Email marketing is the most powerful tool at your disposal and not taking advantage of its unique benefits is really missing a trick. Here’s why.
I’m sure all of you know the power of having thousands of committed readers signed up to your mailing list, allowing you to send each new release into the charts. Even if you’re not there yet personally, this should be something you are aiming for. Every single author should have a mailing list and be seeking to actively grow it.
It’s not what you think
But before we fly through the basics and delve into more advanced topics, let’s be clear about something: email marketing is not about spam. It’s not about fake intimacy. It’s not about posing BS questions to create false engagement. And it’s not about bait-and-switches, contrived urgency, click-baiting subject lines, or other emotional tricks; that’s what cheesy internet marketers do.
It’s a huge mistake to look at someone doing email marketing in a slimy way and decide that email isn’t for you. There’s a right way and a wrong way to use every tool.
Email Marketing Basics
I recommend MailerLite (affiliate link) for the job, which is free for the first 1,000 subscribers and reasonably priced thereafter, has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for creating pretty emails, enables you to slice-and-dice your lists whichever way you please, gives you a nice clean and clear interface, offers great customer service, and allows surprisingly powerful automations.
(Note: I switched to MailerLite from Mailchimp, for reasons detailed in this post – Time To Ditch Mailchimp? – which also recommends MailerLite alternatives for those with specific needs).
Also make sure to have an enticing call-to-action right at the end of all your books, pointing people towards a clean sign-up page on your website, so that you can capture as many of those readers as possible who were delighted with your story.
Okay. This is just the bare minimum reader-capturing apparatus that you should have in place, preferably with some form of welcome sequence too.
Writing good books, releasing as frequently as you can manage, and growing your list over time organically will get you going. But email marketing can do so much more for you than simply roll out launch announcements.
Reader Retention via Email
As authors, we have various techniques aimed at getting people to check out our work, whether that’s engaging in price promotions, giving our work away for free, buying a spot on various reader sites, advertising on Amazon, Facebook and BookBub, engaging in cross-promotions with other writers, beefing our review count by giving away ARCs – the list of such tactics is endless, and the amount of time and money and headspace we devote to these activities is considerable.
But you know what’s way easier than gaining a new customer? Keeping an old one.
In my book Strangers to Superfans (links to all retailers here) I break down the five stages that your Ideal Reader goes through in the transformation from stranger to superfan. And the various blockages along the way that can impede that process.
One of the biggest blockages is internal. Which is a diplomatic way of saying one of the biggest problems is you.
Marketing doesn’t end with a sale
Aside from assuming discoverability is our biggest challenge – and mistakenly devoting all our energy and focus into getting discovered – we also assume our job is done once the reader clicks the Buy button. Our prose will sweep them away. That rakish duke will make them swoon. And the battle-scarred captain will inspire enough loyalty among our reader-crew to get them through all ten books of our tentpole series. Right? Wrong.
Like all relationships, the relationship with your readers must be nurtured. Otherwise you will lose many along the way. We can’t be so arrogant to assume that we will instantly everyone’s favorite author overnight.
Remember that some readers get through a book a week. Retired readers can get through several! All those authors will be jockeying for position in the reader’s consciousness.
Whose work do you think they are more likely to read again? The author who releases the next book in the series five months later and hopes that Amazon recommends it to them? Or the author who convinces the reader to sign up to their mailing list?
Even out of those already working the mailing list angle, which writer is our hypothetical reader more likely to remember: one who doesn’t contact them again until the launch of the next book five months later? Or one who stays in touch regularly, building up a relationship by emailing them something of value (i.e. of genuine interest) every month or so?
There’s no contest. You can take any of those approaches; it’s your choice. But not having a refined email marketing strategy makes it much harder for you to retain readers. Which is a shame considering all the sweat expended getting them to buy those books you labored over.
Advanced Email Marketing
It’s not just with retaining readers where email marketing really shines. Your email list has all sorts of uses:
- deepening engagement and relationships (creating superfans)
- launching books into the stratosphere by concentrating sales during launch week
- driving sales of backlist books your readers may have missed
- boosting reviews by drawing from a pool of your most committed fans.
Some authors use their list to have a true back-and-forth with their readers – not the kind of fake engagement you see internet marketer types deploy. I know authors who have drawn from their subscriber list for beta readers. Others (me included!) have used their regular emails to flesh out book ideas – their list becoming a sounding board of sorts. More again rave about the having an open, direct channel with their readership, the psychological benefits of which should never be understated in what is largely a solitary profession.
But there’s more! Certain email strategies can help you gain readers too. Dangling something as a sign-up bonus is a very powerful way to drive sign-ups. Often referred to as a “cookie” or “reader magnet” it usually takes the form of a free book or story – but doesn’t need to. Writers can get very creative with this sign-up bonus and really tie it in to the universe of their books.
These books or bonuses – especially when exclusive – can be enticing enough to draw in new readers as well as existing fans, and then if you really are delivering value with your regular emails, and not just squeezing your list for sales, then you have a great chance of converting these “cold” readers into buyers and fans too.
