Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

I posted this over the weekend on Substack Notes, but you probably didn’t see it.

Five people called me, and we had some nice chats.

Most of my email subscribers don’t spend time on Substack Notes, and probably don’t even know it exists.

I’m certain of this, as over 80% of you read my newsletter in your email inbox.

It might be the same for your newsletter, too.

Hard truth: Substack Notes is social media, where algorithms control what you see and where most of your audience doesn’t see what you post anyway.

The best remedy to all this is delivering a message to their inbox.

This is why when you post a new song on Spotify, you should send an email to your fans to let them know. You can’t trust that Spotify will surface this new song to all your subscribers on their platform.

If you post a new video on YouTube, you should still send an email to your subscribers and let them know. You can’t trust YouTube to distribute your new video to everyone who subscribed to your channel.

Leaving the distribution of your work to algorithmic platforms is a dead-end street. Posting isn’t enough; you have to reach out to your audience directly if you want to survive.

Now, maybe you’ve got some objections…

🚫 Sending too many emails is spammy

✅ If people don’t want to hear from you, let ‘em leave. An unsubscribe is just making room for someone else to come and enjoy your work.

✅ Funny how we don’t want to send too many emails, yet most of us posted multiple times per hour on social media, right?

🚫 Sending a newsletter is too much work

✅ You don’t have to make vertical videos, and you don’t need to make new static images. If you’ve already posted about your new thing on Instagram, just copy and paste the caption you wrote – 95% of your audience didn’t see it anyway, so re-use it!

🚫 I don’t have enough email subscribers

✅ If you have 1,000 social media followers, you might reach 10% of them (that’s 100 people).

✅ If you have 100 email subscribers, 99.9% of them will get your next newsletter (so make sure you write a good subject line).

The best email to send to your fans is one that they expect.

If someone bought your last album, signed up for your class, or bought your latest print, chances are they’ll be receptive to getting an email about your brand-new offering.

This is the work I do with a record label client.

When High On Fire has a new record coming out, guess what? We email the folks who bought the last High On Fire album.

We did this for Death Row Records, too. If we had a new shirt drop, we’d send to people who bought shirts in the past.

A higher percentage of people will open a segmented email than if we sent it to everyone on our list.

And better-targeted emails can make you more money.

It’s called segmenting.

Substack let’s you build segments from a user’s Activity rating, which they define as, “a high-level rating of how actively the subscriber has used your newsletter in the last month, including email opens and webviews.”

You can also build segments by post views, comments, email opens and more.

All that said, I recommend using another email service like Flodesk or Kit to build a segment based on sales.

You take all the email addresses of people who bought from you before (from your online store, Bandcamp, etc.) and send them a separate email at some point.

For example, this is how Cody Cook-Parrott incorporates Flodesk into their workflow:

“A few days ago I decided to use my Flodesk email list which is made up of people who have downloaded one of my free guides or taken my classes…”

Continue sending to your regular newsletter audience, of course. Announce your new offerings as usual, but send to this “people who’ve bought from us before” segment occasionally, too.

Building new segments.

Let’s say you’re about to launch something new, like an album, a book pre-order or a new course.

When you first announce your new offering on social media, Substack Notes, or even your main newsletter, you get your fans to click and sign up to be the first to know about your offering via a landing page.

For example, maybe I want to offer a workshop next month all about segmenting. I could mention it in this newsletter, and link to a landing page where you could sign up to be the first to know about this new offering.

When I’m ready to launch, I’d email these people first because they’re the most engaged, and I’m not leaving it up to the chance that they’ll see the announcement in the next few newsletters I send. They’re getting a directly targeted email announcing the new workshop because they signed up for it!

So yeah – if you want to be alerted if I set up a Segmenting Workshop, click here!

More info:
Free landing pages for your next idea from Kit
Free forms that make people want to sign up from Flodesk

This could be on your shop window or merch table. A simple way for people to scan a code, enter their info, and be added to your email list (good to have a backup pen and paper list, too).

I recently did an email marketing “tune-up” for a record label and got this email soon after:

If you run a small business and want to make a few more bucks every month, you should schedule a time with me to discuss working together.

DON’T LINK TO SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

I will die on this hill – kill all links to places like Spotify and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter – platforms where you can’t reliably reach your own audience.

A higher percentage of your fans will open and read your emails, so link to your website (with Bandcamp or Spotify or YouTube embeds).

