As an interior designer, what do you think would be more beneficial to your business… having 100,000 followers on Twitter or 100,000 email subscribers? The importance of email marketing for interior designers should never be undervalued.
Let’s take a look at the numbers…
On average, a tweet will receive 0.11% click through rate (the % of people who will click on the link in a tweet).
Now let’s compare that to email averages of… 5% click through rate of an email.
That’s 45 times MORE clicks on an email than a tweet.
And that’s just the average.
If you have a highly engaged audience you can get click through rates even higher.
I work hard through email marketing to keep my email list engaged and my last email was particularly successful with a 11% click through rate.
I’d have to tweet almost 70 times to get anywhere near those numbers.
Your email list is potentially the most valuable number of anything that you track for your interior design business.
You might be wondering why email marketing for interior designers is so important, and in a world where social media plays such an important role in almost everything we do, from product recommendations to election results and everything in between, you would be right to question it.
Here’s why…
More Control
Ever thought that your Facebook fans or your Instagram followers are yours?
You’d be wrong.
They aren’t yours, they are Facebook’s, or Twitter’s, or Instagram’s.
You are just lucky enough to be allowed a page to build followers.
Theoretically, they can take them all away from you, without reason, without warning, they would just be gone, if you break their guidelines in any way (and if you read them you would be worried too).
Your email subscribers however are yours, you own the right to email those addresses each time you write a new blog post, recommend a product or even sell your own products.
You own your email list, you don’t own your social followers.
More Traffic
There is a consistency to growing your email list through email marketing that leads to always gaining more and more traffic to your website.
Using the previous statistics that 5% of your email list will click on each email, if you send an email once a week with your blog posts, product recommendations, new case studies for that week, you would expect to see additional visits (compared to not having an email list)…
| Email List Size | Additional Visitors (each week) |
| 100 | 5 |
| 500 | 25 |
| 1000 | 50 |
| 5000 | 250 |
| 10000 | 500 |
| 20000 | 1000 |
| 50000 | 2500 |
So the more you grow your email list, the more your traffic will grow and this doesn’t even include the additional traffic gained from all their social shares of your blog posts.
More Engaged
This is perhaps the most important but also often forgotten aspect of growing an email list.
Quick question – do you want to make more money from your business?
Of course you do.
Do you want to know who is more likely to become a paying client or customer from you?
1. A random new visitor to your blog?
Or
2. An email subscriber?
That’s right – an email subscriber is over TEN TIMES more likely to become a client or trust interior designers’ product recommendations when compared to a new visitor to your website.
Simply put… You need to be actively building your email list through email marketing.
There are hundreds of different techniques that can be used to grow your email list, and we could list them all here – but that can end in far too much choice leaving you unsure where to start with email marketing.
So instead we’ll list the three easiest to set up tactics interior designers can implement pretty quickly, and one advanced technique that requires more work but equally comes with a much higher reward.
Three Easy (and Super-Effective) Email Marketing Growth Tactics
Pop Up Lightbox
Yes, you might find these pop-ups annoying but the truth is that they REALLY work! On average between 3 and 10 in every 100 people who see an email signup lightbox fill it in and sign up.
There are many tools out there that you can use for pop ups, one of the best (which is completely free) is ConvertKit. Which allows you to completely customise the pop up with headline, copy, call to action, images etc. – whilst being super easy to use. A must for interior designers.
The above pop up used to feature on the Amara Interior Blog Awards blog, it generated 7 subscribers for every 100 people who saw.
Top Tool – ConvertKit Forms (FREE!)
Further Reading: Pop-ups Aren’t Dead: What We Learned Analysing 2 Billion Pop-up Examples
Landing Pages
Using dedicated landing pages to collect subscribers for your email list is a very smart move.
Creating landing pages can be incredibly effective for email marketing, some landing pages can convert visitors to subscribers so well that over half of the visitors to that page become email subscribers.
Landing pages give you a central place to direct traffic, the chance to sell what your subscribers are going to get.
You can promote the pages from your social media platforms as well as across your site.
Top Tool – ConvertKit Landing Pages (FREE!)
Further Reading: How To Create A Landing Page (In the next 10 minutes)
Giveaways
Giveaways are great not only at growing your email list and to build on your email marketing campaigns but also they are a great way to give something back to your audience.
What you might be missing is that giveaways can be an incredibly effective method of driving email subscribers to your interior design business.
There are many tools, Gleam is a free, easy-to-use option to run the giveaway and has viral aspects like refer-a-friend which can help expand your audience as an interior designer too.
Team up with brands by asking if they would like to donate a product for the giveaway, most are happy to contribute something and you could end up with a great prize haul. You could also team up with other interior designers for a bigger giveaway too.
Top Tool: Gleam
Further Reading: How To Run A Successful Blog Giveaway
Content Upgrades: Supercharge Your Email List
The faster you grow your email list, the faster you will get more traffic, and make more money from your email marketing as an interior designer.
The Content Upgrade essentially puts your lightbox pop-ups on supercharge and can increase the number of people who sign up by up to 5 times. So rather than getting 5 subscribers from every 100 visitors. You could get up to 25 additional subscribers from the same traffic!
Content upgrades are uniquely crafted lead magnets designed to be downloaded based on the post a visitor is reading, a hyper-relevant additional resource for the reader.
A real-life example, imagine you had a blog post on the Danish lifestyle concept of Hygge, you could create a checklist as the content upgrade and promote it via a pop up (like the one below) – so your audience can easily digest what they need to do to embrace Hygge.
This bonus engages with the reader as the chances are they like the topic they are reading – therefore by engaging them with a closely related extra bonus greatly increases the chances of them subscribing to your blog.
Top Tool: ConvertKit Forms (FREE!)
Further Reading: The Complete Guide To Content Upgrades
So how is your email list looking?
If you haven’t started looking at email marketing yet – you need to start as soon as possible , you will not regret it!
If you have started but growth is slow, try out some content upgrades on your blog posts that get the most traffic and you will see dramatically improved results!
