See How Your Side Hustle Can Grow From An Email Marketing Strategy
A common mistake side hustlers make is assuming email marketing is for established businesses only. Perhaps you see the value in email marketing and growing your list, but you think it will only benefit you once your business is up and running. This is not entirely correct. Email marketing has proven to be a very successful tool for entrepreneurs and is commonly known for growing and scaling an online business. However, an email marketing strategy can actually be used to build your side hustle and have an audience waiting as well.
The passive strategy of promoting your business while providing value to others is even more beneficial to side hustlers with limited schedules. When building your side hustle, consider using the power of email marketing to grow an audience to launch to and build a business around the specific desires of your audience. Don’t wait to leverage email marketing when your side hustle is open for business. Instead, here’s how you can allow your email strategy to build your side hustle and an audience waiting for the launch date! Dive into to learn more about an effective email marketing strategy for your side hustle.
grow a waitlist
Instead of building a business and then waiting for an audience to find you, build an audience first with email marketing! When starting a side hustle, one of the first things you should do is create a waitlist for your business. This is a list of people who are excited to hear more, want updates and want to be the first to know when you’re open! Ideally, this is the audience who will also be interested in purchasing your products or services.
You can easily create a waitlist and keep it simple! All you need is an opt-in page with someone’s first name and email address. Be clear on what they can expect from being on your waitlist and what your business is about! If your business is still rounding off the edges, that’s okay! You don’t need to provide specific business details but give a general sense of the side hustle you’re about to start!
When you grow a waitlist, keep in mind that you have a warm audience! This means the people signing up to be on your waitlist are interested in your business and potentially taking the next steps. It’s important to keep them warm by continuing to provide value, excitement and updates. Include a warm welcome message for when someone joins your waitlist. From there, be sure to email your waitlist regularly keeping them excited for the day you make your big announcement!
Having a waitlist to launch your side hustle can be so exciting! It’s also a strategic move to your side hustle more profitable in the first month of your business. Make your waitlist an important topic of discussion. Include the signup link:
- In all social media bio’s
- talk about it in social media captions
- Website coming soon page
- Pinterest links & bio
poll your audience and ask for pain points
Now that you have people on your waitlist for when your side hustle opens, take time to engage and learn more about them! Oftentimes we build a business around what we think others want. We invest time in creating products and services based on an idea of what our client’s pain points are. This isn’t always a bad thing. However, if we have an audience available to us and we can ask what their true pain points are and sculpt our business around that, that is truly how we build a profitable side hustle.
Take a poll of your waitlist and ask what their largest pain points are within the subject of your business. This could provide you with some wonderful insight into what your audience is looking for and how to speak to their needs even more. If you’re able to open your business with exact solutions for their problems, you are setting yourself up to be much more profitable.
Also, asking your audience and waitlist specific questions when you’re building your business can be extremely helpful. Eliminate the guessing game by going straight to the source! Begin asking your audience questions like
- …would you use this type of product?
- Do you prefer this or that….?
- When it comes to this, would you want a digital or physical copy…?
- What about this service excites you this most…?
Remember that when you’re building a business, your current audience won’t be your forever audience. And is not your entire audience. Use your waitlist or organic following to help inspire you through the business creation phase and know that you don’t need to tailor your business 100% to their desires. You can simply use them as guidance!
provide a free taste of your business
When building a side hustle, use email marketing to provide an opt-in and create even more excitement for your list! Providing an audience with a taste of what they can expect through some type of free offer can turn them from a warm to hot audience. This means you’re increasing the probability of them taking action when your business is open.
When someone does opt-in for your free offer, you are given the chance to nurture them even more through an email sequence. An email sequence is a series of emails that automatically go out after a free offer is downloaded that has a specific goal in mind. In this case, you can use email sequences to educate an audience more about your upcoming side hustle. You can also nurture your audience, providing value and reason why working with you will be a great fit.
Email sequences are great ways side hustlers can build and grow their businesses. Since email sequences can be automated after a trigger, it allows your side hustle to be working, even when you’re not. You can even incorporate polling your audience and asking them questions into your sequences. If you’re new to email sequences or you have a tendency to overthink how to create one, check out my email sequence planning sheets. This is a $9 product that makes building an email sequence simple and effective with an end result in mind.
use flodesk to start building your side hustle
Even if you can get 10 people on your email list for when your side hustle launches, I guarantee it will be more successful. If you haven’t started an email list for your side hustle, start one right away! Bonus points if you start one today! It’s never too early to start an email list for any business. Having an email list while building a business is so valuable. You are able to build products and services specific to a real person with real pain points. And you grow an audience to laugh your side hustle instead of building a business and waiting on someone to find you.
Email marketing gets to be a proactive strategy of your side hustle journey! Flodesk is the exclusive email service provider that I use for email marketing. Flodesk makes it incredibly simple for me to sigmate my email list, create forms like a waitlist and build strategic email sequences. Their email sequences are actually built out and designed based on the end goal; nurture, welcome, sales, etc. Plus Flodesk’s email templates are creative, easy to brand and exciting to read. Isn’t that the whole point of a good email?
If you haven’t started your email marketing strategy, start one today! And if Flodesk is the right step for your side hustle to take next, then sign up here for 50% off your subscription. Trust me, you’ll never have to overthink email marketing again!