I see it happen all the time: someone signs up to my list because they want the bonus book – you can’t get it anywhere else for all the money in the world. They hang around for a few weeks, seeing if the emails have any value to them. I make sure that any “ask” in my emails only comes after a succession of “gives.” And twhey might get several emails of genuine value before I push my work. Avoiding the hard sell can bring better results.
Unique Advantages of Email
“But wait!” you might cry, just as I was getting up to speed, “Why does all this have to be done by email? Don’t people use Facebook to talk to fans? Isn’t it better to put all this content out on social media or a blog where it actually has a chance of going viral?”
Fair points. So, let’s look at the unique advantages of email. Why is email the best tool for the job? What does it have over blogging or Facebook or anything else? These are good questions and worth teasing out.
Ownership
That might be your name on your Facebook wall but you don’t own it. As you soon find out when you have to pay to make sure your Likes see your launch announcement. Or when you get thrown in Facebook jail by an errant AI.
Attention
Email converts like crazy. Nothing comes close to it. Compare the percentages on a Facebook or Amazon Ad versus an email to your list. Or to a lucrative BookBub Featured Deal. (Which are email blasts, lest you forget!).
When you are reading an email, you are far less distractable. Social media or any other web page can’t compare. Because email captures attention. Email converts.
Intimacy
Perhaps a by-product of the above, email is far more intimate. Maybe also down to the feeling that this is two-way communication. It feels like someone talking to you, rather than broadcasting to you via a blog or social media post. (And sometimes it really is two-way communication because an actual dialogue occurs.)
Data
I know who is opening my emails, who is clicking on the links, and who is ignoring them completely. But I have no idea with my blog subscribers. I just get aggregated states on views and visits and link clicks. Facebook gives me data morsels here and there, but, again, only aggregated. I don’t know who are the solid core which see all my posts organically before I drop a dime (I don’t even know if it’s the same people, or different tranche each time). With email, I have all that data at my fingertips, well presented, and easily searchable. Digestible too – which is pretty important. I look at Google Analytics and I just want to close the window right away (and usually do). All this is important because…
Flexibility
Even if I did know who was missing my Facebook post, I wouldn’t be able to do much about it. But with email I can use segmentation. I can identify people who don’t open 5 or 10 emails in a row and try to re-engage them. Or cut them loose if they are irretrievable, keeping my costs down. But on Facebook, as I said in Strangers to Superfans:
those now-uninterested Likes keep accumulating like mercury in the body.”
This drives up your costs. It makes your content look unengaging to Facebook’s system. And it makes it harder for you to reach those who are interested.
Portability
If Twitter pulls a MySpace, all those followers I’ve accrued will disappear too. But when Mailchimp jacked up its prices, I was able to take my carefully cultivated mailing lists and move over to MailerLite. (The process was pretty straightforward, as detailed in my post Moving from Mailchimp to MailerLite.) But if Facebook runs into trouble and jacks up its prices, it will be a million times messier for you because you don’t own your Facebook Page. All your Likes you built up will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
The Right Tool for the Job
It’s important to remember that it’s not either/or. As you may have noticed, this piece of content is coming to you from a blog. I also have a Facebook Page – indeed you may have seen this post on social media first and then clicked through to my blog. And I have an email list, of course.
All these different tools can achieve different things. A really slick content marketing strategy involves knowing what type of content should go out via what channel and in which form. Because all of these channels can act in symbiosis, and cross-pollinate each other.
(BTW, if you’re interested in learning more about content marketing generally, I’m covering the topic in a series of emails to my list at the moment, and by signing up here, you get access to the Email Archive and any episodes you missed.)
All this talk of content marketing strategies might be overwhelming for some, but take it step by step. Make sure to prioritize so that you aren’t spread to thin. And you don’t have to do all of it – this really must be stressed. An involved content marketing strategy is going to be much more important for a non-fiction author, for example.
Your priority, though, should be your email list, along with a website so there is a clean and slick place for readers to sign up. If you were only going to focus on one thing in the whole world of content marketing and email marketing make it that you will regularly email your readers – once a month is perfectly fine!
The unique advantages of email mean this is a tool you really shouldn’t ignore. Yes, you could use Facebook for customer retention. Yes, you could rely solely on advertising to get you new customers and to tell existing ones about new releases. But email is just so much better at customer retention and can save you so much money in advertising… if you do it right.
Authenticity or Bust
Doing it right starts with respecting your readers. Making sure you stay in touch with them regularly. (But only emailing them with something that has genuine value.) Make sure that any “ask” is surrounded by a string of “gives.” And by “ask” I mean any time you want something . Whether that’s a sale or a share or a review.
You might think you are doing readers a favor by not bothering them unless you have a new book. But what you are really doing is only turning up at their door when you want money from them. I made this mistake for years. It was only when I tried a different approach, that I could see the benefits of regular contact.
If you want help with any of this stuff, if you want to do email right, check out Newsletter Ninja. It’s the best book on the topic and changed my whole approach.
And whatever your approach to email is, don’t listen to anyone who tells you that email marketing doesn’t work just because spammers are a thing. That’s an incredibly limited view, one that could end up limiting your own potential.
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