How freelance marketers can use email marketing to break free from the feast or famine cycle

You go all-in on getting client projects done, only to realize your leads have dried up. So, you shift your attention to promoting your business, but then you’re so busy with new projects you lose steam to build new relationships. And then it all repeats.

Sound familiar? Working ‘in’ the business and ‘on’ the business is challenging for all solo business owners, but email marketing for freelance marketers can smooth out the feast or famine cycle.

Setting up an automated email marketing flywheel helps you maintain and grow your business, even without constant hands-on marketing. That way, you can spend your time and creative energy on your freelance marketing work—whether it’s content, SEO, affiliates, ads, or beyond.

This guide covers why and how to use email marketing for your most important client—yourself.

Why marketers should use email marketing

Agencies have big budgets and entire teams dedicated to drumming up business, but freelance marketers usually don’t have that luxury. In fact, half of all creators run their businesses entirely on their own without the help of outside contractors or employees.

Time and money are of the essence for freelance marketers, but so is consistently connecting with potential clients to keep the business moving forward.

Email marketing for freelance marketers grows your business without taking up too many resources. Here’s how:

• Learn more about your potential customers: Knowing your audience’s habits, interests, and reactions can change how you run your business. With the right email service provider and know-how, you can track what links subscribers click in your emails and who clicks on which content. With this trackable information, you can segment your readers into interest groups, send targeted content, and continue to perfect your message until you find one that fits just right.
• Build personal and long-lasting relationships: Getting permission to be in someone’s inbox is a privilege. If you can treat your readers like friends and show them you care, you’ll likely have them as clients eventually. And unlike social media (whose rules and owners tend to switch around often), email doesn’t change. With the exception of faster speeds, email has been doing the same job for over two decades and will keep doing that for a long time.
• Increase your business’s visibility: When you grow your audience, you increase your chances of connecting with people who buy your services. With great email marketing, you can improve your visibility by creating raving fans sharing your valuable content with friends and colleagues. None of this will happen overnight, so you need to think of email marketing as part of your long game. But if you’re really passionate about your freelance work and want to make it your career, your long game is essential for success.
• Create a consistent client pipeline: When you craft and automate the right emails, your email marketing warms up prospects for you. That way, you’re always meeting and building relationships with new people, even as you’re heads down on a different client project. Creating a consistent flow of leads smooths out the ebb and flow of freelance businesses.

I love email because it’s nice that you know these people are going to get your email. Because with social media, the algorithms change all the time.

And what I love about Kit specifically is I love tagging people who click a link. If I launch something and they want to learn more about this product or this online course, it can tell me who’s actually interested.

Aileen Xu

How freelance marketers can build a steady income with email marketing

Email marketing for freelancers replaces boom-and-bust cycles with steady income through a flywheel:

Step 1: Attract the attention of your target audience
Step 2: Nurture new subscribers with relevant content
Step 3: Deliver a premium experience for your customers

Let’s look at each step of the freelance marketer flywheel more closely, including tips and examples.

Step #1: Attract the attention of your target audience

The first step of the marketing flywheel for your freelance business is catching the eye of the right people.

Your goal is to build an email list filled with people who might be clients someday, and that starts with offering something compelling that makes people want to join your email list.

Create highly desirable incentives

The gateway to your email list is a free incentive, also called a lead magnet. Your lead magnet can take many different shapes, like:

• eBooks
• Worksheets
• Checklists
• Templates
• Printables
• Digital planners
• Workbooks
• Prompts
• Email challenges and courses
• Access to a private group
• Webinars

Your incentive should be relevant to your target audience and their goals, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just one lead magnet. For example, you can create lead magnets for clients with different levels of experience or knowledge or cater the lead magnets to the other services you offer.

Allea Grummert of Duett offers a mix of email marketing services, including copywriting and email platform setup. So, they use a mix of incentives to attract their target audience for those services, like a framework for welcome sequence copywriting and a guide to choosing an email service provider.

Set up landing pages for your incentives

You’ll need to create a landing page for each one of your incentives so that people have a place to sign up for your email list and get the freebie they’re after.

