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I welcome to design for the creative mind, a podcast for interior designers and creative entrepreneurs to run their business with purpose, efficiency and passion, because while every design is different, the process should remain the same.
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Prepare yourself for some good conversations with amazing guests, a dash of Jesus and a touch of the Woo, woo, and probably a swear word or two.
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If you're ready to stop trading your time for money and enjoy your interior design business, you are in the right place.
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I'm your host. Michelle Lynn, you
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Michelle,
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Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Michelle Lin, and this is designed for the creative mind, where we talk about all things business related for interior designers. Today, we are talking about email lists and why they matter. If you have been following along in my world for any length of time, you know, I am a huge advocate of an email list. So let me ask you this. Do you ever feel like you're just screaming into the social media void. Like one day you're crushing it, you're getting all sorts of likes, you're getting all sorts of shares, you're getting all sorts of interaction, and the next day it's like crickets. Well, that, my friend, is why we are talking about email lists.
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This, in my opinion, your email list is your secret weapon. Let me tell you. I So back in 2008
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I started my business and I started home staging. So I was doing all sorts of networking, visiting real estate agents, title companies, mortgage lenders like I was, I was a networking machine. My goal was to get as many people on my email list as possible. And girl, I gotta tell you, I am still getting inquiries for home staging from my email list. I literally will ask somebody, because I don't do home staging anymore. But when I talk to them, or when they inquire via, you know, just a quick message via email, I ask them, Well, how did you hear about me? Like, why do you think I'm doing home staging? They're like, Oh, I've been on your email list forever, but oh well, here I'm gonna have to point you in another direction that my friend is the power of an email list that I am still getting inquiries because they've saved my email information. So let's, let's talk a little bit about social media versus the email list, because I know we are all up in the Instagram. I love me some of the gram, and I still suggest using it, but know that email is more powerful, even though it's not as sexy as your Instagram, because imagine if you were building your dream home. Okay, as designers, we can relate to this. Imagine you are building your dream home, but the land that you're building it on is rented. You don't actually own it. Would you do that? Seriously? Would you build your dream home on rented land? Because that's what we're doing with social media. Social media, we don't own any of those contacts. I said this before, if Mark Zuckerberg,
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if he gets indigestion and he decides to change the algorithm, we don't show up anywhere. And I know it's not mark that's, you know, sitting around like moving the levers like the Wizard of Oz, but it's the same thing he owns.
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Our contacts. The algorithm can change, or, who knows, some overseas hackers, take down Instagram, take both, take down meta, like everything is gone. Who are you going to market to if you are relying solely on social media,
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if you've put all of your eggs in the basket of social media that can dry up in a heartbeat, and am I trying to scare you up? Yeah, just a little bit, just a little bit, because I want you to take this seriously. You own your email list, and no platform can take that away, not LinkedIn, not what the SEO of
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YouTube or the SEO of Pinterest or Facebook, X, Twitter, whatever it is you can download.
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Download your list of emails and upload them anywhere you want to. I mean, I guess not anywhere, but you know what I'm saying.
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So let that sink in, that that's a little bit of a reality check. This is why I'm so passionate about an email list.
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Plus when you have your email list, you have direct access to your entire audience. You land in their inbox. It's not just going to be a random scroll. Maybe you show up in their feed. Maybe you don't show up in their feed. Maybe they're not scrolling today,
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but if you land in their inbox, you're going to be there whether they open their email today or next week. So you have direct access to your audience, which gives you more control, and you also get more conversions. And by that, I mean people are going to reach out to you because they've been following you intentionally for a while, and in addition to having direct access to your audience, where you have more control over the message that they see, and higher conversions, essentially, they're going to be more likely to give You a call because they see you more often is that your engagement increases. And what I mean by that it goes back into the control aspect that you have, because your email open rates generally outperform social media reach, and that means, again, they see more of you. They hear more from you. They understand more about what you do and what you say and your personality. So that goes back to making sure that you know what your voice is, you know your brand identity, and that you stay true to that in your email marketing,
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you don't want to be prim and polished on social media and wacky and zany on email. It's it. There's a disconnect there. So being your genuine, authentic self is going to carry into their inbox, the sales and lead nurturing. Sales and lead nurturing. What does this mean? This means you can dive down a little bit further into some of the granularity. I'm not sure if that's a word, but that's what we're going to use today. You can, you can dive down into more of the granularity of your email list you can look in your system. So depending on if you're using, I don't know, Active Campaign, or MailChimp, or there's a bazillion others Constant Contact, I am going to give it a pitch right here for sidemark.
