#94 - Navigate Around the Creeps - Why Your Business Needs an Email List More Than Ever

SUMMARY

Social media keeps shifting, but email? It’s still one of the most reliable ways to connect with your audience—without fighting algorithms or creepy tech billionaires. In this episode, I talk about how I’m simplifying my own email strategy and how you can make email work for you. From essential sequences to making email feel fun instead of overwhelming, this is your permission slip to ditch the stress and start using email in a way that fits your business and your life. Need help? I also introduce the Email Power Hour—a focused session to get your email strategy on track.

FULL SHOW-NOTES WITH TAKEAWAYS + LINKS

patternshift.fm 

BEST QUOTE FROM THE EPISODE

“Find an email strategy that works for you. If it’s not fun or easy, you won’t do it.” – Saskia de Feijter

🔗 Flodesk (50% Off for the First Year)
🔗 Email Power Hour – Get Your Email Strategy Sorted
🔗 Ja, Wol Community – Join the Conversation

This episode was sponsored by Ja, Wol. I promote my own services and products in my podcast rather than working with sponsors. I will share the odd-discount for things I fully support and use.

Chapters

• 0:06 Welcome to Pattern Shift
• 13:01 Setting the Stage for Effective Email Strategy
• 17:07 Simplifying Your Email Strategy for Better Engagement
• 30:38 The Chaotic Yet Structured Approach to Audience Connection
• 39:14 Conclusion and Call to Action
• 6:21:33 Shifting Mindsets: From Social Media to Email

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey there, welcome back. This is Saskia De Feiter at Pattern Shift Podcast. This is actually editing Saskia coming in to give you a clearer intro than I initially recorded. I'm away on a holiday and I'm editing the episode in our cottage, and I noticed that I was doing a lot of yapping, and so I just wanted to start off with saying what this actually is about. This is typically a Saskia style episode, so, just right from the start, letting you know that this is going to be about building a better strategy around your connection to your audience and using your email list to do it. I'm going into different steps in how you are going to do that. The easy way, the really, really easy way. So grab submitting and I hope you'll enjoy my yapping. And if you want to learn about this a little bit more constructively, then please go to patternshiftfm, find the blog, and there's going to be a blog post there that has everything in a kind of a step-by-step. So the podcast is all about the kind of chaotic me, and then I'll also offer you the really organized part of myself that is also there and that will help you to get more of a structural view on this. Well, let's get on with the show and have fun.

Speaker 1: 1:42

Hey there and welcome to Pattern Shift, the podcast where creative business owners like you learn to build a business that's inspiring, fun and sustainable. I'm Saskia de Veyter, a business strategist, guide maker and all-around creative entrepreneur. I help business owners in the needle and fiber craft world, just like you, navigate all those icky words, branding, marketing and strategy in a way that actually works for your creative brain. Here we talk about everything from running a values-driven business to simplifying your marketing without burning out. Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your business, you're in the right place, so settle in, grab a cup of tea, coffee or, you know, bruchladich you do you and let's get started.

Speaker 1: 2:37

I think we ended up in a space, in a spot, where we have been feeling uneasy about social media for a while now, but we don't want to miss out on making connections, having our friends there, all of that. You can do that if you want to, but we need to be realistic. Like it's changed, right? There's some really creepy people that are pulling the shots. They were there before, but more and more, we are aware of what that means and how actually how creepy they are. I'm just going to offer you alternatives, and I'm going to talk to you about doing things that you've probably already done before, but you really need to do them a little bit better, a little bit more organized, have a little bit of a strategy in mind things that you've been putting to the side and I think today, now, is the time to make that change.

Speaker 1: 3:44

Our small businesses are small and we're just like tiny little parts of this whole machine, but we still have some power, and that is the power of conscious choice and not letting yourself get overwhelmed by where to go next, because that's what I'm here for. That's where other business owners come in and we can do our own thing and do it much better than hanging around in spaces and places where we kind of feel we don't want to be anymore. So before it was about engagement, dropping algorithms that keep shifting, just putting in more and more time for less and less effect. That's definitely been a thing. But now, if I'm looking at myself, it has been about the creepy businessman. Basically, we're renting land from landlords that are super creepy and we're doing all this work, putting in all this time, and we have no control over any of it at a certain point. So I really want you to take back some control over how you communicate with your audience, your customers, your clients.

