’all have long to do lists. And for the influencer, for the folks who are maybe sharing recipes on Instagram,

but sharing in the caption, the recipe itself, where you’ve got a loyal following who buys products when you recommend them. There’s a gap in what is possible for you as a creator. And if you don’t have email marketing set up to capture your audience, there’s so much left on the table, money, relationships and security and how your business grows. And so I’m going to cover that today. So

Let’s talk about the job of an influencer and it involves a lot of content creation in the social media space. So you’re already posting to Instagram, you’ve got like to know or shop my, you’ve got Amazon, maybe you’re showing up on TikTok as well and you might have a blog but even if you don’t we can say this is a lot of work.

And whether you’re doing it alone or you have a team with you, it’s a lot of repeat behavior and you’re creating lots of content all of the time for your audience on social media. The trouble is is that none of these platforms like talk to each other. And so you’re individually posting on each one. And that is just a lot of tedious work. And it’s important because if you don’t share the content, you don’t earn the revenue. But

Perhaps you’re feeling really stretched with that. so the fact that I’m bringing up email, you’re like, hmm, Ali, come again. Like one more thing to copy and paste in and upload photos to. I’m going to walk through why it is important and how to make it more simple for you going forward. The reason why I bring this up is because you’re already doing so much work and you’re showing up on all these platforms, but you’re not really getting your full return on what you could be getting.

if you were to use email. The reason being is that with social media, first of all, not everyone sees your post, not everyone sees your story, your stories disappear. know, and so say you reach 5 % of your audience with a story, that’s a lot of people who didn’t see it. And links can get buried. You’re like, you’re trying really hard to reach all these folks. But having reach isn’t the same thing as having email marketing.

subscribers, people who want to hear from you consistently. So I would say, yes, you’re creating really, really wonderful content, but you’re not fully capturing the value of it. And as you know, I’m a big fan of email marketing for so many reasons. And one of the first reasons is that email marketing allows you to quote unquote own your list, which sounds really weird. But it’s this idea of you actually have

control an agency over how you communicate with your audience in a way that isn’t throttled by algorithms. Sure, when we talk about email marketing, there’s also deliverability, et cetera, but it is nothing compared to an algorithm in a social media platform or even on Google changing things. With email marketing, you can hit send to a list of 2000 people or 200,000 people or 2 million people and it will land

in most of their inboxes and you will see 35 to 50 percent of them open that email and you’ll see a certain amount of them click in that email. So you have a much better, I don’t want to use the word guarantee, but it feels a lot more like a guarantee versus posting on social media that when you send an email your audience will see it. And you don’t have to like hope for the best. It’s just going to land there.

And the reason why they call it like quote, unquote owning your audience is that if anything happens to your Instagram or your TikTok where you say you get hacked, I Pinch of Yum is a really popular food blog and content creator team on Instagram, but their Instagram got hacked and there’s no way you can like, you can’t download a list of your followers and then re-upload them with a different account. You can’t do that. Whereas with email marketing, you have people’s email addresses that you can download.

You can put them on a little backup if you want. Or if you want to switch platforms at any point, can download, export your list of subscribers and move it to a whole different platform. You have a lot more flexibility and those email addresses stay associated with those people. Of course, you’ve got people switching jobs and if they’re signed up with like an EDU address or dot org or something, if they’re switching jobs, they may not actively check that email anymore. It might get shut down. But still, I hope you’re hearing that the odds are still really, really high that you’re going to reach your people.

using email versus social media. Maybe you have a welcome sequence and some nurture emails already, but they feel stale or outdated or you don’t even know if they’re performing well. This is all stuff that I do all day every day for my clients. I’d love to able to do that for you with my email strategy playbook. And if you’d like my team to write emails for you and get them all set up for you as automations, we would love to do that. You can book a free discovery call with me at duet.

co slash contact and we will chat more soon. Now I want to talk about how email marketing can both support your visibility goals and drive more revenue. Well, you know, you’re like, Ellie, but it’s another platform. Sure, sure, sure. But let’s, weigh the outcome of using email marketing. I am not joking when I tell you I have clients sending emails and making money and most of them are making money from site traffic.

