Newsletter Ninja

by Tammi Labrecque

  Then say it again, and mean it.

  Does that sound like some kind of woo-woo? Like perhaps I’ve read The Secret one (or ten) too many times? It won’t, if you stick with me through the whole process.

  So if you’re ready to embrace your inner rock star and be your reader instead of yourself for a while, let’s start at the very beginning: Why do you need a mailing list?

  3 - Why You Need a Mailing List

  You need a mailing list. I don’t suppose I have to tell you this, as you’ve just forked over money that could have been spent on a pint, or some doughnuts, or admission to a movie—granted, at one of those theaters with the sticky floors and wobbly cup-holders, but still. You could be watching the next installment of The Fast and the Furious instead of hanging around listening to me bang on about mailing lists, so I’ll try not to waste your time.

  But just in case we have any holdouts in the “I don’t need a mailing list” camp, bear with me while I run through the rationale.

  Yes, you need a list. A list that lives in a database that you can access at will, whose signup forms you control, with fields and parameters and specs that you set. A list that belongs to you, which is the thing that separates it from your super-cool reader group on Facebook, or the subreddit you hang out in, or your two hundred (or two hundred thousand) Twitter followers.

  If you’re thinking, “Thank you, Captain Obvious, defender of all things already known,” I feel you, my friend. That’s some 101 shit, right there. We all know you need a damn list. Every indie publishing ”guru” has been flogging this particular deceased equine for lo these many years now.

  Nevertheless, there are still people out there—and I do not get these people at all—who will resist building a mailing list, or, if they do build one, will resist using it to its full potential. They have fallen into the trap of believing one or more myths:

  A list is too much work.

  I can get by with Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/my website.

  People can follow me on Amazon/Bookbub/Draft2Digital.

  No one does email anymore anyway.

  In order:

  No, it’s not.

  No, you can’t.

  Yes, they can, but then you don’t know who they are.

  Yes, they do.

  Don’t get me wrong—using the other platforms is great. There are people on each of those platforms for whom that is their preferred method of connecting. Those are all ways you can talk to or at least have a presence for your people. I myself use many of them.

  But building your business on somebody else’s platform is a terrible idea. If the primary place where you interact with your reader belongs to someone else, you’re doing something that I’ve heard called digital sharecropping—toiling on someone else’s land to produce something, to their ultimate benefit rather than your own. Sure, you might get a subsistence living out of it, but you’re never going to own anything worth talking about if you just keep bringing your readers over to someone else’s platform.

  Your list is yours, and (if you treat them right, which we will get to) can be leveraged swiftly and effectively when you need something. The importance of that can’t be overstated.

  Let me give you a recent and painful personal example. I’d already taught this class four times—and told upwards of 40 students that they needed to understand those other platforms could disappear in the blink of an eye—before I experienced it for myself. And it was pretty terrible.

  In one of my other lives, I’m a romance author. As such, I love Facebook. My readers, by and large, are already there, and they’re forming communities and swapping book recommendations and cheerleading for their favorite authors night and day. It’s really quite beautiful. I had an amazing reader group of just over 1800 people, but because I didn’t want to have to do all the upkeep myself, I had built the group with another author; we built it together and were both Administrators. We were BFFs, so what could be more fun than me and my good friend hanging out with our readers, talking about books (and ogling hot guys, because romance readers are some of the most sex-positive and totally shameless people on this planet, for real)? It was, without question, the best, most fun, most responsive reader group on Facebook.

  And then my friend and I had what I thought was a minor disagreement, and she removed me from the group with no warning. I had to start over.

  Now, all the mailing lists in the world aren’t going to ease the sadness of losing a good friend—but if you’ll allow me to compartmentalize, what I want to talk about here is what I did to start that new reader group. I think you know what’s coming: I turned to my mailing list. In just a few days, I had hundreds of people in the new group. It was a far cry from 1800, but that 1800 didn’t happen overnight, so I knew that was fine. It would grow. (It would grow a lot faster if I published more books than I do, but alas.)

  What’s important to note is that if I hadn’t had my mailing list, the new group would have been comprised of me and however many readers saw my Facebook post about it. And if you’ve tried to get some visibility on a Facebook post lately, you know how hopeless that would have been. The mailing list saved the day.

  Another excellent argument for a mailing list over social media is that email converts better than social media. (For the purposes of this discussion, “convert” is, basically, a reader doing the thing that your email/post/what-have-you is encouraging them to do—buy, click, reply, choose, whatever.)

  Why does email convert better than other avenues? There are some definite measurable reasons: more people use email than Facebook (though Facebook is catching up!), they check their emails first and more often, and they just prefer to be sold to in email rather than Facebook. (I’m using Facebook here because it’s the most popular social media platform; the others lag behind it quite a bit in terms of use and conversion.)

