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How Email Marketing Works Pt 210/11/2022 I have subscribers, so what do I do now?Now that you have people who have signed up, you need to talk to them. I suggest making a plan for when your emails will go out and what each one will say. To be effective, you don't have to email your readers all the time. Start with a monthly email that talks about the following: New books come out Coming out soon Posts on tours Talk about your writing process and make it personal. There are special sales and offers. Post pictures on Instagram of things that make you want to write. The subject line and the body are the two main parts of an email campaign. For both parts, it's important to remember that most people use the internet on their phones, so it's very important that your campaigns look good on phones. Topic line In the same way that your book's cover is the first thing people see, the subject line of your marketing emails is the first thing people see. It's important that your subject line is interesting. The first thing you can do to make sure people click on your subject lines is to keep them short and clear so they make sense on a mobile email client. The ideal length is less than 30 characters. The number of people on your email list doesn't tell you anything about how good they are. So how do you know if the people who sign up for your email list are going to interact with you and buy your books? People use three main metrics to figure out how good a list is and how well an email marketing campaign is doing. Open Rate = the number of people who open your email divided by the number of people who receive it. For instance: If you send an email to 100 subscribers and 35 of them open it, your open rate is 35/100, or 35%. How good your subject line is can be seen by how many people open it. Was your email's subject line interesting and helpful enough to get people to open it? MailChimp says that the following are some benchmark open rates by industry: Publishing and the media: 22% Marketing: 18% eCommerce: 16% When thinking about how effective your list is, it's also important to remember that the rate at which email campaigns are opened often goes down as the size of the list grows. When you only have a few hundred people on your list, it's not unusual to see open rates of over 60%. As the number of people on your list grows, your open rates will go down, bringing you closer to the benchmarks listed above. This is because the email won't be as well-suited to each subscriber the bigger the group of people you're sending it to. This is why, when setting up your sign-up forms, it's a good idea to ask for a few extra pieces of personal information, so that as your list grows, you can target more specific groups of readers. Rate this: Click Rate = the number of people who click on a link in your email divided by the number of people who get your email. For example, if you send an email to 100 subscribers and 45 of them open it and 5 of them click a link in it, your click rate is 5% (5/100). Your click rate shows how interesting your content is to people who read it. Most of the time, you will ask people to click on links to buy things or to your social media pages. Mailchimp says that the following click rates are typical for each industry: 4.66 percent: Media and Publishing Marketing: 1.99% eCommerce: 2.45% Conversion Rate Conversion Rate = number of subscribers who do something (buy, download, fill out a form, etc.) / number of subscribers who click the link to do something. For example, 5 people open your email and click on a link to Amazon.com. You sell one book on Amazon that day. Your conversion rate is 1 sale for every 5 people who clicked on the "buy" link. This equals 20%. In another case, five people click on a link that says "Review my book." You get two new reviews on Amazon in less than 48 hours. Your conversion rate is 2 reviews divided by the number of people who clicked on the review link: 5 When you don't have access to customer data at the store where you sell your books, it's hard to get a perfect conversion rate because you can't measure the action directly from email to purchase. The best you can do is estimate the activity based on how long it takes to send an email and how busy the store is. The average rate of conversion in retail is 3%. So, only 3 out of every 100 people who click on a "Purchase" link on a website or in an email will actually buy the item. The most important thing to learn from the above metrics is that marketing works like a funnel, with only a small number of people who enter at the top making it to the bottom. So, the best way to build a large-scale email list that works is to keep putting money into growing the number of people on it. As you add things to the top of the funnel, you will see more things happening at the bottom. It seems like a lot of work to do this. How long do I need to do this? It does take time and some work to grow a mailing list, but it is always a good investment. Remember that your subscribers are unique and that you won't have to pay to reach them again once you have them. You should give yourself between 4 and 6 hours to set up your email service provider (ESP) account and make your sign-up form. Once that's done, you should set aside at least two to three hours a week to grow your list of subscribers and interact with them. You should also look at the reports your ESP gives you to find out what works and what doesn't. ConclusionIf you only remember one thing from this article, it should be that email marketing for authors is a useful tool for any author's marketing kit.