Speaker 1: 5:08

So first of all, I want to talk a little bit about the mindset of being on these platforms. What we tell ourselves is that it's a free space and everybody is there. We don't have to pay anything. But of course, we're paying. We're paying with a lot of time and effort, we're paying with information. We're paying with the fact that we don't own this land. Somebody else owns the land. They want us to spend money on making ads or they want us to buy from the other people that make the ads. But we are thinking about this as a community in a way, a place where we can hang out together and chat with the person you met on that yarn festival at that one time, like a decade ago, and you're still in touch on this platform, which is amazing. But that's not what this is about. That's what we're telling ourselves that this is about. So I think we need to be a little bit more clear on where the social part and where the business part comes in. And if you wanna protect your small business, we're gonna do it in another way. We're gonna focus on you've guessed it your email, your email list and the way you communicate to your audience, your clients, your people. We kind of already know this. Right, it's not news. But we also know that we could do more. We could do it differently, we could do it better in whatever that means for you.

Speaker 1: 6:45

My favorite thing is to talk to other business owners and to listen to them and to hear how they're communicating to their audience, and a lot of the time, what comes up is, oh yeah, the newsletter. People usually don't talk about their list, but they talk about the newsletter, which is something that we'll talk about too. They feel like they want to send it out more. They don't really have an idea of what to send, they're not consistent with it and they think they should really be consistent with it. And it feels like it's so much easier on social media because it's short and a newsletter, especially in the form of a newsletter, almost like it's a newspaper, it feels like it's overwhelming. You feel like you either need to write more or you feel like you've written too much and people are not going to read it, and there's all this insecurity surrounding what should it actually be, and this is why email has taken a step back from social media, because social media was, at the beginning, very easy to use and in a lot of ways, still is, depending on what type of person you are Like.

Speaker 1: 8:08

For me, social media is super easy. I can. It sounds really weird, but I'm just going to say it anyway. I can take a picture of anything and just come up with a story and share it at any moment. In fact, I've been trying to be more organized about it so I am not so reactive to it, because that's my brain will just start thinking in social media sentences and I don't want that. So I'm trying to do organized posts, but for me that's hard and for other people it's the other way around. So it really depends on who you are, how you work and how you can find a way that really works well for you. And sometimes you really don't know what that is, because you have a certain idea of what it should look like and you're kind of pushing yourself into that shape where, like you're around what was it? Round, peg, square form, kind of thing. So yeah, that's not where we want to be.

Speaker 1: 9:10

Coming back to the fact that these platforms seem free to small businesses. Free is good because it doesn't cost any money, but there's so much that we're forgetting about that. So the email. But there's so much that we're forgetting about that. So the email. If it has felt overwhelming or complicated to you, stick with me. It's not as hard as it seems. I'm here to help. Let's dive in. So social media alone is just not good anymore and we should really move on from that. But how? It is the mindset shift that comes first, the pattern shift. If you will deciding that you're going to add to your box of tools no need to move away from anything, that's fully up to you. But I would strongly advise or inform or inspire you to really build something that is yours and that is something that you can take with you.

Speaker 1: 10:14

If you decide to move somewhere else and take it to another platform and you can do that with email you can take all your contacts with you to another platform and I've done that a bunch of times. I've been on MailChimp, I've used the Blue. What was that Blue? Something that was really. I did so much research for that one and I felt like I needed something that was super professional, because I was ready for that and in terms of years in the business, yes, in terms of knowledge, yes, but in terms of how I work and what I need, that was just not a good match. It was too complicated, too many moving parts, too many buttons and in the end, I didn't use it and I stopped sending email. So, yeah, it's definitely important to find the right spaces and we're going to come back to that.