  But, based on what I’ve seen and what I know about how people use the internet, I think I can add a couple of more nebulous theories.

  First, there’s a certain level of buy-in that comes with someone giving you their email address. We all get too much email, so handing out your email address is not as simple a choice as it used to be. People’s inboxes are already too full, so choosing to let you in there means that their interest in you is high. When you send an email, they should be primed to respond positively—by opening and clicking. If you give them something irresistible to read and/or click on (more on how to do that later), you have an almost guaranteed buy-in from them. That’s really powerful.

  Second, there’s a lot less distraction in email. If you make an offer to someone on Facebook, it’s competing with so many other things. If you make an offer in email, the reader is focused on you—at least for the length of time it takes to read that email. There’s a whole different flavor to their reception of what you are saying when they open an email vs. seeing you in their Facebook feed, surrounded by cat videos and baby pictures and ads—if they even see you in their feed, which is frankly getting harder and harder all the time. Without all the distractions, you’ve got an opportunity—possibly a brief one, but an opportunity—to speak directly to your reader while you have her full attention. And that is also really powerful.

  Whatever the reasons, everyone agrees: email converts better. One good analysis can be found at http://bit.ly/EmailVsSMed.

  So now that we’re all on the same page, and agree that one must have a mailing list and afford it pride of place in one’s stable of reader interaction techniques, let’s talk about what a mailing list really is: who it’s for, what it’s for, and some important guidelines for how to use it to its greatest potential.

  4 - My Mailing List Philosophy

  There are a fair number of people making a living in the “advice to authors” segment of the indie publishing space. A smaller but still not insignificant number of them either specialize in email/newsletters or at least devote a portion of their business to teaching about them.

  So what makes me different? B
asically, I think it comes down to my core philosophy, which can be generally summed up in two parts:

  First, you are not selling what you think you are.

  Second, if all you’re using your list for is selling, you’re doing everything wrong.

  That’s it, my whole mailing list philosophy in two sentences. But since you paid actual money for this book, and since those two sentences are a little vague, let me expand on them. I’m going to do it in reverse order, because while I think I’ve listed them in order of importance, they actually build on each other the opposite way.

  If all you’re using your list for is selling, you’re doing everything wrong.

  Most people who come to me with underperforming mailing lists mean the same thing when they say “underperforming”: People are not opening, not clicking, and/or not converting to buyers. The author sends out emails like clockwork asking people to buy books, and then if people open them (which many do not), they’re not buying. If you think the purpose of your list is to sell books, this can be incredibly frustrating. But I’m going to argue that if you’re deciding on the worth of your mailing list by looking at sales and conversions, you’re measuring the wrong thing. If you send an email and your only expectation is “They should click the link and buy the thing,” you’re not doing email right.

  Why? Because you are not selling what you think you are.

  Every student who comes to me—every single one, so far, without exception—thinks they’re selling books. They finish the class with a very different perspective, one that can be hard to convince them of, but that ultimately ends with satisfied writers and readers. The primary purpose of your newsletter is not to sell books (though if you do things properly that will be a happy side effect). The primary purpose of your newsletter is—or should be—to build what David Gaughran calls “superfans”: people who don’t just love a book you wrote, but also love you, and subsequently love all the books you write.

  When you invite people to your newsletter, and send them emails, you aren’t selling books. You are selling yourself.

  This is quite a paradigm shift, but if you can wrap your head around it, it makes all the difference. It makes perfect sense, if you think about it. After all, yourself is the only thing you’ve got that no one else does. Amazon is awash with books—flooded to the point that we’re all drowning, readers and authors alike—so it’s not like readers have subscribed to your list because it’s the only way they can find a book to read. No, they’re there because they liked your book—and, it naturally follows, since you wrote the thing, they like you. No one else can give them that.

  So, yes, in the world at large, you are in the business of selling books, but on your email list you are in the business of communicating with your readers and building relationships.

  When you come to understand that the people on your list are there not just because they want to know when you have a book out, but because they want to know more about you—as an author, as a person—you approach your list in an entirely different way. You can be more relaxed, more open (within your own comfort zone), more free to be your authentic self. And this new, more genuine approach will cement fans to you even more, changing them from interested readers to superfans who will go out and evangelize for you with other readers, helping to build the little (or maybe big) reader army with which you will conquer the world (or at least the bestseller charts)!

  But to get there, you have to internalize what I’ve said above, and you must come to understand that a lack of responsiveness in your mailing list is not a subscriber problem—it’s a you problem. Most people with underperforming mailing lists are simply not handling them right. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but the good news is, now that I’ve told you that, I’m going to tell you how to fix it.