So having ads on a blog, you could be doing the same by sending emails with links to affiliate partners or promoting products of your own. And it’s not just like a pray and send kind of email. You get to create a whole campaign. You could exclude people who’ve already bought. Like there’s just so much you can do with email marketing to really personalize the experience for your subscriber that social media doesn’t allow you to do. hear me out. I am not saying don’t do social media.

I’m just saying you need an insurance plan because we don’t know what will happen with social media. We don’t know who will buy it. If it gets shut down, if the algorithm changes, we, I, we, me, and all the other people who care for you and your online business and want you to be able to continue doing what you’re doing, want you to have an email list so you can have more control over how often your audience can see your content. And then not only that, like, yes, it’s a different platform.

It’s a different content stream, but with very little lift as far as making it different than what’s on social media. You’re already used to writing an Instagram caption or having a compelling hook in a video. You just repurpose it into email. Now you might be thinking, but I want to phase out on TikTok. What are they said on Instagram? Y’all I’ve always said, nobody’s mad about seeing a lasagna recipe twice. Nobody’s going to be mad about it. Like, but you already sent that out. Yeah, hun. It’s a really good lasagna recipe.

or it’s a really great brand that I want you to know about. However, it is that you’re promoting what’s core to your business, whether it’s food content or AG1 or whatever brands you want to support. But what’s so cool about it is that it lands in people’s inboxes and when they hit reply, it can come to your inbox. Technically, mine comes to my inbox, but I have an assistant who reviews emails and she’ll even like draft up a reply. And so it’s like 90 % there before I hit send.

and reply back, like making sure that it’s everything that I would recommend or if there’s anything else I want to say or if it’s a friend of mine who replied back. But what’s so cool is you get to build a dialogue that way. Sure, it’s not public. It’s not comments on a post, but it’s building relationships even behind the scenes. And those still matter. When you reply back to an email that someone has sent to you, I’ve had people be like, it’s you, you’re real. I was like, yes, I’m real. It really is from my inbox.

you have an opportunity to build a relationship with your audience that will continue to blossom into this long term relationship with them where they are paying attention to what you’re saying and they are engaged with you. And so that’s the kind of stuff that’s a little bit more qualitative than quantitative, but is really cool for me. No marketing. That being said, as the people who are joining your list, sure, we have some people who might be a little bit more transactional, like, yeah, I just want this freebie or I signed up just to get

this recipe or this link in my inbox. Sure. But then you have a chance to engage with them through a welcome sequence that introduces you and more of the types of content that you have or your top posts. You send it back to an Instagram real. I don’t care if it’s really helpful and you think everyone on your list deserves to hear about it. We put that in a welcome sequence so that everyone who joins your list does hear about it. And you get to decide.

what that experience looks like for people as they’re joining your list. You can have them complete a poll, tell them, you know, click something to tell you more about who they are. You can make sure that they know about a signature product or affiliate that you want to promote. So while not everyone who follows you on Instagram gets a full introduction to your content or your style or the brands that you associate yourself with, email marketing allows you to do that and allows you to do it consistently.

So you can use social media to continue to build your audience, but you’re also getting them to subscribe to your list for more behind the scenes things where, you know, maybe you share personal stories in your email that aren’t going on Instagram. You can find all sorts of different ways to incentivize people to get on your email list. But once they’re there and once they go through your welcome sequence, they’re going to be around for a while. So it gives you this like nest egg, if you will, of like truly invested people.

who want to hear from you, which gives you permission to send them more emails. And as you send them more emails, not only are you getting your content and the brands that you support or the products that you support in front of people, like visibility wise, as far as reach goes, dude, email marketing drives sales. And so I just like, I want to challenge you that if you were to send one or two more emails a week, I’m going to say, assuming you’re not sending any,

What would happen if you were sending one email a week or start sending two emails a week? Where could you look to see the revenue tied to that? Send the emails and see because as you send more emails, people are going to build a familiarity and trust in you. have a client years ago who works in like the clean beauty space. She does beauty, makeup, non-toxic home life things like

She gets to make sure that everybody on her list knows her top picks for all of those, as well as links to a roundup post of like her favorite finds it target. That’s how I found one of my favorite face masks because Lisa suggested it. So as you send out these emails, you will see it drive revenue. In addition to sending affiliate links to your audience, of course, you probably don’t want that to be.