START USING SEGMENTS

You can build granular segments with Klaviyo and Flodesk and Mailchimp (like sending to people in a particular zip code or region), but Substack is pretty limited.

Personally, I’d say focus on two segments here – free and paid.

I’m not saying paywall everything, but you can post things on Substack (or your website), and then send an email to just your paid subscribers as a way of making it exclusive. Or maybe it’s an early pre-order link, or to RSVP for an upcoming Zoom call.

From Substack: How do I send an email to one or a select group of subscribers on Substack?

MIND YOUR DESIGN AND LAYOUT

I don’t want to get too deep with this – to each their own, but I feel every email campaign should have your most compelling image at the top. It’s how newspapers, website articles, blog posts, and Instagram work, so it can work for your newsletter.

And please, use your own photos. Stock photos are great for content farms and SEO clickbait articles, but if you’re reading this you’re a smart and creative individual with a phone filled with 100 photos you took last week. Use one of those.

STOP SENDING TRAFFIC TO YOUTUBE

I will die on this hill.

If you’re emailing your fans to let them know about your new video, embed it on your own site and link to it there.

Embed it on the product page of the thing you’re selling.

Embed it on the sign-up page for the course you’re booking.

Embed it on the page of tour dates where people can buy tickets.

When you send people to YouTube, you’re dropping them off in the middle of the busy food court at the mall, and expecting them to not get distracted by all the recommended videos and assorted noise of the YouTube platform.

▪️ Google blows. Give Fastmail a try (affiliate link)

I got a few questions from CansaFis Foote via Substack Notes, and figured I’d share my answers with everyone. Enjoy.

Q. What made you choose this platform above all others?

Honestly, I started all of this using Circle, under the name HEAVY METAL EMAIL.

I wanted an online space for musicians to come together and talk about reaching their fans with an old-fashioned email newsletter. This was back in mid-2021 or so. I Tweeted about this little project and got about 19 people to click and sign up.

But things felt off.

I wasn’t using a newsletter to talk about newsletters, so I started looking for at Ghost, Beehiv, and of course Substack.

I picked Substack because I didn’t want to mess with designs and themes and settings, I just wanted to import my subscriber list of 19 people and send them an email.

Oh, and it was free.

With any new platform, the “Is this tool for me?” phase can get cloudy with just a 30-day trial to determine whether it’s a proper fit.

But then Substack rolled out Recommendations, which led to 2,000 new subscribers (remember, I started with 19).

Substack rolled out Notes, which feels like the early Twitter days. That’s led to making friends, paid clients, and plenty of fun interactions. It feels like I’m not just shoveling my “content” into a social media platform and hoping for a click.

Substack has let you upload video for the last few years, embed audio, and set up paid subscriptions, all for just a 10% cut.

For me, Substack is the place to be right now, and it’s built around the concept of having an email list. Call it social media if you want, but my email list will serve me for the next several years, even if this place goes out of business.

Q. Are there any other web spaces you recommend for creators?

This question always leads me to its deeper meaning, which sounds something like, “Where are some good places I can set up where MORE PEOPLE can see my stuff?”

Being “a regular” at 10 different coffee shops in town takes a lot of time and energy, so I’m always wary of going on that journey.

I recommend focusing on one or two places at most, intentionally driving the interest and clicks back to a place (Substack or your website) where people who want to become bigger fans of your work can subscribe to an email list.

When you spend all your time on social media platforms, you’re building an audience you can’t reach.

The long game is building an email list to reach people who want to hear from you.

Q. Would you recommend Substack over a personal webpage or is this better?

Substack is a platform like any other, and it can disappear tomorrow (that’s a reminder to export your email list).

Right now (9/24/2024), I recommend setting up Substack to give people an easy way to subscribe to your email list and to read your work online.

That said, I will always recommend you set up a website/blog to have a running archive of your work, a space on the internet that is wholly yours, where you control the branding, the vibes, the images, the typeface – everything.

I have a blog I’ve been updating since 2018 (sethw.xyz), and I’ve been adding and archiving my work from all over the internet, which dates back to 2004.

Austin is also on Tumblr, too (thanks Sarah Shotts for the heads up). I haven’t seen a post that links back to his work, but as you can see, right below his name, he links back to his site with three links, and his Substack.

Final thoughts:

Don’t leave your fans and readers to bounce around between different platforms like a pinball machine.

Have a website, provide a way for people to sign up for a newsletter, and then send them a damn good newsletter on occasion, telling them about the cool things you’re doing.

Then we get back to work.