Speaker 1: 11:14

For me, what's most important and I'm at this moment actually simplifying my own email strategy because I want it to feel easy, natural, useful, fun feel easy, natural, useful, fun. I'm also all about it looking good, pretty aesthetically pleasing. I want to build a connection with people and not have it be hard. And what I've noticed in the last couple of years when my business has evolved and shifted, is that I've collected a bunch of different lists. So, if you're not familiar with the terms, you kind of have boxes with different groups of people in them. So I have an email list that is about sending emails to tell you guys that there's a new episode out, and that's just that. Then there was an email about crafting in general and my crafting journey and conscious decisions around making your own wardrobe. That was one. Then I had the bullet journal group and then I had the business group and it was too much.

Speaker 1: 12:30

I wasn't able to consistently. And I'm doing air marks now because I feel like the marketing bros are telling us to be consistent and like every week, every other week, every whatever, but it doesn't work like that for everyone. It certainly doesn't work like that for me, but I have found different ways to navigate that and I can share that with you as well. But at this moment I feel like I need to simplify.

Speaker 1: 13:01

The year 2025 for me is simplifying everything about my business so that it is so much easier for me to do things, and this is why I've started to write a blog post first and then turn it into a podcast episode and then take from that, and it's just kind of like so much easier to do because I work on these. I have peaks of being productive and then I have trenches of being super meh, and in the peaks of productiveness I want to kind of do everything and finish everything, because if I don't finish it, it's so hard for me to go back to something to finish it. So I have figured out that for me it really works to find a topic that really makes me excited, like this one, and then I start writing a blog about it and from that blog I will then turn it into a podcast episode. So if you want to read about all of this this is the yapping part If you want to have like a really consistent piece of text with step-by-steps, then go over to the blog and you can read it there. It's not the show notes, it's actually really a blog, and I'm not. I don't have that kind of a blog with all the I hate that so much with all the advertisements and that you cannot, that you can't see what is actually the information and what is an advertisement. So I don't have any of that. It's all about giving you this free information and hoping that at one point you will want some support, some extra support, and you'll reach out to me. That's how I like to work. So I lost my train of thought there.

Speaker 1: 16:14

Oh yeah, so I was talking about simplifying. Here we go simplifying my own email strategy. I'm working on that in the background. So if you're on my list, you will probably at any moment or you've already gotten it get an email telling you that I'm bringing, merging together all my lists into one list and making it more of a festival of different things, different things. So why is email so powerful?

Speaker 1: 16:45

I think you might already know the answer, but in case you don't, it doesn't hurt to hear it again. It is. Let me use a kind of a metaphor that's always helpful for me. If social media is like trying to hold somebody's attention in a crowded, noisy room, email is like sitting down with somebody to have a coffee and do some knitting and have a conversation. So this is why it's so good it lands directly in your audience's inbox, so there's no crazy algorithm guessing if they'll ever see it or not. Of course they can still decide if they want to open it or not, but it will be there and you can trust that it's there. So if they want to hear from you, if they're interested, all they have to do is click and they see everything you want to share with them. An email builds actual, real trust. Over time they get to know you. So there's a little bit of that is about how you show up in your email and that's the kind of work that I can do with you and grow yeah, grow trust and get to know somebody, and sometimes I forget all the things that I share, and then people talk to me and they say, oh, how's this and this going? And I feel like, but yeah, people kind of know me because I talk about these things.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Email also doesn't demand constant engagement. They don't disappear after a few hours, so somebody can choose when they want to read it and when they want to open it, and you can choose when you want to send it. I remember getting an email on Sunday morning newsletter every Sunday morning from somebody that I really thought did really wonderful things and I was really looking forward to being in bed with my cup of coffee on Sunday morning and reading her newsletter. It became part of my Sunday morning, and that is not something that we can do with most social media platforms anymore. I guess YouTube, but I don't know if I would. Youtube is actually not what I'm talking about. I'm talking mostly about Instagram, because most of us in our industry are focused on Instagram. So that's what I'm mostly talking about.