Every email like 10 out of 10 emails, but it could be like 8 out of 10 emails Especially because if people are following you because of your recommendations They are going to stick around and I know Lisa is a great example of like in our welcome sequence that we wrote for her We talk about the testing process she goes through we talk about the experts that she works with in order to Make sure that her recommendations

are what people expect them to be. And so you’re building rapport with people to trust you. And then that paired with the actual links to the places where you would buy things, and perhaps you have a special deal for them because of your influence, that gets people to buy. And it’s not sleazy. I hope you hear that. It’s truly like, how do we tell people what you decide to promote? And why is that important to them? And why should they trust you? That’s all that we’re doing in a welcome sequence. And then with consistent

content, you are getting those links in front of them and allowing them to shop for themselves. So I mentioned affiliate links. You could also just resend content that’s showing up on Instagram or TikTok that you want your list to see. Maybe it’s a real that you spent two and a half hours creating, or maybe it’s part of a brand deal. Send it out to your list. Get more eyeballs on it that way. Speaking of brand deals, you can also layer in an email or more, more than one.

to your list as part of a brand deal package. Now, I know I’ve mentioned this before, so forgive me if I’m a broken record to anyone who’s a regular listener of happy subscribers, but I went to school for advertising and public relations. And yes, you have metrics like conversions and signups and sales. One metric that we pay for in the marketing on advertising space is just general awareness. Like put that in quotation marks. It’s called general awareness. If you have a list of

200,000 people with an average 50 % open rate, you can tell the brand it’s going to be seen by 100,000 people. Now, even if it doesn’t generate sales for them, it might not be you. You provided the audience and that is beneficial enough. So you can build that in to your brand sponsorship deals. You can also run ads inside of your emails that have nothing to do with direct partners through brand deals. But if you use Kit, they have Kit ads. You can sell your own ad space.

There are so many different things you can do to earn revenue through email. Now I’ll have to look up the stats on this, but years ago they said that email drives an average of like $41 or something for every $1 spent. So back to Ali, do I trust you? You can trust me and you can trust the stats. I can look up the stats on that. I’m sure that it exists. I don’t just make stuff up. And yeah, and I don’t know what you’re currently making as far as a conversion rate for social media.

But think of this not as a completely different channel, you’re just repurposing what you’re doing on social and doubling down, double dipping, if you will, to make sure that this audience also has access to your wonderful content that exists somewhere else. I’m gonna give you just a mindset shift. And I alluded to this at the beginning, is that you’re not just creating new content for email, you are reorganizing content that you’re sharing other places.

So you’re already curating your links and sharing outfits or products and posting regularly like daily or more so. So then email becomes a place where you send a roundup, send a digest, send links to multiple things in one email, or you just feature one product. You have options. It doesn’t have to follow any sort of particular formula for it to be a valuable email. If you wanna feature a product, feature a product.

If you want to tell a little bit of your weekend and then share these are the three things we did, I couldn’t have lived without these three items. Perfect. You have your email. So examples of this could be things like this week’s outfits or everything I shared this week on Instagram or here’s the TikToks that, you know, people are excited about. Go check them out here. It could be that you have an email or two a week that’s just about top of

picks with like sale codes. Like if you get access to a sale code, just, if you only have your social media platform to send that to, you’re missing out on a whole potential audience. Think if you had 10,000 people on a list that you could send a sale code to to shop at Madewell and those people buy, you’re gonna see the money come in. I wanna encourage you, it’s not that you’re creating new content. Yeah, I’m talking about like an opening sentence and a subject line and a preview text.

