Email marketing is one of the common strategies that a self-publisher must invest in yet some of you don't realize how an email list helps you when it comes to marketing your book. Check out this article to know why an email list is essential for self-publishers.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around. Because the third point is a secret as to the number one thing you should be doing if you're starting with email marketing. So today's topic is why an email list is essential for self-publishers.
By the end of this article, you're going to know why exactly an email list is something you should definitely invest your time and money in. You're going to have the steps necessary to get started with your email list.
And you're going to feel great knowing you're not leaving money and opportunities on the table like so many other self-publishers who are simply not
making it. So where to start? Grab a copy of my absolutely free self-publishing secrets Checklist.
To make sure that you are not skipping any of the secrets to winning at the self-publishing game. So from my own story when I first got started I was following a whole series of videos, courses and I followed books.
One thing that became really clear in the self-publishing game it's that email lists are the absolute best way to build readers. And to build people who will leave reviews on your books. This combination is very powerful because whenever you come up with a new book you can tell your audience.
You've got this new book on the market and invite them to check it out and let you know how they like it. And the thing is these people already got on your email list. Because in your book you had a little section that said "if you like this book you will definitely want to check out this cheat sheet".
Or "this short story" or "this bio of one of the characters in your story" in exchange for giving their email address. I do this all the time both in terms of people joining my email list piles of people daily. As well as joining other people's
email lists in order to get their freebies.
It's what we call permission-based marketing it's because we're not marketing to people who do not wish to be marketed to. We're choosing an audience that likes our content. And in exchange for an email address they're giving permission you can contact me in exchange.
I want to hear from you and I want to see this free book, free report, whatever it might be a map for example. Game of Thrones or whatever it would be that we get if you subscribe to the list. So we're trying to motivate people.
Because normally they wouldn't say "well yeah sure just add me on your email list so you can spam me". No, that's not how this works, we want to give them something of value. We want to make sure that the emails that we're sending are of value.
And that's the reason why I tend to send my emails out about every three days. That gives kind of an update on different things that are going on and some different strategies that are very useful. That's one of the reasons you would want to grab my free self-publishing checklist.
That's exactly what we're doing lead generation on this but I'd heard that it was an incredibly powerful way of building readers. This works by the way in any product or service that you're selling. It's incredibly powerful especially for self-publishers but underused.
Check out this related article: 3 Things Self Publishers Should Do
The second thing was in my case is I targeted too many audiences on the same email list. That's a huge mistake to make because then when I send an email out to let's say somebody's interested in intermittent fasting. And the other person's
interested in some story with elves.
What am I going to say to these people they got on there because they wanted to learn about pet puppy training. And now I'm telling him about how to do
indoor gardening and so it confuses our readers. And they unsubscribe or worse they mark us as spam.
And this is a huge problem that many self-publishers have when you're attempting to hit multiple niches. That's the reason I advise you to only stick to one niche. You're targeting a specific audience they have a specific problem.
You're just going to keep on serving them until the audience is so enormous. At that point, we can then expand and reinvent ourselves in the process if we're tired of writing on that same niche. Otherwise, I would still recommend keeping
pounding away.
Mistakes I Made With Email List
Almost everyone I know regretted leaving the market that they initially started it. Because they would have done so much better including one of my Coaching clients recently. They were talking about, you know, putting their first books on in terms of putting it on Kindle.
Then maybe they wanted to do fulfillment by amazon and maybe drop shipping and maybe other things affiliate marketing. And the problem is is that if you're doing too many things it's a losing strategy. Kindle books are by far the best way to get started with an online business.
There's nothing that beats kindle books and you're using the strategies I teach on this channel. Implementing it to your sales pages and to your books in order to get these books to start rocketing forward in terms of the total number of sales that they're making.
And this is something that all too many self-publishers are not paying attention to. But targeting a single audience was the next mistake that I made with my email list. The thing is is many marked my email as spam because they signed up for the puppy training one.
Before they know it they're getting one on vegan cooking and that's a bit of a problem. So I changed the strategy and started targeting just one audience at a time. And the end result was magnificent because I saw a huge increase in the
interactions in sales I was making.
And also in terms of the process of getting reviews and all of these sorts of things. So emails played a key role for me when it came to generating all of these leads and building a huge list.
One other thing is that you can then swap your list with other self-publishers who are in your same niche. They're writing the same kinds of books and you can say "look I will promote my audience", "I'll go out to my audience and tell them your book that just came out and you promote my books".
And so by swapping lists, we're able to do it but if you have no list you simply cannot do this and the open rates are massive on these lists. So why an email list is essential for self-publishers? Number one, it still has the best open rates.
It also leads to more sales than any other marketing channel. When we're on email lists my open rates I think something like 20% or something. Whereas if I'm trying like a Facebook ad or a post on Facebook it's going to get like less than even half a percent.