Speaker 1: 19:19

Another thing that is why it's so good is that just a simple email sequence. So a sequence is a couple of emails that are sent out on different times and they have a connection together. They can sell without feeling sleazy, without feeling icky, but also that has something to do with your tone of voice, with the way you talk about this, and, yeah, you can learn those things. So it's just a really good way of connecting with your audience. And the best part, the best, best, best part about this is this is basically what my whole marketing plan is based on.

Speaker 1: 20:08

You don't need a huge list for email to work, so you don't need what we call in social media, vanity numbers. I have so many thousand followers yes, that's great, but do they actually buy from you or are they just there for your ego? And I don't mean anything nasty with that. This is just how we work, right, we love. It's great to feel appreciated by people, but as a business, you want to sell, and so a small engaged email list will outperform a big passive audience any day. So just take that in for a while A small engaged email list will always outperform a big passive audience audience. So if you find a way to send your emails that really connects to who you are, who your business is, and communicate in a way that people find engaging, showing what you have to offer them to solve their problem or to make their day a little bit better, then that will sell so much easier and more than the fleeting messages on Instagram. And, by the way, if you're actually actively selling on Instagram, good for you, keep doing it. I'm not here to tell you otherwise, I just feel like I have to keep repeating that.

Speaker 1: 21:47

Yes, but then email feels so hard sometimes, doesn't it? As I said before, it can feel draining and overwhelming. You don't know what to write at all. Like what am I writing about? We've got a new color of this and this yarn, or you've got one. Let's say, you're a pattern designer and you've got one pattern out, but the next one's not going to be ready for months. So what are you going to write about? Well, it's a conversation. It's like you're writing to a friend. Like in the olden days we would have written a letter and then we started writing like actual emails to your friends. And then we got the smartphone. So we stopped doing that and now we're just sending text messages a few characters at a time.

Speaker 1: 22:40

But think about that. Go to that vibe where you feel like you're sitting down. If you want to go all Jane Austen and light a candle, put a fountain pen in front of you, pretend like you're using that and start a conversation with the person on the other end. That's one way to start thinking about it. Then the next thing is I don't have time. Well, you don't need a lot of time. Actually.

Speaker 1: 23:10

If you want to start by sending one email per month, that is great. Nobody's telling you to do it every week. You should just find a way that works for you and that's doable for you, and in the moment, for me, that feels like I need to simplify a lot, otherwise I won't send it out. And that's going on for me at the moment, which is also the big inspiration of talking to you about this, because there's definitely sometimes a difference between knowing how to do things and actually doing them. So you don't have time, it's not a big deal. Just don't send as many. And if you don't want to do it every month or every week, then you do it whenever it feels good. You do it whenever it feels good. I would, however, say try not to have any large gaps, and if you feel like that might happen, then there's something else going on, and then you either need to simplify, like I'm doing, or perhaps work in bulk. So have a moment where you feel like energized and you have a lot going on that you can talk about and then do a few and plan them out over time.

Speaker 1: 24:35

And then another thing that people always say is I don't want to be salesy, like social media kind of easily goes into that. This is my new yarn. This is my dog. Here's the new outfit that my kid is wearing, with the new yarn, with the new dog in the background. That doesn't feel as salesy for some reason.

Speaker 1: 25:00

But there's two things that I want to say about that. First of all, this is your business. You're supposed to be salesy, but you can still do it in a way that feels good for you. And there's just also about that whole idea of you're not pushing things onto people. They can make their own decisions. You are offering them a way to help to enrich their lives, something that they might find useful or amazing, and it's your job to show them that you're there with the solution to their problem or with something that will make them feel really good. And then it's up to them. So you're never supposed to like push it right. You can share insights, stories, things that your audience actually want to hear, make it interesting.

