Email is the heartbeat of my author business – as it should be for every writer. It is, by far, the best marketing tool you have at your disposal, and your No. 1 marketing asset, aside from your books.
These are the very best email marketing tools which I use to build my list, send newsletters to tens of thousands of readers, create engaging emails, reach inboxes on every send, and keep my list nice and clean.
Most of these tools are free. In the case of services which cost money, I’ve indicated who I think might benefit from paying for them. A few of these links are affiliate links, most are not. All are tools and programs and services I have been using for years.
I’ve organized these by theme for quick reference – I recommend bookmarking this page so you can come back when you need to. First up, your basic setup.
Free Setup Guide
It is imperative that the background infrastructure – your reader capturing apparatus – is in good shape. Following is free and exclusive to Decoders subscribers. It has over 20,000 downloads but I think a few of you may have missed it. Make sure to get your free copy from BookFunnel (and click that NEED HELP? link in the top right corner if you run into issues).
It will show you how to write effective sales copy at the back of your books to hook readers, how to build a clean landing page on your site to maximize sign-ups, and how to set up your email marketing service so you can start sending newsletters.
And if you want a more visual walkthrough then an entire module of my free course Starting From Zero covers how to set up your mailing list, how to welcome readers properly, and the kind of content you should share regularly and how that is different for fiction and non-fiction. You’ll actually see some of my welcome messages on-screen and how the text, presentation, and branding are different based on genre.
While we are talking fundamentals, this kind be stressed enough for anyone who is unaware:
Email Marketing Service
You can’t operate a newsletter from Gmail without running into serious issues. You need a dedicated email marketing service (EMS). I’ve been using an EMS since 2011 and the area has grown hugely since then and there are now a dizzying array of companies offering different services and at different price points.
Authors often focus on price too much, in my opinion, because the very cheapest services tend to either be unreliable or missing key features which will hold back your growth or fail at the most fundamental level: getting your emails into readers’ inboxes.
The latter is a surprisingly tricky challenge for any company because over 160 billion spam emails are sent every single day. Which is why I recommend going for a service which is legit, established, and has a stellar track record of avoiding spam filters and reaching readers’ inboxes.
Kit and MailerLite are the two services I recommend, depending on your needs. Both of those are affiliate links but I have used these two services for for several years now and I’m recommending them based on years of hands-on experience.
I have used Kit to power the non-fiction side of my author business for several years now – including the weekly book marketing newsletter Decoders, which you should be a subscriber of if you are reading this page! (If not, you can rectify that here…)
Kit is a premium service with all sorts of bells-and-whistles, including advanced automations and a huge set of integrations. It’s great if you have complex needs, sell direct, or are someone like me who might have courses or other digital products like that. It has a particularly generous free plan – up to 10,000 subscribers – which is free of some of the limitations competitors have but which has its own unique quirks.
However, Kit might be overkill for many, especially fiction authors starting out, and can get expensive once you exit the free plan. For most people, I recommend an alternative.
MailerLite has run the fiction side of my author business for around a decade and is a great combination of price, value, and features. It also has one of the best records on the planet at getting your newsletters into reader inboxes, rather than the pesky promotions tab or the dreaded spam filter. It doesn’t quite have the advanced feature set of Kit, and the free plan is more limiting, but it is a little cheaper when you do move to a paid plan, and also easier to wrap your head around when starting out.
I’m more than happy to recommend both services over any competitors, depending on your needs.
If you are wondering why I don’t mention “free” services like Substack, you can read this breakdown I did a few years ago on why it’s not really designed for what authors need – What’s Up With Substack? (or read this Facebook post where authors share their own experiences).
Authors can sometimes be drawn to the cheapest service – understandably – but it’s also important to avoid decisions which could limit your growth. When comparing services, I would respectfully suggest placing a priority on things like deliverability.
