In the world of digital marketing, social media networks like TikTok and Instagram are lauded as the outlets to find success, the places to go if you want your work to be seen. But… they can also kinda suck.
Social media is notoriously fickle. Trying to get your work in front of people is an uphill slog that social networks will be very quick to help you circumvent… for a price. And a price that might not even get you where you want to go. And if a social network goes away or decides to ban your account, you just lost your entire audience because you don’t actually own the relationship with them.
So what’s a TTRPG publisher or self-published writer to do? Where else can you go to build an actual group of people who want to hear what you have to say and see what you’ve created?
There may be a few possible answers to this, but one of the most enduring is… email.
Email Marketing is Key for TTRPG Publishers and Writers
When it comes to the range of ways writers and TTRPG publishers can put their messages out into the world, email stands out. There are a few reasons why, including it’s strong showing in comparison to other options, being able to own your list, and offering a really broad range of things you can include.
Isn’t email marketing dead?
I hear it relatively often when talking to people about digital marketing: email is dead, isn’t it? I kind of get it, really. Email has been around forever, we ignore so much junk that comes through our inboxes, and we’ve heard things about how you can get flagged as spam.
However, Forbes reports that 61% of consumers spend 8 seconds or more on average viewing an email message, which isn’t bad when you consider how much a reader can take in or click on during that duration. They also add that people are three times more likely to make a purchase from an email versus social media, which feels significant when you consider the emphasis put on social media these days.
Overall this means that email remains an impactful marketing tool, allowing you to put your work in front of an engaged audience that’s more likely to convert into customers.
You own your list
The words “TikTok ban” have famously kicked the hornet’s nest of social media a few times recently, and that really illustrates another strength of email marketing: you own your list.
As a creator on TikTok myself, the news of a “forced sale” of TikTok immediately had me asking: where are people going next if this comes down? It was a feeling of wanting to hedge my bets and attempt to establish an audience strategically, not wanting to feel like I was wasting my time while also losing a lot of work I had put in to my TikTok content.
And that’s the danger of social media being your only way you communicate with your audience. Algorithms change, networks fall out of favor, data gets lost, and apps get banned. Each of these means you might have to start completely from scratch and learn how to grow in a fully new environment. You might be able to bring some of your audience with you, but it will likely only be a sliver.
If you use social media to instead drive people onto your email list, however, those subscribers go where you go. Whether you’re publishing on TikTok or Instagram, your email list isn’t impacted by those differences. You’re far less likely to lose your audience.
What can TTRPG publishers and writers do with an email list?
Another thing I often hear is that people resist building up their email marketing lists because people “just don’t want to be sold to all the time,” which… that’s really true. But having an email list doesn’t mean you should be constantly bombarding subscribers with calls to buy things from you.
Email marketing has great potential to build a relationship between subscribers and yourself (or with your business). Where social networks might only bother sharing your posts with a miniscule segment of your followers, an email you send out will hit their inbox every time. And with that kind of visibility and engagement over time, subscribers will start to get to know you better, especially if you’re giving them actual value in those emails.
While this topic should (and probably will) be an article all on its own, some ideas of things that writers and TTRPG publishers can include in their emails that subscribers might find of value for various reasons are:
- Devlogs – Updates about your in-progress work, sharing insights into your process, getting ideas and early feedback on features, and getting people excited about what you’ll be releasing (and making them excited to pick up a copy), something I’ve been creating for my game Stargazer
- Yourself – Content that helps your subscriber get to know more about you and the things you’re passionate about, especially things they might relate to. I include a section called “Something cool I learned this month” in the monthly newsletter for Graycastle Press (called the Graycastle Conspiracy) where I share neat things I picked up recently (I freakin’ love learning new things y’all)
- Community Support – Signal boosting other creators doing things you think your audience might like. This could be a fellow TTRPG publisher’s Kickstarter campaign, a new novel by a writing peer, or a cause relevant to your audience that they might feel similar passion about
- Fun Stuff – Emails don’t have to be overly serious, and you can always include something that your audience might just find fun. I theme my monthly mailing list around conspiracies (since a group of ravens, the mascot of Graycastle Press, is called a conspiracy) to make it kind of different and fun, and include ciphered messages in each email for folks to learn about and decode
Email is such a wide open kind of content that you can really do anything with it as long as you think your audience will appreciate it and find value in it. And just because you shouldn’t make every email one where you present a chance to pay for your work to your audience doesn’t mean you should never do it.
