7 Tips Freelancers Can Leverage Email Marketing
Freelancing is a great way of finding employment. Imagine being your own boss and working on your own terms and conditions, that too from the comfort of your home or any place you love. Now, that’s what a dream job looks like. However, it can happen only if you know how to promote your work in the right way.
As a freelancer, you need to have a constant stream of clients to keep your income running. But with the constant quest to complete the deadlines and work on client satisfaction, the freelancers get little or no time to maintain the consistency. This is where email marketing can come in handy.
With 68% of freelancers finding work online, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the competition is tough. Moreover, with 86.5 million people expected to freelance by 2027, it is important to have a competitive edge over your freelancer counterparts.
So, if you are a freelancer and wondering how you are going to do it, start leveraging email marketing right away. With ROI as high as $42 for every $1 spent, email marketing can be a great and cost-effective way of promoting your freelancing business.
Further, do you know there are 5.5 billion email accounts across the globe? And, if that’s not enough, 61% of consumers like to receive promotional emails weekly.
Email marketing isn’t only cost-effective but has a wider audience reach too. So, if you haven’t already started extracting the benefits of email marketing for your freelance business, it’s high time you do it. However, before you do that, here’s a quick look at its various benefits.
Benefits of email marketing for freelancers
1. Increases the awareness of your personal brand
Email marketing works towards increasing your brand awareness with the help of newsletters. A good newsletter can help you in building a good brand reputation. So, if you send high-quality content on a consistent basis, you will be able to establish a direct and personalized connection with your leads.
2. Facilitates trust-building with leads
Regular communication with your subscriber base can help you instill a sense of trust within them. Your high-quality content doesn’t only help them solve their issues but also gives them a way to accomplish their goals, thereby giving you an important place in their lives.
Moreover, consistent communication keeps you on the top of their mind. So, when they are looking to buy a product or acquire a service that you happen to offer, you will be their first choice. All you need to do is send engaging and relevant emails to them.
3. Provides easy open and structured feedback
Feedbacks are a great way of building your credibility. In this context, you can make use of surveys sent through email. It is a simple yet impactful way of garnering feedback. So, keep collecting feedback from your previous and current client base. It will help you sell your services to your prospective clients. You can even use it on your landing page or in your service pitch desk.
4. Helps in building authority and charging higher prices
As mentioned already, email marketing helps you instill trust in your subscriber base through the engaging and regular content that you send. It can work in your favor and make you appear as the authority of the niche you work upon. To put it in other words, email marketing makes you appear like a brand. As a result, you get access to better quality and higher-paying clients along with diversity in work. You can even get the freedom to choose whom you want to work with and what you wish to work upon.
5. Assists in staying in touch with older clients
Email marketing assists you in reaching out to your client base, irrespective of them being a past client or a present one. From sharing your latest blog to discussing your favorite topic, you can keep in touch with them through regular emails. It will help you to update them about your availability, thereby curbing long periods of no business.
Now, since you know about the benefits of email marketing, go ahead and use it for making your freelance business a success. Here’s how you can do it.
How can freelancers leverage email marketing?
1. Opt for an email marketing service provider
An email service provider can help you collect subscriber data through inline forms and web pop-ups. You can even make use of an email sequence to schedule emails for your subscribers. The email service providers also assist you in measuring the performance of your email campaigns while taking corrective measures when needed. So, choose an email service provider that best suits your needs. You can opt for a cheap or a free trial to get an idea of which plan works better for you while paving new avenues of growth.
2. Create buyer personas of your favorite customers
Buyer persona or customer persona is a customer profile that can be created by keeping in mind your prospective customer’s interest and expectations. To put it in other words, a buyer persona works as an imaginary ideal customer with different traits, location, gender, etc. This is how a buyer persona looks like.
So, you see, how this buyer persona gives a detailed idea about your prospective customer’s needs and wants? It will help you identify what kind of content, product, and services will work best for them. Remember, the more you know your subscriber base, the higher will be your chances of sending relevant content to them, thereby making your business prospects better.
3. Work on a free leads magnet
You must know that giving before taking is the first rule of marketing. Hence, go ahead and start offering products, services, or high-end content for free. These free offerings are known as lead magnets. It entices visitors and prospective customers to join your email list. When they witness you giving freebies, they will be more than happy to join your list.
4. Create an impeccable welcome message
A welcome email is the first email that your customer should receive once they subscribe to your email list. It is the best way to introduce yourself while telling them about your freelancing business and the products and services you sell. It wouldn’t only set a tone for further interaction but will also give your subscribers a clear idea about what to expect from you. There are a lot of free HTML email templates that can help you craft an impeccable welcome email in no time. It is highly recommended that you send out a series of two to three welcome emails.
5. Work on a content calendar
A content calendar works towards delivering high-quality content with a periodic timeline. Remember, the frequency of emails should be optimum. It should neither be too high nor too low. After all, you don’t want your subscribers to get annoyed and unsubscribe you or even worse, report the email as spam. So, make sure to keep a content calendar handy. It will ensure that you have control over what you send and when you send it.
6. Analyze email metrics
You must keep a check on important KPIs such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and spam reports. Having a clear insight into these metrics will give you an idea about what’s working for you as a freelancer and what isn’t. For instance, if there’s an email with higher open rates, use that business email template more often. Similarly, if an email has a higher number of spam reports, analyze it, and see what are the drawbacks. Try sending less of such emails in the future.
7. Consider email list limitation
It is important to filter your email list once in a while to remove inactive or unengaged subscribers otherwise they might ruin your open rate. Moreover, with email service providers charging you on the basis of the size of your email list, it becomes critical to keep only such subscribers in your list who are really interested in receiving your content. You can do so by including an unsubscribe button in your email.
Wrap up
Email marketing comes with a variety of benefits for freelancers. So, start setting up your email marketing campaign right away. Sure, it does involve some setup and brainstorming but when you will see your efforts turning into results in the form of more clients, more work, and higher money, you will understand how it is worth all the efforts and investment you put in.
Hope the points mentioned above help you in promoting your work as a freelancer.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing email marketing agency specializes in crafting custom email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion, free HTML email templates and Mailchimp email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.