There was a time when the online adult industry was littered with “small” but financially successful businesses.  Most of these businesses consisted of single individuals or partnerships, but they made enough money to live attractive lifestyles.

Individual freedom has always been one of the biggest allures of working in the adult entertainment industry. Few people are lucky enough to live their lives as they see fit. For those who value independence, email marketing is an important tool as I’ll soon explain.

Modern Adult is a Challenging Business Environment

In recent years a majority of porn fans have gravitated towards a few giant destination sites. That mass migration of eyeballs has made it harder for smaller adult businesses to make money.  When sites like Pornhub (and even Twitter) keep most of the potential customers occupied, it can prove challenging for small businesses to find economic oxygen.

Even worse, mainstream companies don’t want your business or your participation.  When you use mainstream tools and platforms to market your business, you’re introducing risk into your revenue stream.  As your success with mainstream platforms goes up, so too does your risk because you have more to lose.  Many adult companies and performers have lost significant revenue overnight when mainstream platforms suddenly cut them off without warning or explanation.

One Option: Try to Play Their Game

You can try to exist on the large social media platforms, and probably should.  For the moment at least, Twitter technically allows adult content – although sometimes explicit posters on Twitter are (arguably) shadowbanned, which can damage a poster’s potential reach.  (Note, Twitter says they don’t do this, but it really seems to hinge on one’s definition of ‘shadowbanning.’)

Facebook and Instagram are even more difficult.  Strict rules on both sites necessitate some awful careful stepping for adult businesses looking to raise awareness about their offerings.  Walking that line severely limits the effectiveness of both platforms, and while enterprising adult models have found ways to turn Instagram followers into sales, many have reported losing their accounts suddenly after years of building up followers.

You also can ‘give in’ and upload content to Pornhub or other ‘tube’ sites, but monetizing on tubes can prove tricky.  And by uploading content for free to these mega platforms you really have to ask yourself this question: are you just feeding the machine that’s orchestrating your demise?

If search engine traffic is thin these days and small adult businesses are at constant risk of losing their social media accounts, what’s the solution for maintaining vital relationships with customers?  How can you communicate with them when they’re not actively visiting your website?

Another Option: Collect Email Addresses

One piece of this puzzle absolutely lies in email, a core internet technology that isn’t in any danger of going away.  Email provides one of the few paths available to adult companies to reach out and ‘nudge’ current, former and prospective customers.  It’s one of the tools available to small adult businesses who are looking for ways to reach people who would otherwise be thoroughly distracted by Pornhub, social media or other streaming video sites.

That’s the good news.  But there’s some realities around email that need to be understood, if you plan to use it effectively.

Even with Email, Big Tech Makes the Rules

First, email isn’t entirely free from the controls and manipulations of the internet gods, i.e. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others.  That’s because most of the people you want to reach are using email accounts controlled by these entities – so they have a lot of power in deciding which emails to deliver, and which to mark as ‘spam’ or, worse, just not deliver at all.  Yes if you use these companies for your inbox, and you probably do, you’re contributing to the power imbalance.

And the difficulties with landing emails in the ‘inbox’ won’t get any easier as time goes on.  It’s in the financial interest of email service providers to reduce the volume of emails that hit their servers because, frankly, it saves them money.  One way to accomplish this is to set strict rules of behavior for email marketers – then refuse to deliver emails that aren’t sent according to the rules.

Also don’t forget that most people get a lot of email.  So even if your email is delivered, you’re going to need to put some thought into how you’ll give your customers some content that they’re going to want to receive.  Otherwise they’ll just click delete when cleaning out their inboxes.

Good Practices Can Deliver Results

What all this means is that you’re going to need to spend a little bit of time building your email strategy.  YNOT Mail customers are always welcome to reach out with questions about best practices and the technical side of email marketing, you’re not alone and we can help, but questions about content will rest solely with your own creativity.

With email you have a lot of tools at your disposal.  Depending on your business model, and the nature of your target audience, you might run contests or special offers, share exclusive photographs or videos, or provide readers with information they can use.  Adult companies often do well when offering exclusive and compelling media content to their email list subscribers, but that’s not the only way to go here.

Regardless of which approach works for you, taking the time to develop a successful strategy for leveraging the email channel is not only worthwhile, it’s vital for adult companies.  Building up an engaged list of email subscribers means taking your fate out of the hands of social media companies alone.  It means building security and longevity into your business model.

The more email addresses you get from those leads you generated through other channels, the less risk you have of losing all your hard-won gains should those platforms suddenly decide you are no longer welcome.