Why You Need To Have An Email List As A TPT Seller

If you’re a teacher author, you’ve probably heard of email marketing. But I bet you’re wondering why you need to have an email list as a TPT seller. Well don’t worry, I’m going to tell you why email marketing is so popular and why you keep hearing people say ‘you need to start an email list’!

What is email marketing and how does it work?

First, a quick breakdown –

Email marketing is a powerful form of direct digital marketing. It uses email to promote your business’s products or services and helps make your customers aware of your latest items or offers.

For most TPT sellers who have an email list, what does this look like?

Basically, TPT sellers send out a frequent email to a group of their ideal customers (with the hope that those customers will purchase the seller’s TPT products).

Why should you prioritize email marketing?

If you’re a TPT seller, you are probably aware that email marketing is pretty popular. But let’s take a second to acknowledge why it can be so powerful. It will also open your eyes to why email marketing should be your top priority going forward.

1.) You own your email list.

Your email list and your website are the two most secure things in your business. The sad truth is that most marketplaces and platforms (such as TPT, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Pinterest) don’t belong to us. It’s a bit like renting a house instead of owning one. Your account could be deleted or hacked at any time. I’ve lost count of how many heart-breaking stories I’ve heard of fellow sellers being hacked. They lose thousands or tens of thousands of followers and mourn the years of work that are now gone.

It’s wise not to put all of your eggs in someone else’s unsecure basket, so to speak. If your Instagram account gets hacked, you will feel sad. But if you have an email list, you will still have a way to access your customers and you won’t feel quite as panicked.

Let’s also remember that most forms of marketing are trendy and could disappear within the blink of an eye. Remember MySpace? It was hot and now it’s not. Email has been around for twenty years and is here to stay.

2.) You’re not competing with an algorithm.

Your email list is one of the few things that you have complete control over in your business. Unfortunately, places like TPT and social media make constant changes. You have no control over changing algorithms, updates, or new expectations that can affect your success.

An algorithm update can really punish you on places like TPT or social media and your income becomes a lot less reliable. However, if you have an email list, you are not at the mercy of an algorithm. There’s no demand to change your SEO or suddenly create dancing videos in order to see success!

Finally, you can easily add links to your resources within your emails. Let’s face it, it’s not easy to get customers to TPT from social media. Social media companies have sneaky motives (like they want you to pay for ads and they want users to stay on their platform and consume ads). This is why you find yourself not being able to add links to your idea pins, Instagram posts or TikTok videos.

3.) Email marketing has a higher ROI.

A HubSpot article in mid-2022 shared that email marketing has an impressive return on investment – $36 for every $1 spent. Other forms of marketing don’t come anywhere close to that! In fact, the ROI for email marketing can be as high as 4400%. That’s $44 for every dollar spent on an email marketing campaign.

Simply put, having an email list can be astronomically more profitable that having something like an Instagram or Facebook page. Email often has higher purchase conversions. 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media, according to a survey conducted by Monetate. The best part? All this information is easier to track on email. You can see open rates and conversion rates, so you know how your emails are performing. This is much harder to gauge with social media.

Finally, people like to use social media to relax and connect with others. Most users resent being sold to. Whereas this is more acceptable through email.

4.) You can work less and be seen more (all in your jammies)!

You can work less with email marketing. Drafting an email may take you fifteen or twenty minutes, but it’s definitely a lot less of a time suck compared to places like social media. Once you add up all the hours of making posts, writing captions, sharing stories, and answering messages, social media can be pretty time consuming!

Here are some of the reasons you get seen more through email

• Although there are millions of social media users, there are billions of email users. Let’s face it, not everyone is on TikTok but everyone has an email account! People check their email every single day (often multiple times a day).
• There’s no algorithm. 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. Therefore, visibility is definitely higher with email.

Finally, email marketing is perfect for introverts. If the idea of making reels or TikTok videos makes your stomach churn, email marketing is perfect for you. You can type up an email with your hair in a messy bun and no make-up on! There’s no requirement to show up every day or be camera ready.

I hope you found this post insightful about why you need to have an email list as a TPT seller. It’s really important to keep these things top of mind, so that email marketing becomes a priority for your business.

If you’d like to learn more about email lists, I have an email marketing course for TPT sellers. Click here to check it out!