How to utilize email marketing for your side hustle and the three types of emails you should be sending every month.

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How To Utilize Email Marketing For Your Side Hustle

You’ve likely heard people talk about needing an email list and the importance of growing an audience. This is a key strategy within entrepreneurship. However, when you have your email list; do you know what you should be sending to your audience? Email marketing for your side hustle doesn’t need to feel complicated.

That’s why I’m breaking down three types of emails you can send to your list. Leave the feeling of not knowing what to send, behind. Instead, let me make things easier for you and your marketing!

The Three Types of Emails You Will Use

When it comes to utilizing email marketing for your side hustle, there are three email types that you are going to send.

1. Nurture – warm your audience up by serving them value-added content
2. Poll – get to know your audience more by asking specific questions!
3. Pitch – present your offers to your audience

The frequency with which you email your list will vary depending on your business model.

If you offer high-tier packages, you will likely email your list, less. If you often low-ticket packages, perhaps you will email your list often.

And if you haven’t started your email list yet, begin by creating a value-added lead magnet. this is a resource you can share in exchange for email addresses. Download my Free Lead Magnet Workbook here to get started!

01. Nurture Emails

When it comes to email marketing for your side hustle, the first type of email you are going to send is a nature email.

These emails are meant to do just that, they nurture your audience. 

You want to continue serving them, providing value that they actually want inside their inbox and you want them to associate your business with something they have interest in. 

Great ways to nurture your audience is by sending them tips and tricks on a subject within your business, any additional lead magnets that you may create, blog posts that you write, podcast episodes, any what other forms you may have of content. 

Nurture your audience by:

• Send tips and tricks on a subject within your business
• Advice
• FQ&A’s
• Send additional lead magnets you create
• Share blog posts
• Share podcast episodes you’ve recorded of guest starred on
• Any regular long-form content

This also benefits you by reminding your list to consume your content. Especially if you have a blog or podcasts where viewership helps performance. 

Nurture emails can also be personal. Remember, a part of selling in your business means striking up a relationship. Although you want to focus on value for your audience, mix it up every now and then by sharing a personal email that pulls back the curtain on the person behind the scenes. 

Flodesk makes this very easy for entrepreneurs! I use the fun email templates Flodesk creates to send personal emails of my latest cell phone camera roll. This connects with my audience so much! Explore Flodesk for yourself and get 50% off by clicking here.

Out of all the emails that you send to your audience (nurture, poll, pitch), nurture emails should be the majority. 

02. Poll Emails

When utilizing email marketing for your side hustle, the next type of email you want to consider is a poll.

This is where you are going to utilize your inbox for information. Remember this audience that you have should serve your business. It’s not just a number you want to grow. 

By polling our email list, we can ask our audience questions like:

• “What are you enjoying most from my content?”
• “What would you like to see more of?”
• “What’s your biggest problem currently?” 

The answers to these will be worth their weight in gold! Polling your audience gives you the unique opportunity to literally ask what their needs are so you can go and solve them! 

And guess what… you can poll your email list when it comes to offers too. 

If you are developing a product suite or services in your business, maybe send out a few descriptions to your list and ask people what they are most interested in. And what they aren’t interested in. 

I have built entire offer suites based on what my email list has told me they wanted. Episode #30 of Side Checks touches on this a little bit as well.

There are a few ways you can poll your audience:

• Simply ask questions in your emails and ask folks to respond
• Create a Google Forms poll questionnaire and send it out
• Incentivize your Google Forms poll (like with a $5 Starbucks gift card!)

Be sure to poll your audience on a regular basis. Once or twice a week is a greta way to create a poll and encourage feedback.

03. Pitch Emails

When it comes to email marketing for your side hustle, the third type of email you are going to send is a pitch email.

Pitch emails are going to be sent the least. However, they are very important.  

Ironically enough, I think it’s pretty common among us entrepreneurs that we forget to ask for money. We are so focused on creating the content and having someone see value in it that we forget to ask them to pay us. 

But my friend, this is the point of email lists. And it’s not a bad point. We have to get out feeling slimy about selling because if we didn’t we would all have expensive hobbies and not businesses. 

Keep in mind, if you’re emailing your list on a regular basis and you never ask for money, when you do… it’s going to feel odd. For you and your subscriber. 

Instead, get your email used to your extending invitations to your paid offers. They aren’t going to unsubscribe or get offended. And if they do, they may not be your proper audience or an audience that was ever going to invest with you.

Try to send 1 – 2 pitches every month. This is a great frequency to start off with, especially if you are leading with service.

When To Email Your List

The frequency of emailing your list is completely up to you. However, I recommend emailing your least once a week to get started. This will vary depending on your business model.

The great thing about these email types is they are already in the order in which you’re going to send them. 

You are going to start with nurture. And remember we want to nurture a lot. Let’s say you send 8 emails a month. I want 6 to be nurture emails. 

One should be a poll email. And at least one should be a pitch email.

We can pitch and poll the same amount. And everything else… we want to nurture!

An easier way to think of this is we want 80% of our content to be nurture content and 20% of our content be pitch/poll content.

General Tips

Email marketing for your side hustle doesn’t need to feel complicated. In fact, it should be the very opposite. Email marketing allows you to naturally place your offers in front of your audience so you never feel like you’re selling.

Here are some general tips I have on email marketing for your side hustle:

• Get an email service provider, explore Flodesk, and save 50% here.
• Don’t make your emails too long or too wordy (something easy to scan and digest is best)
• Don’t pitch different offers back to back
• Stay consistent with your email frequency
• Track what’s working and what’s not

Start Your Email Marketing Strategy

Sitting down to email your list shouldn’t be complicated or leave you unsure of what to send. Instead, follow my formula!

You’re going to send these three emails. Nurture. Poll. And pitch. 

Your nurture emails will take the majority each month. And thats where you will be providing value and creating that relationship. Send tips and tricks, advise, education, resource, and be sure to continue sharing all of your weekly content. 

Then you’re going to send a poll email. It’s always good to get a pulse on your email list. Especially as it grows. Continue to check in with them. What do they need? What are they focused on? This is going to help you continue to create value for them, for them to open your emails, and ultimately put your business at the top of their list. 

And lastly, you are going to send pitch emails. 1 – 2 times each month we are going to get out of our comfort zone and ask our email list for money. Remember we tend to forget this is a part of entrepreneurship.

If you are ready to grow this email list of yours so your business can earn more money, I am all about it. And I want to help. Download my Free Lead Magnet Workbook. This is what is going to land someone on your email in the first place. 

Long gone are the days when someone just signs up to be our virtual pen to keep up with the latest. Today, we want to provide value in exchange for these email addresses.

And from there, we begin to build audiences that sustain our business efforts.