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I think if you've been around for a while, you've heard that I am a co founder of sidemark, which is a client relationship manager. It's where I do all of my email marketing for both my coaching, well, my coaching is about to move over to sidemark. It's been on another platform for a while, but for my interior design business, I've been on side mark for quite a while, and what you can do is you can track who's opening your emails, the percentage of open rate is but also what you can do is you can track your leads in a pipeline. Now, you could do this on a spreadsheet. You can do this through a notebook, like whatever works best. But what you want to do is your warm leads are going to be easier to convert when you're in their inbox. So you can take a look and say, Okay, this person's opened up so many emails. Maybe they even reply, like, I'll get a reply on occasion from a from an automated email that says, Oh my gosh, this was a great idea. Or, Oh, I was always wondering how to how you guys mix metals, or whatever the case may be. So so you get that engagement on occasion, and then you can keep track of those individuals and see if they turn into a sale. Now, y'all, if you've got 12,000 people, or if you've got 1200 people, or if you have 12 people on your email list, it doesn't necessarily matter the size, it's going to be how well your content converts, but you have to start an email list to begin with. It's just like your designs. Think about this. It's just like your designs. I'll bet the first designs that you've done or the first designs that you will do are not going to be as sophisticated
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as the designs that you did a year later. Or.
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Five years later or 10 years into your career, it's going to be the same thing with your email content. So do not try to hide from this or be perfect to begin with, because what really happens your readers are looking more for the consistency, because consistency breeds Trust. Trust breeds paying clients. So if you're just sending out, Oh, I've got an email list and it has 122 people on it, so I'm not going to need to email them very often. Well, don't treat those 122 people like the red headed step children. They need just as much love, because you might have a handful of paying clients in that small list. It's about quality, not quantity. Because seriously, you, I don't know if you can anymore, but you used to be able to go out and buy email lists. So it's like buying followers. It's more for an ego to say, I have a large following on Instagram or a large email list, if it doesn't turn into money, does it really matter? And let me just clarify here. I used to think, well, I don't want to be annoying, like I only need to email them once a month, maybe just when I publish my blog. That's enough. But if you're worried about I don't want to be annoying. Okay, so let's talk about this. Let's talk about some common objections, okay, or at least the ones that I had, and then some probably, I don't know. Let's see where this goes. If you don't want to be annoying, let me just tell you serve first and sell second.
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What I mean by that is that give them content. Make sure that your email information is interesting
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and well, if you send out one a week to begin with, if you send out one a week to begin with, maybe two are going to be interesting to all the readers. Maybe one will be interesting to most of them.
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Maybe some will unsubscribe. They unsubscribe. They weren't your client anyway. But if you serve, if you are coming from the heart and you are sharing information, you'll have a call to action at the end of the email. But don't do you just, basically you just don't come at the reader trying to sell right away. So I don't want to be annoying. Might be one objection. Another objection might be, I have nothing to say, like, what am I supposed to say? What I don't have anything interesting, babe. I'm here to tell you that you totally do share project updates. You know, our industry is sexy. People want to know what's going on. We're in the midst of it every day, so it doesn't feel as sexy. But there's a reason for HGTV. It's because everybody wants to see behind the scenes. So give them a behind the scenes for you. It could literally just be a recap of what you're doing. And if you're thinking that there's no value in that, it is because you're basically sharing with your readers, with your audience, that you are the expert. You are the trusted authority. And if you're just now starting, it gives it gives you some idea of what the jobs are looking like. And you can explain that. You can explain, look, this is the first time I've done this full fledged kitchen renovation. Here's the lessons I'm learning. Or you could phrase it in the way of, hey, if this is your first turn it around the other way. Hey, that's a good idea. Turn it around the other way and say if you haven't done a kitchen renovation, here are some things to watch out for. So you could talk about project updates you can do before and afters you can do frequently asked questions. Like, what are some frequently asked questions that your that your clients ask? How much is this going to cost? How long is this going to take? Is it going to be your style or my style? Like you could do a whole month series on that. It doesn't have to be like your email marketing does not have to be a novel. I'm just going to read it anyway. So keep it short and sweet. Design tips, like design tips are great. So maybe one week you do something, the second week you do design tips. The third week you do some you could get into a rhythm, like, what works for your brain, make it easy. Because I think sometimes that's another objection is, it's too much work. Too much work. Well, babe, if you're looking for ideas and you're looking to make it simple,
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repurpose some of your content from from Instagram, if you want to get really crazy, pull them together and do a series a month long worth of content that crosses over. You know what? You can always tap the power of AI like go to chat GPT and get some ideas, and then have chat GPT, who I lovingly refer to as chatty G, me and chatty G, we come up with a lot of content, and then you just build it out. She can create an outline for you. Heck, I should do that with some of my podcast content. Practice what I preach. Just wait and see. Who knows what it's going to look like next week.
