Episode 67: Mailing List and Email Marketing Best Practices with Heather Solos from Feedblitz

Creative Yarn Entrepreneur Show

Heather Solos is a director at Feedblitz. I met Heather at the 2016 Snap! conference and we later had a Skype chat about best practices for growing, maintaining, and monetizing your email list.

About Heather Solos and Feedblitz

Heather Solos started blogging in 2004 and became a professional blogger in 2006. She joined FeedBlitz, an RSS and email marketing company, in 2012 where she built the customer service team. She’s now a director at Feedblitz and swims in a sea of email, marketing, and best practices. When she comes up for air, she works for Home-Ec101.com, a site that earned her the blogger dream, a book deal in 2011.

Heather is raising four kids, a dog, and a hedgehog with her fiancé in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. She runs on spite, caffeine, and wine and recently picked up a crochet hook in an attempt to resist checking her phone in the evenings. She now has more washcloths than dishes.

About the interview

In this episode, I talk to Heather about her own experiences with email lists as a blogger and what she has seen through her work at Feedblitz. (If you're new to the topic of email marketing, you may want to list to Episode 55: Email Marketing 101: Or, Why and How to Set Up an Email List for Your Creative Business.)

Some of the topics we discussed included:

• Ways to monetize your email list through advertising, sponsorships, digital or physical product sales, and bundles/special offers for subscribers.
• The email open rate companies will be looking for before sponsoring a list.
• When to consider opt-in freebies to grow your list.
• When it's ok to use a more "salesy" approach to your list.
• Content ideas for autoresponders.
• How to approach an email list if you don't have your own website but operate out of a marketplace like Craftsy, Etsy, or Ravelry.
• How to find out the deliverability rate of your email list.
• What to avoid in your subject line, format, and email text to stay out of spam filters and when to use different email formats.
• List hygiene and maintenance.
• Tips for sending emails more regularly.

Listen to the podcast for more from Heather about best practices in email marketing for creative businesses. I also share my experience using with the Feedblitz "test drive" and the service.

If you enjoyed this episode

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