Week 2: The Power of Email

Welcome to Week 2 of our program. In Week 1, we chose platforms (web and Twitter) and started to develop our own content. Congrats to all of you! Well done. In this week, we will work on .... email!

Most of the time, email is a hassle for us. In fact, I have written about how to deal with the daily flood of email before. Today, however, we are taking a different viewpoint. I will teach you how to use email to gain and amplify your voice.

Having a list of email addresses (and names, ideally) of people who are interested in hearing from you is more powerful than having the same people as followers on your social media platform. Why? Email carries more weight, if you are able to put your thoughts in somebody's inbox, you have managed to reach their to-do list. To be clear, I am not talking about spam. I am talking about delivering content that is meaningful to the people on your email list.

Today, I will teach you the basic infrastructure you need for this. Later this week, we are going to watch this in action when I send out the next monthly Network Neuroscience newsletter. In case you have not already signed up, I highly recommend you sign up here.

I use Mailchimp (no commercial interest). I am sure there are other free tools. In essence, Mailchimp gives you all the features you need to manage email campaigns. You can sign up for a free account. Be aware that the email address you use will be the one that shows up as the sender email address once you send out a mass email to your list. Once singed up, you can create a sign up form (see mine, as an example) that you can put on your website. Simply cut and paste the html code into your website. Make sure the sign up window on your site is super prominent. Then, on your site, you make reference to the email list and make sure your readers understand that they will have privileged access to more content by signing up.

Give this a try and see how this feels. In the next post, we will talk about creating a newsletter and the logistics around that.

Take care,

Flavio