I’ve written about this before in an older post - From Me to You - but I recently re-read it as I’ve been sorting through some old files and I was really struck by how relevant it is now. Maybe even more so than when I first wrote it.
For me, sitting down to write an email newsletter still does feel very much like writing to a friend. It feels more personal in a way that a post on Instagram never can, and it’s still one of my favourite things to do in my business.
In a world where social media is increasingly ruled by the Algorithm Gods even your physical presence on a platform can’t be taken for granted. It’s an unpleasant truth but all of us are just a post or two away from losing our accounts. Accounts can be mass reported, frozen, hacked or removed overnight and it can be very hard to come back from that kind of loss. Social media can be a fickle friend - seductive but fickle.
My decision to move away from Ravelry, for example wouldn’t have been possible without my email newsletter list. My network of loyal subscribers who have stuck with me for years now and who I can always rely on to respond with cheerful enthusiasm and energy. For many people the loss of Ravelry was a sudden shock. Faced with the prospect of ill-health for continuing to use the site many had to take the difficult decision to either stop using it or drastically curtail their use of it.
I was fortunate that I wasn’t directly affected by the site changes, but my decision to move my pattern sales from there was made an awful lot easier by the reassurance that I still had a means of communicating with people. If I hadn’t had my email list I don’t think I would have been in a position to do that.
It’s easy to think of email newsletters as just a sales tactic. A way to sell something to someone, and yes it’s certainly true that it does help. But it’s much more than that. It’s personal connection between me and your inbox and I share things in my newsletters that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing on open social media.
Most of the time on social media you are just on broadcast mode - putting stuff out there into the world and hoping that someone sees it. With an email newsletter it’s different.
It’s a personal invitation into someone’s inbox. It’s a gift and one that I never take for granted.