Speaker 1: 25:54

Go back to that idea that I was saying just before now actual letter writing. What is going on with you, what's going on with your life? How is the new dog and how does it reflect to your business? We're actually thinking of getting a dog. We're actually already on. We're going to get a new dog. It's coming and it's going to impact our lives and it's going to impact the way I run my business, because I'm not going to be able to sit behind my computer hours and hours on end. This is also one of the reasons that we're actually getting a dog.

Speaker 1: 26:36

So, yeah, you can just talk about that, and there's so many ways that you can share things in a newsletter. It could be a weekly image with almost nothing else like a close-up of your latest design. You are creative and there are endless creative ways of doing that. Yeah, it should feel good and not another task on your to-do list. I am absolutely positive that you can find a way to do that. So how do you then start or restart your email list without overthinking it? Let's just say for this, to this point, that your email list has been sitting there collecting dust or you haven't started one yet. We're making this super, super easy. You pick a simple platform.

Speaker 1: 27:37

Now, I personally love Flowdesk. I told you before I've used a whole bunch of them. Flowdesk is, first of all, aesthetically super pleasing, design focused, which I think is really important in our industry and you can still change it up to match your brand. So it's not gonna. It doesn't have to look like all the other emails. It can still look like it's your email, but they just offer really nice way of building your email and it's so pretty. It's just so pretty and it's easy to use. And this is something that I found out that my brain really needs, something that I'm eager to start working with because it's fun and beautiful. My brain wants that kind of thing and that's why the blue what was it? Let me just Google it for a sec. Well, I just can't find it anymore. Anyway, it was too complicated. I just felt overwhelmed.

Speaker 1: 28:43

Another thing that's really simple about Flowdesk is they just have one price. So where you're working to grow your list and then at some point your list grows and then you have to pay more, that is just super demotivating, unmotivating, what's the word, I don't know. With Flowdesk, that is just really clear. I think it's really affordable. I think if you have a small business. You should be able to afford this because it's such an important part of your communication and your sales and everything. I do have a 50% off link for you in the show notes and in my blog post, which I only do because I've used it for so long and I'm so happy about it and it works so well for me. I'm not going to even say more about that because I don't want to start feeling like this is all based around selling this flow desk thing for you. That's not it. It's about the topic and if you decide to use this, I have a discount for you. So for the first year is 50% off. That gives you enough time to start using and learning if it works for you for a great price. So there we go, that's it. That's step one.

Speaker 1: 30:04

Pick a simple platform and it's called an email service provider. If you want to go and do some research, then you set up a basic welcome sequence just three to four emails introducing yourself and what people can expect. Now this is new for a lot of people. People think we're just sending out these newsletters and that's it. But there's a little bit more to it and it doesn't have to be hard. In Flowdesk. They have templates for that. I actually teach it in my program, but you could just copy the templates in your own language and then you're done.

Speaker 1: 30:47

So a sequence, as I said before, is a series of emails that have a certain goal. So this is a. We're talking now about a welcome sequence, which lets your new subscribers know who you are and what you're about. And then also you have sales sequences, which are something that these are different from. A nurturing sequence, which is an email that you send out on the regular and that has a similar topic every time. A sales sequence is really there to help you sell a certain product or a certain could be a festival, if you're a festival organizer or a pattern or a workshop I know that a lot of you that are listening might have a local yarn shop and then it doesn't feel like you need all the different things, and that's right. You can choose. You can choose what you want to do. That's all about figuring out what your best, what your best strategy is Now.

Speaker 1: 31:56

Three simple start was pick a simple platform. Two was set up a basic welcome sequence. Number three give people a reason to sign up. Perhaps you give them a free PDF, a free worksheet, some exclusive insights, a video tour of your shop or just some really good emails, which is great. You don't always have to give people stuff, but it's good to know that not everybody wants to give you their email address easily. Sometimes it helps to give them something in return.