How often should I send out emails to my list?
Pretty much every time I’ve approached email marketing I’ve gone completely overboard (story of my creative life, tbh) and ended up committing myself to something like sending weekly emails. It sounds like a great idea, but it instantly became an overbearing task to create that much content that regularly. And so I dropped it almost instantly and sent emails only sporadically.
With my monthly Graycastle Conspiracy newsletter, I tried to approach in a more sustainable way. I ended up setting myself the goal of putting out an email only once a month. It felt a lot more motivating to know I had a few weeks to put something together that I was proud of and that I think my audience will really enjoy and get value from. I also structured the content for the email, making it more templatized so I always know what content I need to create.
This isn’t to say you can’t set just as ambitious of a goal as you want, but just that it’s not required to send out an email at any specific interval. Consistency is more key than frequency here.
I talked to my friend Jay of Laughing Lark Games the other day about his choice to start up a new email newsletter with a frequency of one email every two months:
I chose every two months for two reasons: to give myself breathing room and to give myself a chance to surprise myself. The first reason is simple enough. I have enough time to think up content with a break in-between to take care of other obligations in my life. Let’s me ease into it. As for the second reason, think of it as a stretch goal. I want to see if I am given the creative freedom and time to think up ideas and content, I may surprise myself and have more to say than I thought. I may even find I need to decrease the time between disbursements.
How TTRPG publishers and writers can build their email lists with free downloads
I’m a really big proponent of using free downloadable resources as a primary way of growing my email list. By offering some kind of resource in exchange for joining my email list I’m able to offer a well-targeted resource with tangible value to new subscribers.
The key here really is the word value, ensuring that what you’re offering will be something the new subscriber actually wants.
What makes a good list builder?
Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal audience member and imagine you’ve landed on a website offering an enticing digital resource. You pop your email into the signup form, get the email with your download link on it, and then… the resource kinda sucks. It’s low effort, not useful, or incomplete. How would you feel about the resource? Even more important, how would you feel about the person who created it?
Now imagine instead that the resource you just got is good. Like, really good. It does what it says on the label, it looks great, it solves a problem. It’s good enough that you’re surprised that you didn’t have to pay for it. How would that experience make you feel about the person whose email list you just joined?
When it comes down to it, there are three things I try to make sure of when putting together a list builder that form my core checklist for a “good” list builder:
- Is this actually targeted to people who will care to be (and that I want to be) on my email list? Is this something that my ideal audience member (and hopefully future customer or reader) will actually care about?
- Is this list builder something of quality that people will find a lot of value in? Does it ideally feel like something that’s worth actual money (even if its just a few bucks)?
- Is this something I feel like I can execute realistically at a good quality level?
I’ll be the first to admit that not every list builder I’ve ever created has consistently hit all of these checkmarks, but in general just make sure that the person you want to add to your audience will care about this thing and that it’s worth downloading.
The Technical Aspects
While each email system is a little bit different (I use MailerLite, a really solid option that I liked enough to upgrade to a paid tier) the general flow for how a list builder works is this:
- You set up an automation on your email marketing system that sends an email when someone joins a list
- The email is sent with a link to the downloadable resource
- Your new subscriber is added to your email system to be included in future communications
I break this process down a lot more in my article How To: Setting Up Free TTRPG Downloads with WordPress and MailerLite if you’re interested in the nitty gritty for how these automations are set up.
Just a note that the link to MailerLite above is an affiliate link, where you’d get a $20 credit to MailerLite if you use it to sign up and I’ll get a small commission with no charge to you. I just like to be super transparent about affiliate links, in case readers prefer to avoid them.
Email marketing is a solid, approachable options for TTRPG publishers and writers
Okay, so that was a longer article, but I don’t want you to walk away feeling overwhelmed about email marketing. It really has the potential to be a powerful tool for building relationships with your audience and letting them know about the kinds of work you have to sell.
Just focus on making achievable goals around frequency and on making your content something you think your audience will like and the value will eventually make itself apparent.