5 Reasons You Need an Email List as a Content Creator

Email is far from dead and a vital tool to communicate with your audience and keep them engaged. It’s often overlooked because of the work needed to build an email list, but the time you spend will only benefit your business.

So, let’s quickly cover what an email list is.

You have a form on a web page where your audience can leave their email address. They confirm they want to receive your emails and are added to a list. We prefer MailerLite for email marketing, but we will discuss this software in a future article.

This article shares 5 reasons you need an email list as a content creator.

Build your audience outside of the platform

You might think that you do not need an email list because you are building an audience on a platform like TikTok or Instagram. Wrong.

When creating content on third-party platforms, you have no control over your audience, primarily because many of them use algorithms to share your content.

Take YouTube as a great example of why an email list is essential. You cannot control which subscribers receive an email sharing your latest video. Also, not all subscribers will be suggested your videos.

Create a one-page website to capture email addresses from the audience, and if you were to be affected by algorithm changes or banned, you still have an audience.

Send a monthly email with links to your latest content, or offer behind-the-scenes type content your audience will love.

Build trust in your skills

As a content creator who teaches a skill, having an email list allows you to show that you’re knowledgeable and can help your audience. In the future, you might want to sell a course or digital product and sharing tutorials, and short lessons will build trust.

Many successful creators have a free product that visitors to your website can download when they sign up to your email list. Create an exclusive piece of content like a checklist or tutorial only subscribers will receive.

Trust building is critical when starting to sell products and services. No one will buy from you if you haven’t shown up and proven that you can help your audience.

Sell products or services to your audience

Email is still a great way to sell a product or service to your audience. You have built trust in your skills, and it’s time to create a course or digital product. Within an email list, you could offer a discount or even test the product with a segment of your audience, gather feedback and improve before you sell it.

Another option would be to promote someone else’s product and earn money through commission per sale.

Keep the audience engaged

When your target audience reads an article, you want them to return and become a regular visitor. A popup, landing page or form on your pages will allow them to sign up to your email list and keep in touch with your content which is invaluable.

There is nothing worse than creating a piece of content, and then it takes a few weeks before it starts to rank in the search engines and receives visitors. With an email, you can get people to consume your content straightaway.

Learn more about your audience

You will learn much more about your audience when sending out a regular email. A service like MailerLite provides analytics on subscriber behaviour, so finding out what resonates will provide content ideas.

An email is a perfect opportunity to have two-way communication where the audience can share with you their pain points and challenges. This type of information is invaluable in understanding how you can help them.

It’s easy to find other demographics like the location of your email subscribers. This makes planning the optimum time zone to distribute your email more straightforward.

What we love about email is that it’s a more personal way to chat with our audience and get to know them. Starting conversations helps you build trust and makes you a more approachable content creator.

Types of emails for content creators

Finally, we want to highlight that there are different ways you can create an email. It’s possible to automate it, so your subscribers receive an email when you publish a new blog post or video using an RSS feed.

You can send the email daily, weekly, monthly or even quarterly. We recommend a monthly email as an excellent start. That way, the time you spend sending the email is minimal once you have created a template.

Hopefully, this article has motivated you because these 5 reasons you need an email list will help you grow your audience as a content creator.