Top Five Reasons Digi Designers Need a Newsletter

Have you shied away from offering a newsletter to your customers? There are a lot of compelling reasons for digital scrapbook designers to maintain a customer list. Here are my top five.

1. Stores close. I saw the announcement of 3 stores closing in May. Maintaining your own customer list separately from the stores in which you sell allows you to take your customers with you when you move.
2. Ability to create subscriber-only special offers. Reward your fans with coupons and offers that are not available anywhere else. This not only increases loyalty but can also increase your sales.
3. Data loss/store crash. In the case of a site going down and losing large amounts of data, having a separate list of your customers and fans is a great safeguard. This applies to whether you own your own store or not.
4. Promote your products on your own timetable. With your own mailings, you can decide which products you are featuring and lessen the likelihood that your ads and new release announcements are getting pushed off the "front page" by a large rush of other new things from other designers in the stores where you sell.
5. Better exposure and open rate than social media. Facebook deliverability and engagement rate is at an all-time low as the site moves to a bigger push to sell ad space. You get much better results (opens and click throughs) with a good email targeted to your customers.
Getting started is very easy and there are some wonderful email providers who deliver for free. CUDigitals has been using Mailchimp since 2011. I have used this mail service for other businesses, too. You can send to up to 2500 subscribers once a week for free with responsive templates that can be customized. You can spend a lot of time of the design or simply make an announcement that you have a new blog post if you want. It's up to you!

Do you have a designer newsletter? What are your additional reasons for maintaining it? Share in the comments below - we love to hear from you.