Email's where it's at!
I'm the first to tell you that I LOVE social media. NoBooksWereHarmed.co.uk probably wouldn't be here without it.
In the first weeks and months of nobookswereharmed.co.uk, it was the support, interest (and custom!) on social media that really lit the fire under the entity that is No Books!
But, nearly 8 years on, it's fair to say that social media has completely changed for business profiles. Despite having a healthy number of likers/followers across lots of social media platforms, including a really engaged 'audience', I couldn't tell you the last time that ANY of my posts were actually shown to more than about 15% of the people who've 'liked' my pages.
This means that for every 100 people who have clicked 'like' or 'follow', there's about 85 of them that each platform isn't sharing my content with.
As someone who owes everything to her amazing army of customers and likers, this really doesn't sit right with me, and often makes me sad. Whilst those 85 (times a few thousand) people may even have forgotten ever seeing anything about NoBooksWereHarmed.co.uk, I've not forgotten them.
On a personal level, I feel like I'm being ill mannered by never being able to touch base with them; on a business level, it scares me how much untapped potential business could be there...
But now with SO few people actually seeing my content in their feed, combined with hardly being at real life NoBooksOnTour.com pop ups for over a year, I'm FINALLY doing what grown up business people do, and working on my email list. Big shout out to Lorna Scully for delivering a really easy to digest course on email marketing - she convinced me that my email subscribers really DO want to hear from me, and it's not spammy, salesy, yukkiness! I've kind of gone full circle, and feel bad for ignoring my subscribers for so many years!
Back around 2015/16 I sent regular newsletters. They were a time consuming pain in the arse to build, and I reckon boring as f**k to receive. But lots of things have changed since then, and I've gotta tell ya, I'm excited by it!
So. You may have noticed a few emails from nobookswereharmed.co.uk in your inbox of late. I'm tweaking so many things with each email I send, and haven't settled into a consistent plan of action yet. I can't thank you enough for opening these emails, reading them, following whatever links etc - every milisecond you glance at that email, is teaching me what kind of thing you like to receive in your inbox.
Unlike social media, where I post the same thing to every follower, I'm working so bloody hard on the emails, to make them as relevant and personal as possible to YOU. It's a steep learning curve, using mahoosive 'tools', so is proving a bit of a brain poker for me - but worth every hour of confusion, knowing I'm no longer neglecting my subscribers....and aint nobody, not Facebook, Instgram, Twitter, Pinterest, DeviantArt, Tik Tok, nobody, can get between me and you now!
Haven't signed up yet? It's your first step to helping me learn how to send you exclusive subscriber only content and offers, direct to your inbox...