OK, I'll bite. What are you doing with those emails, then? Are you blasting out spam to them? Do they engage? Are the analytics better for those who have subscribed to e-mail compared to those who haven't?
So I just took over responsibility to reboot a polyglot conference in Greenville, SC that will happen this August.
In the interest of time, I needed to communicate a lot with a lot of people to keep people informed, raise awareness, etc before I have time to properly build a new site so I setup a substack blog to do it. You can see it here:
- Feed all of the social media accounts created for it (with dlvr.it)
- Announce call for Speakers (open til May 25th)
- Announce call for Sponsors
- Additional community information (we're trying to help get local meetups moving again as a side effect)
Early on there's been a ton of information to distribute and feedback to gather, so it's worked well. The substack email list is the primary communication channel and we've got about a 50% open rate with very high engagement from about half the list. I use the scheduling features to make sure I never sent more than one thing per day, on weekdays only.
I'm learning the marketing side of this as I go, so I'm trying to be very wary of things that bother me. On the flip side, the defaults for a tool like dlvr.it will post multiple times a day to social channels which seems very spammy but it also seems to work. I've never been very social media active because I don't like doing that type of thing.
Spreading the word on this stuff is hard though, so I've got to balance my own desire to not bother people with the real need to get the word out around this conference. We did have one fun social media challenge for programmers where people could create variations of a code payload about the conference in their favorite language. I'm looking for fun things like that to engage people when I can.
The bigger the list gets, the less I feel the need to keep spreading the word because I feel better about being able to reach people with the important things when I need to. Now I'm far enough along that people are starting to spread the word for me and connect me with potential sponsors, so that's helpful.
What does the data show?