It doesn't replace your other marketing efforts, such as running price promotions or keeping up with social media, but it's a good way to get the word out about your work. To recap: Because you own your email list, email marketing is the best way to reach your readers. Setting up an email list is hard work and has a learning curve, but if you stick with it, you will be rewarded. There are many ways to get new subscribers, such as through social media marketing, paid marketing, making good use of eBook backmatter, and giving things away. Your email subject lines should be short, your subheadings should be clear, and you should only use a few images. Your emails must be mobile-friendly . Don't look at how many people are on your list to judge how successful you are. You can tell how good your subscribers are by looking at how many of them open, click, and sign up. Email marketing is a long-term process, not a quick one. Plan to spend time, money, and other resources to build your list and keep people on it.
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How does email marketing work ?10/8/2022 Email marketing is exactly what it sounds like: sending a reader an email about a product. There are two ways for you as an author to use email marketing: 1. By making your own list of subscribers 2. By paying to see the lists of other people. When you run a promotion with services like ours, you do this (Freebooksy, Bargain Booksy, Red Feather Romance, New in Books, and Audio Thicket). In both cases, your books go straight to the readers' email boxes. Email marketing has always been a great way to reach readers, and now that most social media platforms are getting less popular, it's more important than ever. A Usually Bad Idea Email gets a bad name because it's often used to send spam. The word "spam" came about because email marketing was used too much and in a bad way. Email marketing isn't spam if you send emails responsibly and give your readers useful information. You'd want to know if your favorite author put out a new book, right? In fact, it might be annoying not to get an email about new releases that people are looking forward to. If you do email marketing right, people will want to get your emails. In this article, we'll talk about the best ways to use email to reach your readers in a valid and effective way. Vocabulary Before we get started, let's define a few terms we'll use to talk about email marketing: Subscriber: As an author, a subscriber is a reader who has signed up for your mailing list. Campaign: An email sent to a list of subscribers is called a "campaign." Subject Line: The first thing a subscriber will see when your email arrives in their inbox is the subject line. Body: This is what your email says. What people see when they open their email. Open Rate: This is the number of people who sign up for your emails and then open them. Click Rate: This is the number of people who open your emails and click on the links in them. Click Through Rate, or CTR, is another name for this. Where do I start if I want to make my own list?To build an email list, you'll need two things: 1. An email service provider (ESP) 2.A web page An email service provider (ESP) will help you get subscribers and keep track of them. It will also let you create, send, and track your campaigns. Even if you don't think you need the reporting and design features of an ESP (and trust us, you do), mass emails sent from a single email address are likely to be marked as spam, so you shouldn't just collect email addresses and add them to your Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. address book. I recommend MailChimp as your first ESP. Their accounts are free for the first 2,000 people on your list, and creating campaigns and getting stats and reports is very easy. Pro tip: When you log in to your ESP, make sure that the email address you are sending from is linked to your website domain and not a free gmail or yahoo account. For example, make sure your email marketing comes from mike@mikesmith.com and not mike.smith22@gmail.com. You need this to follow DMARC, which is a complicated but important rule. You don't have to get it, but you do have to follow it. Once you have an ESP, you need to start collecting email addresses. Putting a sign-up form on your website is the best way to do this. Most authors use Squarespace or WordPress. MailChimp integration is already built into Squarespace. If you're using self-hosted WordPress, we like the plugin MailChimp for WordPress. It's not officially endorsed by MailChimp, but it does a great job and make it easy to add a mailing list form to your WordPress site. What do I want my subscribers to tell me? You can add signup forms to your site using an ESP plugin or by adding the code directly to your site. Before you can embed the form and start collecting emails, you need to decide what information you want from your future subscribers. The more information you get from your subscribers at the start, the better you will be able to send them campaigns that they find useful. We suggest that you ask your readers for the following information: 1. Email address 2. Give your name (for personalization of email subject lines and bodies) 3. Zip code (if you are interested in doing local events, book tours, etc.) You don't want to ask for too much information because that will make the sign-up forms too long and scary for potential subscribers. However, you do want to get enough information so that you can send relevant information to your subscribers. If you know a little more about your email subscribers, you can make your emails more personal, which shows that you care about them. How do I get people to follow me?Body There are a few things you can do to make sure your email body works well on mobile devices: People don't read anymore, they scan. Most people will quickly scan an email to decide if it's worth reading, and only then will they actually read it. Use subheadings, bullet points, and bold text to make your emails easier to read. Once you're done with the email, read just the headlines one