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So my point is is just start with it. Okay,
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you're an interior designer, not a marketer, but somehow you're stuck spending hours on SEO, social media and email campaigns instead of doing what you love, designing beautiful spaces. Marketing shouldn't take over your business. That's why sidemark was built by designers, for designers, we offer done for you marketing services like SEO, paid ads, email and even social media management so you don't have to lift a finger not quite ready to let someone run it all for you, we also have done with you software subscriptions that include all of the tools you need, along with live coaching courses and 24/7 live support to help you market smarter with a clear plan, imagine getting back to doing more of why you started your business in the first place. Solve the marketing overwhelm and visit www.mysidemark.com
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today that's www.mysidemark.com,
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so do you have an email list that you need to revive? I did. I actually had an email list that I nurtured for a long time, and then I had some staff changes, and I completely forgot about it. In all honesty, I completely forgot about it for probably about a year or so. So there's a lot of things that we're getting, a lot of people that were still getting some of the automations, and then it just kind of trickled away. So basically, what what you want to do is if you need to revive your email list. So let's just pretend you had one, and it just kind of died off like like mine did. What you'll want to do is you're going to want to ease back into your regular content.
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And honestly, I restarted mine. So there might have been somebody who went through the entire year of my automated content and I just restarted them. I just started it slow. So instead of every week, or every couple, every couple of days to begin with, as my segments go, which we're going to talk about in a second, then I just ease them in. But let's just, let's just assume that you don't have an email list, because I'm going to assume that the majority of y'all listening, if you've gotten to this point in today's episode, that you're still tinkering with the idea, let me just say the easiest way to build your email list, to get it started, is a lead magnet. Okay, you can call it a lead magnet. You can call it a freemium basically, what it is is it's something of value that you offer in exchange for the email address. It needs to be something of value. So let me tell you my top 10 favorite white paints y'all that can be. You can find that on Pinterest, okay, it needs to be something of value. For example, on my ml interiors group, I have what you need to do before you hire an interior designer. Okay, that is what my audience wants. Audience might want something like, what is the average investment for a living room, to furnish your living room? And you could, you could just, you can create that, like, good, better, best. Like, what are they going to like? Everybody's sophisticated enough that they know that if they, if they want the free downloadable, if they want the information, and they're going to exchange their email for it, that it's going to come with follow up emails. So make it something juicy that they can't resist. Once they have exchanged the email address for your bad ass lead magnet, you need to nurture them. What I mean by that is the first few emails. I call it the Sales series. Okay, so they download what to do before hiring an interior designer. They download that, then they get a couple of emails like, let's say they download it on a Monday, they get it delivered to their inbox, maybe a quick follow up with that. And then they probably get something on Wednesday that ties back to the or two days later. It doesn't matter. So they download it on day one, two days later, they get a follow up, saying, so what did you think? Did you enjoy it? Or whatever? By the way, this is another benefit of blah, blah, blah. And then they get another email, maybe a day or two later, but for the next 10 days, they're hearing from you regularly. Okay? You want to hit them when they're hot. Hit them when they're hot. From there. Maybe they're not ready to invest in interior designer. Maybe they're just dipping their toe into the water. They're not sure what they want to do. You cannot leave them hanging after your Sales series. Okay, so your Sales series is promoting whatever it is they downloaded and why they need to hire you, etc, etc. You need to be direct. This is not a time to pussy foot around and just say, oh, hum. If you're interested, I'd love to help you. No, it needs to be like, This is what you need to do, and this is why you need me to do it. It needs to be direct sales copy. Ask.
