Isn’t email marketing dead? Email marketing isn’t dead and in a world of social algorithm, it’s even MORE important. We’re going to tell you precisely why email marketing is still a sewing pattern designer’s magic bullet  – AND how to maximize your email marketing for sales success.

Here are the top four reasons to start or expand your email list in 2021:

  1. Email isn’t bound by social algorithms
  2. You can share a much larger story and much more inspiration on email than you can on social
  3. Email is the conversion engine that makes social media’s discovery pay dividends
  4. You can link directly to products with tantalizing buying prompts with email that are hard to (or impossible) to do with social

Here’s how you maximize each of those:

Social media altorithms mean that about 1% of your followers will ever see your posts. Zuck & co’s goal is to sell you ads. They’re not interested in organic reach of your brand’s page or feed or story.  After 24 hours, it’s not gone.  Stories are FUN, we love ‘em too, but true power in sales comes from evergreen content. And ephemeral content is enjoyable but it’ll never drive traffic past that first few hours, if it drives it at all. If you’re not bringing people back to your website, you cannot sell them anything. That’s where email marketing delivers.

  1. Well-crafted, visually appealing, beautifully branded emails reach your customer’s inboxes each week and are opened at the average rate of 21-35%. That’s far more than the typical 1-5% social organic reach
  2. You can embed video, images and buttons in email that direct your customers right to your pattern product detail page (and right to add-to-cart for that matter!)

You have a lot more to say than just two sentences and a dozen hashtags. You have inspiration to convey, tips to share, and the joy of creating another amazing sewing pattern to bring to your audience. That same audience that self- selected by signing up. It’s one thing to tap a like, it’s quite another to give an email address. They WANT to hear from you. They want to be inspired by you. They need to learn new techniques.

Email marketing allows you to create long form content on your website and blog and share that detailed content that can be tremendously useful as evergreen content. Someone might search for something today and two years from now –that content still delivers them to your website (and your products.) 

  1. Create enjoyable long-form blog posts, blog posts with lots of inspirational photos, how-to photo galleries, recorded video and share all of that to your email audience weekly
  2. A well-designed on-brand email can inspire and sell your products (and more of them with each shopping cart) than a social media post can. 
  3. Creatively crafted email with good images and buttons will enable customers to add products to the cart right from your email
  4. Grow your email list by adding pop up and exit intent signups to your website – these increase email signups on average by 25%.

Some of our favorite sewing industry email that we read (almost) every issue:

  • Seamwork – most of the content is behind their membership paywall but the email is well designed and inspirational
  • Helen’s Closet – click through to video features (created with images, but linked to video)
  • Lion Brand Yarn (check out the buy now/add to cart/download buttons right on the product grid on the email itself)
  • Yarnspirations
  • StyleArc
  • My local yarn shop, Woven Art in East Lansing, MI. Owner Meg always opens with a short story/inspiration before featuring yarn and happenings around the shop. It’s as much a delight to read as a product email. 

If you sign up for them, note how they are designed for mobile viewing in mind FIRST (yours should be too)

Email is a very important part of your digital marketing:

Email is not a replacement for social media, it’s a deeper conversion platform. Social media is a discovery platform. You need both discovery, engagement and conversion platforms to succeed in e-comm these days. They aren’t exclusive, but should be used in concert with one another. Social discovery drives traffic, which results in email signup, which then results in reminders, sales and website conversions. It’s a process to bring the customer from discovery to evangelization of your brand to others. Email plays a critical role in that process. 

If you haven’t made the commitment to email yet, start easy by adding a sign up box to your website. If your commerce application doesn’t offer email, connect one of the many email tools such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, Hubspot that offer email collection & creation. Collect email and deliver a coupon to your customers via a link in bio from social media, from a popup on your website. Your email provider will connect to your commerce app in settings and you can configure the popup in the same spot. Even if you do not have an email calendar set up or content planned, collecting email now allows you to start with a list when you’re ready to launch.

If you’re on the fence about what email can do for your business from a sales standpoint check out our email marketing mini course. We show you precisely (using your own commerce metrics, average order volume (AOV) what you can sell this year by adding email marketing to your digital marketing mix. You can use this same planner to track your email effectiveness over time.