Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

It’s “Not My Business” season again.

A year ago Olivia Rafferty declared that some things were not her business:

Things That, As A Substacker, Are Not My Business

1. How many subscribers I have? NOT MY BUSINESS
2. The current state of my header/footer? NOT MY BUSINESS
3. Whatever is happening on my welcome page? NOT MY BUSINESS
4. The growing pile of unread newsletters in my inbox? NOT MY BUSINESS
5. How many emojis I use? NOT MY BUSINESS
6. The leaderboard for Culture? NOT MY BUSINESS
7. Substack Chat? NOT MY BUSINESS
8. My Notion database for future post ideas? NOT MY BUSINESS
9. My open rate? NOT MY BUSINESS

Social media, and lately the newsletter busy-ness industrial complex, has us spinning our wheels on so many things that are not our business.

Things like open rates, deliverability, A/B testing headlines, churn, soft bounces and hard bounces, email lists spread across multiple CSV files – really, it never fucking ends, and most of us ain’t making enough to sweat all the finer details.

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Rachel Karten speaks with the little joy coffee shop, focusing on their social media strategy, but I think the main point applies to how all of us talk about our work, despite which medium we use.

RK: What advice would you give to a local business that is trying to find success on social media?

CL: Social media is replacing television. And just like in television, there’s the shows you tune-in to watch and there’s the commercials you suffer through. Stop making commercials. Be the show.

Did you see it? “Stop making commercials. Be the show.”

One of the longest running TV shows isn’t about the contents of storage containers, it’s about the stories that weave around them.

Telling people that we have a show coming up is a commercial.

Planning, booking, the travels, the build up, talking to fans, borrowing gear, making the flyer for the show – that’s the story.

We don’t need to start making videos, we need to tell better stories.

“Direct access to your audience is so important, and very much worth the time and energy,” Seth Werkheiser

It takes time to build an email list because there is friction. Social media gives you the illusion of speed in this matter, as it’s very easy to for someone to just hit the follow button.

It’s hard work getting people to do anything on the internet, especially hand over their email address! But it’s worth it.

Read more in ‘How I grew my Substack by 7,000% in less than 3 years without burning out‘ by Alex Lewis over at HubSpot!

If you want someone to sign up for your newsletter, give them a link where they can do just that.

This is what The New Happy Newsletter does very well.

Remove all distractions, eliminate the noise, and build your email sign up page to do one thing – get someone to sign up for your newsletter.

Let people see what they’re signing up for. Let them click around and get a feel. People don’t give up their email address easily, so make a good case.

This from The Creative Rebel podcast with Stephanie Harrison – listen here.

A musician with some impressive Spotify numbers wrote me for a bit of Email Guidance, asking how to get people from streaming music platforms to a paid Substack or Patreon. Here’s part of my reply (lightly edited):

Open a Substack account TONIGHT and start filling it up with stories. Give your fans a place to DIVE INTO. You can build a real website later.

Get 10 posts up there. Twenty.

Buy a domain name at Hover.com, point that domain to the Substack.

Stop using LinkTree. Stop driving everyone to platforms where you can’t reach them. 

Get them to your Substack, where you can still embed all your music, and your videos. And that’s where everyone can SUBSCRIBE to your email list. Be RUTHLESS about it.

Get people to YOUR SITE FIRST. That is your mission.

Then go play shows. Have a clipboard and a pen to get people on your email list. Hand it out before your third song to someone in the crowd so people sign it while you’re playing (inspired by this story from Jes).

Send a newsletter once a week, or twice a month. Subscribe to other musicians on Substack and see how they do it. “Steal like an artist,” like Austin Kleon says, and develop your own rhythm and style.

Make your newsletter something that someone wants to open, and not just “hey I’m playing somewhere next week,” or “listen to my new song.”

There’s lots of shortcuts in the online music world, but that just means that everyone is taking them, too. You gotta be where they can’t be, and that’s strumming a guitar in front of 15 people on a Tuesday night. 

Community is your unfair advantage. Whether you’re a musician, a writer, a photographer, whatever – you need other people in your corner. You need fans and friends more than you need funnels and lead magnets.

Yes, you can play the streaming music lottery and maybe hit it big. That’s because the casino has to pay out on occasion, otherwise people stop going to the casino.

The choice is yours; keep playing the lottery, or make better bets.

“It’s absurd how we’ve come to think that reaching thousands of random people will be more impactful to our lives more than meeting a handful of people with whom we share interests and goals.”

That’s from Matilda Lucy (from ‘What do you measure when the metrics don’t matter?’), and it’s spot on – meeting a few people every week and pulling them into your creative orbit is what’s going to build the foundation for your work for the decade ahead.

That reply above was just a snippet. I usually write 1,000 words to folks reaching out for Email Guidance. I’m not saying I got all the answers, but I can put you on the path to finding them. The first email is free, too.