Have you found the best email marketing service provider? If not, then this article is for you.
If you've been around my blog for any amount of time, you know that one of the biggest challenges many authors face when getting started with their books is understanding the importance of having an email list. But to have this email list, you're not going to be sending it out from your account, or it's going to get marked as spam.
So, what exactly should you do? Well, the answer is you're going to use an email management system or a customer relationship management system to make sure that we're able to stay in touch with these people and do a lot of other things.
But which one should you choose? That's what we're going to discuss. So, in today's topic, we're looking closely at which program is the best. Now, I'm going to tell you that when I first got started with emails, even before I even had the first book out, I was already starting on the email list.
Why was I doing that? It's because all marketers say, "This is one of the most important things you can do when it comes to putting your books on the market: building and staying in close contact with your target readers.
You can also help boost the books when they first come out by putting them on a countdown deal and offering them at a lower price. This way, you're able to generate sales that cause Amazon to push your book to even more people.
Check out this related article: Can Publisher Rocket Help Your Amazon Ads Take Off?
So, there are lots and lots of strategies here. Now, the specific piece of software I like to use to manage these thousands of contacts is ActiveCampaign. When I first started, I guess Aweber was my first one, and then I moved to MailChimp. However, I discovered that the most affordable and flexible option, which ties into all of this stuff, is ActiveCampaign.
It is incredibly popular as a marketing automation and customer relationship management tool. So, it's an entire platform with a whole host of features. Now, you don't have to use all the features built into it, but it's important to know about them.
So, in today's article, we're going to look at about 20 of those features. I just want to tell you that this is the one that I've been using for several years, and I've had no problems at all. I'm also an affiliate of theirs.
The first thing we'll discuss is marketing automation. What is automation? It's not just sending out an email. Instead, it's setting up actions based on certain transactions on your website or in emails. It automatically triggers responses like, "If they do this, then do that; if they do this, then I want you to do something else.
So, it goes back and forth based on what people do. It's able to automate and ensure that you don't have to do all of this stuff manually. You can also set up queues where all of the emails are in a queue. So they're sent out one at a time as you space them properly based on when people are most likely to open emails, which is information you can also get from ActiveCampaign.
Another important aspect is email marketing, which may be one of the most crucial ones. ActiveCampaign offers a lot of powerful templates built-in and allows segmentation. Some people may be interested in one thing versus another.
Split Testing and Segmentation
You can separate them into two different segments or lists and send them tailored content. Furthermore, you can conduct A/B testing to see the open rate on two different versions of an email. It's very easy to set these things up, and there are lots of instructions available.
The next thing we're going to be looking at is integration. It seamlessly integrates with all sorts of other features, giving you the ability to track things like the last time you were in contact with somebody or the interactions you've had with them. All of these features make it powerful in that regard.
Then, you have contact management. You can see all of your contacts and which lists they're in. You have an idea of when they last opened an email and the level of interaction you've had with them, whether they're a dormant contact or if they haven't opened anything recently.
Check out this related article: My Best Book Marketing Tip
Whether it's bouncing, when they send an email it just bounces off of their inbox or they don't even get it at all. So you're able to clean things up in the contact management area. I look if nobody's opened the email or clicked on anything for 6 months.
I will just remove them from the list because I don't want to have to pay for extra people who aren't even really there or interacting. Then you have your lead scoring, we're able to identify and prioritize high-quality leads by assigning scores based on their engagement with your content.
So you're able to have an idea of which ones of these leads on your email list are going to be the best. In terms of when you're making contact or special offers especially maybe when it comes to reviews and such you're able to do that.
Then you have your sales automation where you can do the whole process. Where you're going all the way from the beginning, then they click on this thing and then that triggers the next email. Then it moves on to the next email where you're showing them, “Look I got this book” and if they click by then, it can go to the next book and say, here's another offer.
So we're able to figure out what they like and send them more of that. The customer support on their website is phenomenal it's really good. It goes through and shows you exactly any time you have a question. You post it and they usually within 24 hours get straight back to you.
So I found that nice to have and they are friendly people who are working on their staff there at ActiveCampaign. Then you have multi-channel marketing we're able to send messages, emails, and SMSs.
Now some of these things do come at a cost; social media to reach your customers through the preferred channels that they have. Back to split testing, we're sending an email out, we want to know if they open A or B. Based on the results, it's going to send all of the rest of them out to one of those channels.
Like if it were A would have the biggest open rate, then it would send A. So it's able to figure out based upon this particular thing, with split testing, it can see who should be receiving these emails that are going out. Then you have your behavioral tracking where we can see what they're doing on the website.
Getting Lots of Integrations
So we can customize what we're doing. We give Active Campaign permissions. You have dynamic content that based on their user preferences, is going to send them different contacts. You got Integrations, it integrates with all sorts of third-party applications and services which expands the functionality of what you can use this for.
That's something I find fantastic on my website. So they literally can sign up to join to get a free sort of lead magnet like a Checklist. Then it automatically sends them in for your stories. It could be like a backstory or some maps or maybe an additional short story that'll pull them into your business and get them on that email list.
Then we have reporting analytics, it's showing you all the graphs and curves that are necessary to manage this thing correctly. They have a mobile app you can check right from your phone to see if people are joining your email list. You can see what's happening, I personally like it. Just to have it email me which it does.
You can have your e-commerce integration so you can connect it with many of these standard commerce ones. If you want to sell your books on your website, you can hook it into that, or Shopify that's a fantastic option.
Then you have your event tracking and monitoring, which tracks the response to user interactions on your website or in your emails. This gives us a really good idea of how well things are going. We can see the response to user interactions with event tracking and monitoring.
Again, we have social media automation, where we're able to schedule and manage some of the social media posts that our audience is going to see. We also have site and event tracking, where we can monitor the behavior when they visit the website and create automation based on their actions there.
Additionally, there's training and support. They have lots of videos available on YouTube and their website that show you exactly how to use this tool to its maximum potential. They're always coming up with new features and training for those features, which is amazing.
Check out this related article: FAST KDP Income Growth
The training and support ActiveCampaign provides include resources, webinars, and customer support to help you make the most of the platform. They want you to stick around for a long time. I'll tell you, I've been with them for a long time, and there's a good reason for it.
They perform well in comparison, and they have a great rate. Plus, they're scalable. Whether you're a small business just a single author, or you've scaled up, this platform will work great for you. You're not paying for all of it upfront; you simply start at the lowest tier and then slowly move upwards.
Even though it's not free at the lowest tier, the service is phenomenal. I know you won't want to miss it. That's one of the reasons why I highly recommend you click below in the description of my YouTube videos. You'll find the link to ActiveCampaign. That is my affiliate link, and I do receive a small commission.
But it doesn't cost you any more money; it's a way to show your support for my channel, my media, my blog, or any of these sorts of things if that is of interest. If you're looking for the right tool for you, this one works for me, and maybe it'll work for you too. I will see you in the next blog.