Getting your emails safely into readers’ inboxes is incredibly valuable, and every dollar spent on an email marketing service is, in my opinion, the best value you will get in the world of book marketing – once you consider the power of your email list when it comes to launches and promotions.
Email Health Check
Here are two free services for you to make sure your newsletters are squeaky clean and your list is in good health.
Postmaster Tools is completely free and an official tool from Google – which makes it incredibly useful as it can give you a sense of how Gmail views your newsletter. I recommend that everyone signs up for it.
It monitors your domain and your emails in the background and tracks issues over a 120-day period. I check in on it every few weeks, or if I have some drop in open rates or another issue like that.
Some of the information is easy to understand (delivery errors, spam reports), other parts are more technical. But it’s all data you can provide to your EMS to help them hone in on trickier issues especially. (Indeed, my EMS regularly asks for it when I run into problems.)
It’s super quick to set up, once you have your own domain. (Instructions on how and why to get one in Following above.)
Mail-tester.com is free-with-limits. There is some kind of premium plan which I have never, ever used and I doubt you will need to either. You get three free test sends a day, which should be enough for most purposes, and I use it every single time I send an email to my list. (I test all my welcome sequences and automations with it also.)
It will flag any issues in your email or problems with your background settings. You don’t always need to understand the technical nature of the issues it will flag, but, again, that will give you the jargon to approach the customer service for your EMS with; they will then advise you of the next steps. All part of the service you pay for!
I find Mail-tester.com incredibly useful for identifying issues that might drop your email into Spam, and if you can get your score close to 10 (and, yes, the maximum score really is achievable if you have everything set up correctly), then you will stand a good chance of avoiding the Promotions tab as well – which will really help open rates.
Free Image Shrinker
Speaking of dodging Promotions and Spam, one of the more common errors is putting images in your email which are too big. ImageOptim is the best I’ve found for shrinking them down without losing too much image quality.
There are a few settings you can play around with but I generally recommend shooting for images of 50Kb or less for your newsletters. Which sounds small but will greatly improve your deliverability.
Promotions/Spam filters are surprisingly sensitive to this for a whole host of technical reasons I won’t bore you with. This is a simple thing you can do to improve your open rates in your newsletters, welcome sequences and automations.
Free Image Creator
Your emails shouldn’t just look good to our robot overlords, fleshy meatbags need to be impressed too. A smart header image goes a long way to making a good impressions and strengthens your branding.
My go-to tool is Canva. I’ve been using it for years for everything – not just newsletter images, but website graphics, social media teasers, reader magnet covers, and any other promo assets I might need. I love it so much that I pay for the Pro version but the free version is probably good enough for all but the heaviest users.
BTW, there is a built in file size cap when downloading which you can use to skip the image shrinking step above, which is a nice quality of life feature. Although sometimes it doesn’t shrink the images quite as neatly, so I then download them big, and use the tool above. Just FYI.
Free Canva Tutorials
I have a bunch of free Canva tutorials on YouTube for making promo images in every genre imaginable. I share my screen so you can follow along. Check out The Image Workshop here.
Reader Magnet Delivery
One of the keys to success with email is to offer a freebie – usually a short story or book connected to your main series – to encourage readers to sign-up to your list. But it is essential that the delivery process is smooth on the reader side and also doesn’t cause you any deliverability issues.
BookFunnel are the best in the business and I’ve been using them since forever. A pro service with great support (on both sides of the fence), reasonably priced, and they get the job done. Pricing starts at just $30 a year, which is a snip for such a key component of your operation that will then run smoothly in the background for you (they take care of customer issues on your behalf, which is a huge value-add).
Even More Email Marketing Resources
I have lots more email marketing advice for you. Check out the Email Archive – a treasure trove of the most useful newsletters, organized by topic. There’s an entire section on email marketing covering a huge range of topics, such as how to build an automation, how to clean your list, and how to do nifty things like create a video welcome for readers.
But if there is anything particular you want to know about, pop a request below!
