How Email Marketing Works Pt 2

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.

Conclusion

If 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
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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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