Why should you use email marketing as a freelancer?
Email is online, just like where people most likely order your services
As an online marketing tool, email is great in the sense that people only need to open up links to get to your website/portfolio. If you compare this with things like magazines, street signs and flyers, the response from potential clients isn’t as instantaneous. Without their quick thinking, you’re going to lose out on valuable new clients!
With emails, you can track and keep a log of all your client communications
It doesn’t really matter how many clients you have, email marketing is amazing in the sense that all your clients, prospects and communications can be easily tracked. Starting from the moment you send out your first promotional or welcome email, all the way until you’re best friends with some clients. Having a way to track and go back to certain conversations really helps to add that personal touch, so you can remember client preferences, budgets and their style of business.
Freelancing is probably your hobby, so you’ll always have something to share!
Email is the perfect way to share your passion with potential clients. You can offer helpful guides, advice and testimonials from your other clients. This is easily done via the likes of social media and flyers, but they aren’t picked up as often as an email. At least if you’re being sent to someone’s inbox, you’re going to be seen 9 times out of 10.
Emails don’t take long to make, and offer high yield success
As a freelancer, you don’t work the same amount of hours each week, and it can be hard to find the time to carry out marketing to bring in new clients, especially if you’re so caught up with your current ones. If you can set aside an hour a week to generate a great marketing email, you’ll find your existing and prospective clients approaching you more often – This is dependent on how relevant you make you content though, as you need to come across as the person for the job, regardless of which client is contacting you.
So how would you deliver relevant and engaging content?
First up, you must build your email list properly – This means getting contacts of individuals and or businesses who may actually require your services, not those businesses you think might need your services, simply because of their industry.
Once you have your contacts, you want to send out a personalised welcome email to every new subscriber. You can use merge tags (Like in Mailchimp), or you can change up your emails for the different industries your contacts operate in. If you are a blogger, offer your knowledge of each industry, and include testimonials/work you completed for previous clients.
Did you know that on average, 320% more revenue is earned on average for welcome emails as opposed to other promotional emails (The Workbox).
Next, share as much of your work/expertise as possible, linking up your socials to the email campaign. Make yourself as noticed as possible, as there is always a business out there that needs a project completing that they can’t do themselves. Whether it is accounting, market research, photography or web design/web development – Your expertise needs to be apparent, and not just brushed to one side. People need your services, you just have to appear in their inbox, or on their news feed at the right time!