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Or, let's say, the 10 days, or whatever, however many emails you put together in this sequence, then you go into a little lower touch process. And what I mean by that is that instead of every couple of days, they're just going to hear from you maybe once a week for the next four weeks, and then after that, it's every other week. And then it might trickle to it is just once a month, okay, but they're not going to forget about you. So hypothetically, for the first year, they should hear from you no less than twice a month after that, first year has gone by and they haven't hired you. It doesn't mean they're not going to life sometimes gets in the way you want to still stay in touch with them. So after 12 months, I mean, you're not going to be writing emails like you need to just write or hire somebody. Let me just tell you, a good copywriter pays for themselves. You want 12 months worth of content. This is not something that you have to do for the rest of your life. What you do need to do for the rest of your life, hypothetically speaking, at least as long as you're in business, is you need to write a blog once a month, so when the 12 months of content is done, automatically emailing them, they will still be getting the blog that you publish once a month and send to your email list once a month. Does that make sense? If you want to get really crazy, I have not, but you could get really crazy and you could segment it. A lot of the systems today will be able to say, Okay, I'm going to segment these people because they are interested in home building, okay? Or maybe these are builders that I'm marketing to in this segment, and then maybe everybody else is in another segment. Or maybe it's, it's builders and multi family and then residential. It's possible, as you grow, you can get more sophisticated and you can do more testing. So segments are great. Now let's talk about action. All of this is well and good, and it's fabulous in theory,
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if I do say so myself, but
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babe, all you need to do is set up a simple opt in. What I mean by that is just go to your website. Okay, call your developer, whatever. If you do your own website, the system that you use is going to have a place where you can set up a subscribe here, subscribe here, and which, by the way, let me just tell you that in the last month, in the last month or so, on side mark, yes, this is another, another pitch, and on side mark, y'all, we opened up the option for websites so you can do it yourself. We've got some beautiful templates, or we can do it for you, including some search engine optimization and all sorts of fun stuff around that, and you're not going to beat the price. Okay, so that's brand new. That's hot off the press. Depending on when you're listening to this, if you're listening to this in 2026 it's old news. But if you're listening to this in March or April of 2025
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this is good information, it's good information anytime. But do know that that is something that we have recently opened. So if you don't have an email list, wherever you have your website set up, a simple opt in. Can you do it this week? Can you do it this week? Momentum, if you already have an email list, but maybe it kind of got stuck, like mine did for a little while.
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Maybe just send them a hey, I know you haven't heard from me in a while, but I'm still here, and I want to share this really cool tip with you. Or let me tell you what the trends are for this year. Or let me tell you what i've what I'm seeing in the market. Or let me tell you a cool case study of a client that I just served. Okay, so just just a quick, just a quick howdy. But what I really hope that you take away from this episode is just a a shift in your mindset. Your list is an asset. If you were to go to sell your business, and as they go through the valuation of your business, your email list is going to be an asset. It increases the value of your company. So you need to build it, nurture it and monetize it. So what are you going to do? You're going to go set in, set up a simple opt in. You're going to go talk to chatty G and see what she suggests creating as a lead magnet she might even be able to give you.
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Some sales copy. There's no excuse not to do this right now. If you cannot hire a professional copywriter, just get it done now and then, as you grow your business, you can update and pay somebody to create new copy. So with that in mind, let me give you an example. Go over to designs for the creative mind.com
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that's my website for my coaching programs. Scroll to the very bottom and you're going to see my opt in. It's the interior designers Business Review and planning guide.
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You need it. Subscribe to it, and then watch my sales series, and then watch my nurturing content. Now it's not the same as for my interior design hell. Go. Go subscribe over there. Go to ml interiors group.com and subscribe to the three things that every what they should do before hiring an interior designer, watch my sales copy. Okay, do not plagiarize it, but you can use it as inspiration. Okay, so do that. But then also, while you're at it, go ahead and leave a review for the podcast. I won't even email you for that. I just, I just, I would greatly appreciate it from one business person to another, good reviews are very much appreciated. And so with that, thank you for for listening to me ramble on. I hope you're enjoying this marketing series that I'm doing on the podcast, trying to trying to get this baby organized, doing some series, doing some seasons, if you have any suggestions or requests, you can always email me or DM me on the gram designed for the creative mind, and then until next time, keep those emails warm and those clients sweeter than a fresh baked croissant that is my bakery reference for the day.
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So if you're looking for a guide, a leader, a mentor, a coach, check out the interior design business, bakery, and I will catch up with you guys on the next episode.
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Thanks for being here. Be great today.
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Hey y'all, if you love the show and find it useful, I would really appreciate it if you would share with your friends and followers, and if you like what you're hearing. Want to put a face with a name and get even more business advice, then join me in my Facebook group, the interior designers business launch pad. Yeah, I know it's Facebook, but just come on in for the training and then leave without scrolling your feet. It's fun. I promise you'll enjoy it. And finally, I hear it's good for business to get ratings on your podcast, so please drop yours on whatever platform you use to listen to this. We're all about community over competition, so let's work on elevating our industry one designer at a time. See you next time you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