How to connect your incentive to the Landing Page

Once you design your landing page in Kit, the next step is to connect your incentive to it. That way, people get access to your lead magnet as soon as they sign up. To do this, click ‘Settings’ from the landing page designer.

Then, choose the ‘Incentive’ tab and check the ‘Send incentive email’ box. You can click ‘Edit Email Contents’ to design the email now or come back to it after connecting your lead magnet.

Choose whether to direct subscribers to a URL or send them a downloadable piece of content. Using a URL for your lead magnet works well when you’re giving someone access to a free community, linking to an unlisted video on YouTube, or if your lead magnet is on a page of your website. Use the ‘Download’ option if you have a PDF to send, like for an ebook or worksheet.

If your incentive is a file, hit ‘Choose a file,’ select the file from your computer, and click ‘Open.’

Once you upload your lead magnet or insert the redirect URL, click ‘Save.’ Now, you’re ready to publish your landing page.

How to automatically tag people who sign up via your landing page

You could be ready to go once your landing page is live and your lead magnet is connected. We recommend one more step— tagging people who sign up for each lead magnet.

Creating separate tags for each lead magnet, like ‘Downloaded SEO workbook’ or ‘Accessed Ads Webinar,’ helps you organize your audience and what they’re interested in. Then, if you launch a new service related to the lead magnet topic in the future, you know just who to reach out to.

Here’s how to set up a tag in Kit. First, select ‘Rules’ under the ‘Automate’ tab from your Kit dashboard.

Then, click ‘+ New rule.’ This will take you to the page where you select your ‘Trigger’ and ‘Action.’ For this project, the trigger will be ‘Subscribes to a form’ and the action is ‘Add tag.’

Click ‘Subscribes to a form’ and then choose your lead magnet landing page from the drop-down. Then, click ‘Add tag’ and select or create a new tag for these subscribers.

You can add multiple tags if you want, like noting that they downloaded a specific incentive and that they’re interested in a topic.

Finally, click ‘Save Rule.’

Direct traffic to your landing page

Your landing page is live, and your tags are ready—it’s time to promote your new incentive.

There are tons of ways to grow your email list for free and promote incentives, so experiment and see what your audience likes. Try out:

• Sharing your lead magnet on your social media channels
• Optimizing your landing page for SEO
• Linking to the landing page from your website content
• Adding links to your incentives in your social bios and email signatures
• Using website banners to promote your lead magnet

Using a lead magnet landing page to grow your email list is all about persistence. While you don’t want to overwhelm or annoy your audience with constant promotion, don’t shy away from sharing it multiple times across your favorite channels.

Step #2: Nurture new subscribers with relevant content

You have potential clients on your email list—now what?

Step two in your email marketing for freelance marketer flywheel is about slowly building the relationship with subscribers. The goal is to keep your audience engaged with relevant and timely emails to build trust, which will lead to conversion.

Send an educational email sequence

New subscribers have started to see what you’re all about with the free lead magnet, but you should keep providing valuable content.

To make your life easier (and your email list better), set up an email automation for each incentive. Add an email to the sequence that thanks subscribers for signing up, and then follow up with helpful content that’s related to the lead magnet they chose, like:

• Your top blog posts related to the lead magnet topic
• Case studies for that project type
• Other incentives they might like
• A prompt asking them to respond with their questions on the topic

If you consistently send valuable content and resources, subscribers will view you as their go-to for information and help on a topic.

Let subscribers self-segment based on their actions

Link triggers are a handy way to learn about subscribers as they engage with your emails so that you can tailor your marketing to them in the future.

For example, say you send an email with a roundup of your top social media or blog posts from the past few months. Then, you could add a tag to subscribers who clicked on particular links. You’d be able to tell that subscriber A might be interested in one topic while subscriber B likes another.

You could also ask subscribers directly about their interests in an email, like prompting them to click on which topic they most want to learn about.

Use our free self-segment email automation template

Pitch your services and products

Once someone has been on your email list and interacted with some emails, you can start pitching your services and products. Having subscriber tags and link triggers helps at that point since you can tell who’s interested in what and whether they’ve engaged with your content.

You’ll need a sales email to pitch your freelance marketing business, which should explain what you can offer and how it’ll help them. The more you can relate it to the content and topics you know they’ve read about, the better.