  First, though, we’re going to run through some really basic software and setup stuff, just to make sure the novices know what to do and the veterans are using best practices. Sounds fun, right?

  (I’m just gonna pretend you said yes.)

  Onward, then!

  5 - Planning and Setup

  The first question most people ask me is, as you might expect: Which email marketing service should I choose? And it’s not a bad question—all of the various services have pros and cons; they do different things, at different price points, with different levels of flexibility; and what’s right for you might not be right for someone else—but I think it’s the wrong question with which to begin.

  The proper first question, I contend, is: What do you need your mailing list to be able to do?

  If you start there, rather than with price or gimmicks or what the author you want to be like uses—if you decide what you need from your email marketing service (which I’ll be calling an EMS from now on, because I’m lazy and don’t want to type it out every time), then choose the service that’s right for your needs—you’ll be in a much better position to leverage the one you choose, because you will have chosen it for reasons that make it specifically suited to the list you’re trying to build.

  Choosing an EMS

  So how do you go about deciding what you want your list to be? If you already have a list, a good place to start is with your current situation. Which things are working, and which are not? From there, you can extrapolate what a good list (for you, because this is quite individual) would look like.

  If you don’t yet have a list, or much of one, it can be a bit hypothetical in nature—though I contend it’s still helpful to ask yourself the questions.

  Are you wide (selling in all stores rather than being exclusive to Amazon)? Are you cross-genre? Fiction and/or nonfiction? Do you have pen names? Do you have overlap between pen names and genres?

  The answers to these questions allow you to decide what level of flexibility you need with regard to segmentation, separate lists, tagging, and things of that nature. If all that sounds like so much gobbledegook, don’t worry; we’ll talk about all those things a bit further along. For now, just be aware that if you write in more than one genre, or write both fiction and non-fiction, or have two pen names with no overlap at all, you may be fine with an EMS that places people on separate lists and does not allow you to send an email to more than one list at a time (at the time of this writing, MailChimp and AWeber are like this).

  If, however, you anticipate that a substantial number of subscribers would wind up on more than one list, or if you want to be able to send (or not send) an email to specific subsections of a larger list, you would probably be better off with an EMS that allows you to combine lists and tagging (or custom fields) to send emails in a more targeted or more inclusive manner, whichever is right for your circumstance. Otherwise, you’ll find it quite inconvenient to send an email to those overlapping subscribers and you may be charged twice for them each month when it comes time to pay for the number of subscribers on your list(s).

  How often do you grow your list using things like newsletter signup swaps, cross-promotion bundles, giveaways, etc?

  Non-organic or incentivized subscribers need to be onboarded in a different way than organic subscribers (again, we’ll get to those concepts in just a bit), so you’ll have the same need for segmentation or tagging or some other way to know who came in from where, which will allow you to send them down different paths when they join, and to isolate them later if you need to send them something specific or engage them in some particular way.

  How big is your list?

  This affects price, obviously, with MailChimp and Mailerlite having fairly robust free options (up to 2,000 and 1,000 subscribers, respectively, at the time of this writing), and others starting at more expensive price points but becoming more equitable as subscriber numbers rise.

  How often will you send emails?

  Some services have a limit on how many emails can be sent in one month, which may or may not depend on your specific plan; you should definitely read the fine print to make sure you’re not locking yourself into a list that can’t expand w
ithout costing a lot of money.

  If you are an infrequent sender, a less expensive plan might work well for you, or you might like MailChimp’s plan that charges per email rather than per month. I don’t really address this sort of plan or approach, because you aren’t going to be an infrequent sender once I’m done with you.

  How willing are you to move your list from one EMS to another?

  Moving is not as hard as some folks make it out to be, but it’s not a whole lot of fun either—and I would argue that you have better things to do. Additionally, with recent changes to privacy laws in the EU, and the near-certainty that changes like those will find their way across the pond, it’s worth mentioning that moving lists will involve a lot of tracking signup information to comply with any subscriber requests for information. And who needs that hassle?

  However, if money is an issue right now, but you anticipate needing more advanced features down the road, it’s definitely possible to start on one of the free or less-expensive services and move later. I generally advise beginning as you mean to go on, and starting out with the best choice for the author business you envision; I also understand that sometimes that’s not possible.

  What is your budget?

  I like to ask the budget question after the other questions, because starting with budget immediately eliminates some services from your list of possibles. Better instead to evaluate all the services before determining your budget, for two reasons. One, you will have a better idea of what’s a fair price for each level/type of feature; and two, you might decide that a certain EMS’s features are desirable enough that you’re willing to budget a bit more than you might otherwise have done.