Why I love my email newsletter

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.

If you’d like to sign up to my regular email newsletter to find out what I’m on about just click the link below

From me to you

Moments Journal from Jennifer Cockcroft

A fresh mug of coffee, a notebook and my laptop. It might be pouring with rain outside and a distinctly grey start to the working week but sitting down to write my email newsletter always feels like a bit of a treat. And like all treats it always seems to sink to the bottom of my to-do list. Somehow there are always a hundred other ‘important things’ that clamour for my attention.

But today I have my phone firmly turned screenside down and on the other side of the room. It’s just me and my coffee for half an hour and time to write. In an eternally busy world sometimes it feels like the ultimate act of rebellion to turn your back on the world and spend a bit of time with just you, your thoughts and those of others.

I have struggled of late to keep up with other peoples blogs and newsletters. People that I like to follow and whose work I admire, their writing kept getting lost in an ever present series of to-do lists and things “to do later” - Hint: later never seems to come.

So now I’ve started saving all my email newsletters from people into a separate folder on my phone and it really does help. Rather than have them get lost in my general inbox they are saved waiting for me to have a spare half an hour. In the same way as I used buy and read glossy magazines I now save up and read fabulous snippets from creatives whose writing and work never fails to lift me up, make me think and inspire me. I think it was Ruth Poundwhite (of the Creatively Human podcast) who gave me that idea and co-incidentally enough her new (and free) email marketing challenge begins this week.

I’ve had an email newsletter going for a while now and whilst I love to write it I feel as though I need to revisit it a little and evaluate it. So I have signed up and am looking forward to viewing it through fresh eyes. and maybe trying a few new things.

For me the joy of an email newsletter is that it cuts through all the noise and busyness of social media. It’s a crowded old world out there and new, shiny things are constantly competing for our attention. An email though, lets me chat to people on a much closer, much more human level. Rather than a post on Instagram that might get hundreds of people tapping on little hearts but only 5 comments, an email is the opposite. You don’t get that little dopamine hit of instant gratification as people ‘like’ your work but you get the chance to communicate with them on a much deeper level - for me as a card carrying introvert - it’s a bit like the difference between close friends and casual acquaintances.

My email newsletter is my way of communicating with friends, with people who really ‘get’ what it is I do and why I do it. It’s a cup of coffee and a chat, rather than a pretty flatlay with lots of gloss and rather less substance.

All this is a very long winded way of saying, if you are signed up to my email list then a heartfelt “Thank You” for being there. And if there’s anything you’d like to see in my emails that I don’t currently do then please do let me know.

And of course - if you’d like to sign up and see what I’m talking about you can see more here

A way to show appreciation

For the past few years it has been my practice to have a series of sales promotions and discounts on patterns over the New Year period. This year however I chose not to for a variety of reasons but chiefly among these has been the realisation that I want to be able to target my special offers and discounts to those loyal followers.

Certainly mass promotions can have their place and the past several years has seen some of my older patterns pop back into the Ravelry Hot Right Now charts, but that has been at a price. The proliferation of (largely overseas) pattern sharing websites means that any patterns - particularly those offered for free - are vulnerable to copyright abuse and fraud and sadly last year that happened with a number of my patterns that I offered free for a limited time.

So, moving things in a more positive direction I would like to make better use of my email newsletter in order to be able to send special offers directly to those who follow me and who are interested in my designs.

In 2017 I am planning some changes to my email subscription service and this is just one of them. If you are reading this, the chances are that you are already subscribed but if not you might want to consider signing up for regular (non-spammy) updates, snippets and top tios.