there is some technical like implementation that’s required in order to do email marketing. But I hope you know, I’m not saying that this is like reaching a completely new different type of audience than what’s on social. You just get to use it and read it somewhere else. So if you were to start implementing email marketing into your strategy or bring a team member on or train someone to do this, what if, what if you looked at some emails that come into your inbox and just like

Consider the elements of them and what pieces you want. Pull those elements together. Consider one template layout. Oh my gosh, I cannot believe it. I just watched my cat fall out of her cat bed to the floor. Are you okay, honey? I think she’s embarrassed. But if you were to pull together some of the different pieces that you like seeing in a newsletter, then half of the work is done for you. Maybe even more than half because not only do you kind of have the design figured out,

you know what pieces of content and what sections you need to fill in. So if you can create for yourself a templated layout that you just duplicate and edit and send once or twice a week, so much of the work is done for you. So much of email marketing and what feels heavy for people is feeling like everything needs to be made from scratch every stinking time. And it doesn’t have to be. So hear me out. You can always grow into trying out different templates.

But for now, just create one repeatable format and send an email once or twice a week. Within that email, I do recommend a short intro. It doesn’t have to be super personal, not every time, but you want some sort of like, hey, here’s what’s going on. Some elements of you and your brand story showing up in email on a regular basis. So it doesn’t just feel like AI is churning out content and shipping it to your audience. We want them to also know

you and feel like they’re connected to you. Include your links, include any images that you want. And on this topic, you just need to be really careful that as you’re building out your emails, you’re not using header text with anything that is really, really important because it may not always show up in an email or if it’s showing up on top of an image, those images like the entire block of text on the image itself may not show up in email. So just make sure that the bulk of your email

The important things, the links are all showing up in body copy. So here’s what I’m imagining though that you are maybe running into or thinking about is like, yeah, Ali, it’s simple for you. You do email all the time. And it’s true. I do. And so I share these tips as somebody who was a DIYer. A lot of folks are DIYers and they want to do it themselves. Power to you. I want to encourage you that you can absolutely start growing and emailing your list.

by yourself on your own. It just requires consistency and follow through. And I know that a lot of folks come across a lot of questions when it comes to getting started. When you join my email list at duet.co slash happy, I have all sorts of DIY resources that I send out regularly. But if you’re thinking, I like this idea, it makes sense, but Ali, I just don’t want to manage it. That’s what we do. And so you can book a call with me through duet.co slash happy. There’s a link there for you.

We have a service called Done and Delivered where we handle the strategy for you. We write the emails for you. We schedule and send them and we look at how they’re performing. We gather all of the details from you and then provide them to you in a way that you can sign off on and move the ball along. You get to stay in your zone of genius, working with brands, showing up on social media and just know that this part of your business is operating.

There’s different ways that we work with clients in a variety of capacities. And so I want to hear from you what it is that you want out of email marketing and what we can take off of your plate. So I want to encourage you, sweet influencer, take your content that’s showing up on social media, make the most of it by sending it out to your email list via email and make sure that your business is set up for long-term revenue and connection through email marketing because your content and your relationship with your audience is worth it.

Thanks so much for listening to happy subscribers and our conversation about email marketing today. I hope you feel inspired to take action, even if it’s a small change, so you can more confidently share your valuable message with your community through email. Special thanks goes to my team who makes it possible to produce and share these episodes with you. Seriously, thank you guys. If you want to hear more email marketing tips, strategies, and success stories to help you develop deeper, more meaningful relationships with your email subscribers, be sure to subscribe to happy subscribers so you don’t

If you have a few seconds, I invite you to share this episode link with a friend or post it on social media so your peers and community can benefit from it as well. And if you have a few minutes, I’d appreciate if you’d leave a written review of the podcast since that helps more people hear about it and I believe we need more creators sending more valuable emails to their audience with more confidence.

If you want to reach out to me directly, the best way to do that is to join my email list through one of my top freebies listed in the show notes. You’ll get regular emails from me that are packed with value. And if you hit reply to any of those emails, it’ll land in my inbox and I can’t wait to chat with you there. Until next time, let’s do it.