after the other to see if the reader can understand what the email is about. If not, you need subheadings that are more clear. Don't fool yourself by checking your email on a desktop. Most people will read it on their phones, so make sure it looks good on a phone. Put links to where to buy and important information at the top. Make sure that all the information you want your reader to see and any buttons you want them to click are no more than one scroll down in your email. Don't use too many pictures. We know that professionally made graphics are pretty, but if the image files are too big, they will take too long to load, and readers will give up before they even get to see them. You will need to include your book covers often, which is fine. Just make sure to save them as a medium-sized jpeg and you will be fine. Give away a story or chapter for free in exchange for an email address. To do this, put a link to a free download of one of your books in the welcome email that people get when they sign up for your list. This way, the link to the free content will be sent to the subscriber as soon as they confirm their email address. Add a link to your books' back matter. It's best to always put a link to your mailing list signup form at the end of your eBooks. Make sure to include an email signup link at the end of the story so that any new readers you get through promotions can also become new subscribers. Sample text: Thanks for reading (Book Title)! If you liked it, please sign up for my mailing list so you can find out about my other books. Give things away. You can give away eBooks or physical copies of your books. The most common way to enter is by giving an email address. This is easy to do with Rafflecopter because it works with Mailchimp. People who enter your giveaway are automatically added to your list. Tip: When you run a giveaway, make sure the prize is something that will attract the kind of reader you want on your list. For example, you might get a lot more entries if you give away an iPad, but the quality of those entries will be lower than if you give away a Kindle. This is because almost everyone wants an iPad, but only people who read want a Kindle. You should pick a prize that will attract readers, preferably in the same genre as your books. This is why giving away a copy of one of your books will always get you the best subscribers. Send a request to the people who follow you on social media. Let your social media followers know that they can be even more "in the know" by joining your mailing list. This will always get more people to sign up for your list. You should do this as soon as you set up your ESP, but as long as you're getting new fans, it makes sense to share links to sign up for your email list with your social media followers every month or so. You can also put a link to sign up for your email list at the top of your Facebook and Twitter pages to remind new fans all the time. Add a "popup" to your website. You'll need a page for your signup form, but you can get more readers if you use a pop-up that asks people to sign up after they've been on your site for a certain amount of time (we recommend 10-15 seconds). Popups, like email, sometimes get a bad name for being "spammy," but as long as you don't use too many exclamation points and are clear and honest in your popup, you'll be fine. Spend money on advertising. You can get more people to sign up for your mailing list by running ads on Facebook and Twitter. We suggest putting aside 50 cents to $3.00 per subscriber in your budget. It's important to remember that this is all about marketing, which means that you're selling your books and your author brand. As you post on social media and make pop-ups and sign-up pages, think about what kind of special content you want to send to your readers via email, and tell them right away why they should sign up. There has to be a hook. Will you give sneak peeks, give away free books, have contests, or have special sales? Think about your plan and tell them! There are some ways to grow a list that I absolutely do not recommend.Do not buy lists. ⚠️
If a list is for sale, you can be sure that it is not good. People who signed up for your emails on their own will be the most interested and active ones. Spend your time and money on getting readers who are interested. ⚠️ Send nothing to anyone who hasn't given you permission to do so. ⚠️ If you send emails to people who haven't signed up for your list, they will be marked as spam and you will get complaints. Most ESPs have built-in systems that track how many complaints they get about your emails. If the number of complaints is too high, they will shut down your account. It might be tempting to look through your rolodex or address book (do people still use those?) and add everyone to your mailing list without their permission. Don't do it. That's all for today. Stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow.
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In the past, it was hard to get independent book stores to stock self-published books. Independent book stores didn't want to sell self-published books because they thought that self-published meant that the content or quality of the book was bad.
But that was back then, and this is now. Self-published authors have not only stepped up their game in terms of content, but the quality of their books is now very close to that of traditionally published books. So, how do you sell your book to stores that aren't part of a chain? For authors, writing books is both a hobby and a business. For independent booksellers, selling books is both a hobby and the only business they have. Even though independent bookstores are known for being great places for people to get together and for having staff who really care about the book business, that doesn't mean they can do everything for free. Still, they have to sell books. In this business, everyone has to make a living, and that's what the independent booksellers need from you and your book so that both of you can sell it. Here are some tips to help you: |