Speaker 1: 32:37

The whole step stack idea is like the merging of a Patreon, an email list and a community. For me at this point it's super overwhelming. I don't really grasp all of it yet. I might at some point. You might want to think about that, and you can try different things out. I had the best thing that I did was a pop-up on my homepage that offered a wall planner, and that was really successful. A lot of people signed up for my list because of that, and I'm not sure if it was because it was a wall planner or because it was a pop-up on my homepage, because both of those things were new. So I have to now test that with another pop-up, or putting the wall platter somewhere else, which doesn't make sense because it's February already.

Speaker 1: 33:29

Anyway, fourth step, last step commit to a low stress schedule. Now, this is one that's really important for me. Just be okay with once a month, and if you miss one, it's fine. It would be great if people start mailing you like how are you doing? What's going on? I've missed it, but usually they're doing their thing and you don't have to stress about it.

Speaker 1: 33:54

Don't go with all that marketing, bro blah, where they say every week, or it doesn't, it isn't effective. Not doing it, that's not effective. So, yeah, that's my 50 cents. Two cents, how many cents is it? It's a bunch of cents, man. 50 cents is a rap artist. If you say rap artist, does that make you old Rapper? Makes you feel old? Now I'm thinking of a candy wrapper. Okay, stop thinking. Where am I? So, yeah, don't overthink it. Just make it fun to do so that you will do it more often.

Speaker 1: 34:40

Have a little bit of a strategy, a plan. Put some time in to think about what you want to communicate to whom, and then make it fun and easy and pretty, and this is how you do it and this is how you start, and from there you will evolve and you will make different kinds of sequences and all that. I'm totally giving you permission to keep it really easy, because I'm doing the same thing. The biggest takeaway from all of this is start now and keep it simple. It's not about perfection, it's about connection. Write that down like embroider it. Hang it up on your wall. Show up in a way that feels good for you and valuable for your audience. That's another key part Make it valuable for your audience and valuable is about a lot of things.

Speaker 1: 35:39

Don't start sending emails for the sake of sending emails. If you have nothing to say at some point, then you have nothing to say. But at the same time, don't think that you have nothing to say because you do Right. Does that make sense? If you want help to make this process feel easy, there are ways to get support. Of course, you can join our community and talk to other business owners and see how they do it, talk about it, what platforms they use and learn what's so annoyed by the whole Musk Zuckerberg situation that I have come up with the email power hour, then the blog and this podcast episode. So now I offer what I've actually always offered is an hour of support.

Speaker 1: 36:42

But the email power hour is just about email and really structured into one thing. So I connected the price to the fact that it's really focused on one thing. If you want to do that, I'll have a questionnaire ready for you so that I can come prepared and that we don't waste a minute of that hour where we start to work on a strategy and a way that really works for you and that you feel happy and eager to start communicating to your customers and your audience. So if you need help, I'm here. Reach out, go to my website patternshiftfm or ja-volcom, and go to the work with me and you'll find it there. Yeah, social media will keep shifting and email hasn't shifted in a bunch of decades now. So let that sink in. It has been there for a long time and it will stay there, and I think it's really time to give it a little bit more respect and start using it so that you can immediately start making back that money that you've paid me to help you. Send it out, if that makes sense, right? Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 38:05

I wanted to end with a little bit of a call to action. This is something that is really cool if you put that in your email as well. A CTA, a call to action. If this resonates with you, I love to hear your thoughts. I love to hear your thoughts. You can reply to this episode's show notes, to the email I send out to let you know that there's a new episode. You can go to the website. There's a button there where you can leave a voice message on the show notes.

Speaker 1: 38:37

There's so many ways to get in touch with me, but I really want to hear about you, even if you are not booking the email power hour. Just let me know what's going on with you. And yeah, that's how we learn, isn't it? We just share and we help each other out. So that's it for today. Thank you so much for hanging out. I hope I made a little bit of sense in all my rambling, because sometimes I talk and I think at the same time, and I really don't know what it'll sound like until I do the editing, and then it's just gonna have to be good enough. That's just what it's like a lot of the time. I just I'm not doing it again. It's just gonna be have to be good enough. Anyway, thank you so much for your time and I hope to catch you on the next one. Bye.