It goes like 0.2% of the people who open it or will even see it or read it at all. So our emails are a lot more personal. The same goes with SMS they get even higher than emails but it's a lot more difficult to get permission to go about doing SMS marketing and you can burn people out with this one.
So emails are a much safer way even if they don't open the emails regularly. It doesn't really matter because over time what happens is they will open it. Now anybody on my list if you stay on my list for six months and don't open anything I will remove you from the list.
You can still join back again, I just clean the list because I need to ensure open rates are high since I'm not in the business of spamming people. I get permission to put somebody on my list in exchange for a checklist or something along those lines.
Then once you're on my list if you want to be off the list you can click unsubscribe. And if you don't want to do that well then you have the very easy option of just doing nothing. Because after six months I'm going to boot you off my list.
Check out this related article: 3 Common Mistakes of Self Publishing Authors
I need only people who are interested in doing this and that's the thing. We're not talking about spamming people, we're talking about contacting people on a regular basis. And you want to make sure you're contacting at least once a month.
One of the things they found with many of these things is that we contact too seldom. So I recommend doing weekly or twice a week that's what I personally do is twice a week. At one point I was contacting people on a daily basis and I was still getting interactions.
And people were not complaining about it, you just train people to what exactly they can expect. You have to understand they're not going to open every email that you sent. So that's another key little bit of a tidbit that you're doing.
Do Not Undervalue An Email List
The second tip for today is you own the list, this cannot be overstated. You can easily switch if your email marketing service that you're using to send your emails out suddenly doesn't want to send your emails. For whatever reason, they should want to send them.
Because we're not talking about spamming people who are breaking any international law here. But if you do want to switch, you own the list the same goes for your blog. And all the traffic that comes from search engines too, you own that as opposed to a YouTube channel for whatever reason take this channel down right now.
Or my podcast you might be listening to me on but not the blog. The Blog and the email are the most stable areas of my entire content marketing strategy that I personally use. The same goes for your email list they can take your books down but then if they take it down how will your audience find you?
Well, you better be building an email list because that email list you can tell them when you come up with a new book in your same niche and you own the list. Now it's true in a sense you don't own the list those people give you permission but you own the right to contact those people who've given you permission.
And in today's day and age where the average person as it's claimed right has a lower attention span than a goldfish of eight seconds. Attention is the commodity, it is the value that we have today. Whether it's this YouTube channel or whether it's an email list or it's somebody who buys your book and reads it.
If you're able to hold their attention the value that is added is massive. People are willing to pay for this right to get in contact with these lists. So I'm telling you that you definitely don't want to undervalue an email list.
Don't think that just because sales on amazon are going well you're fine, no. If your amazon shuts your account down for one reason or another. You want to be able to make sure that you can get in contact with those people even outside of the Amazon platform.
And they definitely do not want you to be able to do that. Now the third and the secret point of today is don't email from your personal email. You need to invest in a high-quality email service I highly recommend and use a personally Active Campaign.
If you look below in the description you can see my affiliate link for an Active Campaign. They are the email service that allows all sorts of automation and tracking of what's going on. Graphs and illustrations and all sorts of metrics.
So that if a person does this then it'll send an email here, if a person does that they'll send them there. So we're sending emails to the right people at the right time to ensure the best sales. So when you're getting started with your self-publishing business you want to invest in an email marketing service.
You should definitely go with an Active Campaign and just check out the link below. That will also help my channel out as well so I'm able to continue to produce videos like this very one. That's the one that I go for, it takes a little bit of time to learn but it's definitely worth the investment.
And they are the cheapest and most reliable of the email marketing services that you will have. If you send it out from your own email you will be blocked by Google and other services will block you. Whereas these specific services like the Active Campaign, it is clean as a whistle.
They get rid of all spam so that they're sure that their emails have the highest delivery rate. As opposed to ending in the spam folder. For most people they're going to end up right in their inbox, people are going to see your email.
They're going to read your email and we're going to go from there. Where you can start seeing your sales and building your email list as you have new reviewers and all of these things that you get all sorts of opportunities. I also go back and forth with people.
Check out this related article: Ethically Get Reviews For Your Books Self-Publishing
If you're on my lean email list go ahead and email me. We can go back and forth as well on email even though I do prefer going back and forth on YouTube. Or if you want 1-on-1 you can always hire me as a coach as you see below in the description.
As many of you have been taking the opportunity to do I appreciate you as my customers and clients for this particular channel. It's been very fun, self-publishing is one of my favorite things and I love nothing more than discussing your problems with you and coming to solutions that work for you.
But my question for you today is have you started building an email list? If you have I want to know write "yes" below in the comments and maybe even who you've chosen to go with and if not write "no" below in the comments. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.