Then, include a clear CTA in your sales email that directs clients to your sales page.

The sales page should have relevant details about the product or service and how much it costs.

For example, Katelyn Bourgoin offers 60-minute strategy calls, and her sales page explains how customers benefit from the time. The page also has details about the cost and timeline, plus offers lower-cost options if the strategy call isn’t the right fit right now.

Create a seamless buying experience

When clients are ready to pull out their card for you, you want checkout to be as easy as possible. A tool like Kit Commerce makes it happen. With Kit Commerce, you can embed payment processing with low transaction fees into your website and emails.

How to sell your freelance services with Kit

You can use Kit Commerce to sell products (like a paid set of marketing templates) or services (like your marketing audit). To set up either, click ‘Products’ under the ‘Earn’ tab of your Kit dashboard. Then, click ‘+New product.’

Enter the name of your product and then select the product type—either Product or Subscription. A one-off product works well for something like a 60-minute consulting call, while the Subscription option is useful for setting up monthly client retainers.

Next, you get to choose the pricing of your freelance marketing services. Most freelance projects will probably use Standard one-time pricing, but there are also options to let clients choose their pricing or split the cost into installments.

If you let clients pre-pay for multiple projects, like buying four coaching calls at once, toggle the ‘Allow customers to choose a quantity’ option.

Then, you can select the fulfillment option of your Kit Commerce product. Choose ‘Something Else’ for freelance marketing services, or select ‘A Digital Download’ if you’re selling something like an in-depth ebook.

After you choose the fulfillment type, choose the domain and page URL for your Kit Commerce page and click ‘Create Product.’

Finally, you’ll customize your product page with an image and description. Once the product page is live, you can direct clients there to pay for your freelance marketing projects.

Stripe powers kit Commerce, so customers get secure payment processing, and you get low transaction fees. After each purchase, your clients will receive a confirmation email and ticket via Kit.

Step #3: Deliver a premium experience for your customers

After you wrap up a freelance marketing project, your email marketing helps retain clients and keep them coming back for more work.

Streamline your customer onboarding with automation

Customer onboarding emails get everyone on the same page so a project can be as smooth and successful as possible. Your onboarding email could include:

• A thank you message
• A timeline of what to expect next
• Information about contracts
• Details about what information you need to get started
• Instructions about how to access your project management software

If you aren’t sure what to put in the onboarding email, start by looking at what you do each time you start a new client project. Is there research or review you like to do? Do you add clients to a database and save contracts and rate agreements?

It’s also helpful to look at example onboarding emails from other freelancers, like Ashley R. Cummings’ template below.

Ask for feedback using surveys or polls

Sometimes, asking for feedback is scary. If there’s something bad, do you want to know? Well, yes, even if it’s uncomfortable.

Chances are, though, that a post-project survey could reveal what clients love about your work and process and generate ideas for new services. After each project, you can use a poll to get feedback on:

• What went well
• What could have gone better
• Why they chose you above other freelance marketers
• Which other projects they need help with
• How they’d rate your work on a scale of one to five

Then, you can use the feedback to improve your services, pitch new projects, ask for testimonials and referrals, or work to fix rocky relationships.

Offer discounts for successful client referrals

One of the best ways to find new clients is through your past clients, and you can offer a discount to incentivize clients to help you out. For example, email clients to let them know you’ll apply a percentage discount on their next invoice if they refer you to someone who ends up hiring you for a project.

Reward referrals to your newsletter

Another way to entice subscribers to help you grow your list and business is with a newsletter referral program. Each time a subscriber refers your newsletter to someone who signs up for your list, the referring subscriber works toward rewards that you choose.

For example, Aleyda Solis offers rewards like a social media shoutout and access to exclusive content in exchange for newsletter referrals.

Build a consistent client pipeline with Kit

Setting up an email marketing flywheel for your freelance business takes a little upfront effort, but then you get to reuse it over and over (on autopilot) to keep your pipeline full.

Kit has tools for marketers that make growing a business without a team easier. Design irresistible landing pages and emails from free templates, grow your audience with automations and referrals, and collect payments for all from a single tool.

Ready to grow? Try Kit today!