Newsletter Ninja

by Tammi Labrecque

  Now that we’ve answered all those pesky questions, we’re ready to choose an email marketing service.

  The Best EMS

  I get asked the same question by just about everyone at or near the beginning of class: Which EMS is the best one? I hope you’ll forgive me for side-stepping the question, but it’s impossible to say which is the best EMS—only which is the best EMS for you. I can usually come up with a pretty good answer for any individual student, because we talk about their specific situation, but I can’t give a definitive answer that would apply to everyone reading this book.

  For one thing, this is one of those “it depends” situations, and I can’t give a recommendation for each possible combination of answers to the questions above. For another, I want this book to be evergreen, so to speak—still useful in a few years, or even longer—and things change all the time in this business. Even advice that’s really solid today may not be so tomorrow—and will certainly not be so in two years.

  So, in lieu of a recommendation for you personally, I will say this: Take stock of all the questions I asked above and then research every EMS you can find, paying special attention to any that come highly recommended from your peers. The top dogs, at the time of this writing, roughly in order of ease-of-use, features, and expense, are: Mailerlite, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Active Campaign, AWeber, and Drip. But ask around; by the time you’re reading this, the landscape could have changed drastically.

  And, as I said above, to whatever extent is possible for you, make price point your final deciding factor rather than your first. Do your best to afford the EMS that best fits your needs, if you can—and if you can’t, make finding that money in your budget a top priority. This is worth doing right.

  While we’re on the topic of software: If you’re going to offer some sort of reward (what I call a cookie or bribe, and normal people usually call a reader magnet; we will talk about these at length later) for joining your list, you also need to consider how you’re going to deliver that reward. Some mailing list services will allow you to include attachments to welcome emails or emails in an automation sequence (we’ll get to those topics soon!), or you can always include a link to a file stored in a cloud-based service or on your website. I have done those things, and they work, but the tradeoff is that you will inevitably wind up doing customer service for people who can’t figure out how to download, side-load, open, or otherwise partake of your brilliant reader magnet due to difficulties with technology.

  As I said just a moment ago, I want this book to continue to be useful long after it’s published, so I’m hesitant to recommend any specific tactical advice, preferring to focus on strategic principles. (We’ll talk about the difference between tactics and strategies in a later chapter.) So rather than endorse any particular way of accomplishing this reader magnet delivery, I’ll just say that you should look around (and ask friends) for a solution that allows you to offload delivery and customer service to someone else—for example, some sort of service that would funnel your books onto a reader’s device.

  (Stage whisper: I’m talking about BookFunnel.)

  Initial Setup

  So once you’ve done all this planning and choosing, you just have to set up the structure of your list(s) and get them ready for the subscribers you don’t have yet. Setting up your mailing list is fairly simple no matter what EMS you end up choosing, but as with so many other things, you will make it easiest on yourself with some advance planning. Every EMS is different, so it’s not practical for me to attempt to explain the step-by-step process for each of them. If you don’t know how to create a list or make a signup form, your EMS will have customer service documents (or possibly chat or email) that you can consult to figure out the basics.

  The questions you asked when you were determining which EMS is best for you (cross-genre? overlapping subscribers? lots of list-building?) will be useful again here, as you set up your lists, segments, tags, custom fields, etc.

  And, as I’ve said, if you choose one service and then find out down the road that it’s not flexible enough for your needs, you can always switch. Try to start as you mean to go on, but it’s better to start a list when it’s 80 percent “right” than to wait until it’s perfect—because it’s never going to be perfect.

  So get yourself up and running with the best practices you can manage and the best service you can afford, and don’t be so afraid you’ll do something wrong that you do nothing at all.

  That said, once you think you’ve got everything set up the way you want it, take your own email address through the signup process to make sure everything looks and works as it should. There may be things you need to change to make the process seamless and professional-looking.

  To use an example from my own experience, when I sent out the first ActiveCampaign email for one of my romance pen names, the name in the From field was my own. This was not a huge tragedy, because that pen name isn’t a big secret, but it was confusing for subscribers who had signed up to Nom de Plume’s email list but got an email from a name that many of them didn’t recognize. It was time well spent digging around in the settings to figure out why that was happening and how to fix it.

  In fact, you’ll want to test everything on yourself before deploying it. Signing up, automated emails, regular campaigns, unsubscribing—anything that a subscriber might do or see, you should do or see it first. Again, this is worth doing right. It looks unprofessional when emails don’t have the right name on them, or placeholder language is accidentally left in, or an image is pixelated, or whatever (the list of things that can go wrong really does seem infinite sometimes, but you must just do the best you can), and why look unprofessional if you can help it?

  Believe me, you’ll do plenty of looking unprofessional over the life of your list. For example, you might, I don’t know, participate in a list-building cross-promotion, set up a beautiful onboarding sequence for those new subscribers, then import them with the wrong tag and send them a confusing email that leads to a bunch of unsubscribes. If you do, I recommend doing it just before the release of your book on how to be a Newsletter Ninja, because what could be more fun or less embarrassing?

  Now that we’ve done our planning, we need to get some people in here, right? Nope, still no. There’s a reason I’ve placed the chapters of this book that deal with list-building after things like setting up your list, creating an onboarding sequence (I keep using that phrase, and I promise we’ll get to it next chapter), and figuring out who (and where) your perfect subscribers are: Because you don’t want people flooding—or even trickling—into a list that’s not ready for them. So before we start acquiring subscribers, we must first plan, then set up (then do a couple of other things, actually, but we’ll talk about that in just a minute).

  In short: we’ve got a few things to do yet. And we’re going to do them in a weird backwards order for a little while, setting up the onboarding sequence, then the welcome email that precedes it, and lastly the signup process. Why? Because you don’t want a list signup that goes nowhere; you need the signup to lead to the welcome email, and then into the onboarding.

  So let’s get this thing ready for subscribers, then we’ll talk about who those subscribers are and how to attract them.

  6 - Onboarding

  Onboarding Basics

  Okay, so we’re finally here—the mythical onboarding sequence! So what exactly is an onboarding sequence? It’s the autoresponder that introduces people to you and convinces them to stay on your mailing list.

  Let’s back up just one step and define the word autoresponder, because that’s obviously important. An autoresponder, in general, is an automated email that is triggered to send when a subscriber takes a certain action. Unlike what we normally think of as a newsletter, which is written at or near the time you will send it and talks about current events—a book you’re working on now, a sale you have coming up soon, when your next release will be, etc—an autoresponder is something you will write only once,
and is meant to be fairly “set it and forget it.” You can have an autoresponder set up for when a person clicks a certain link, or has been on the list for a specific amount of time, or has a birthday, or whatever you like.

  Or—and this is where it gets cool—when someone first signs up, you can have an autoresponder that gives them an overview of your work and makes them think it would be fun to stick around for more of your emails; this is an onboarding sequence. (You’re bringing the subscribers “on board,” so to speak.) It begins when your autoresponder is triggered by people joining or being added to your mailing list, and goes on for however long it takes to accomplish the two goals I just stated.

  Your onboarding sequence can consist of as many or as few emails as you like. I have a romance pen name whose onboarding was a single email for quite a long time, because she only had two books and a single email was more than enough to introduce her to readers. As you develop more things to talk about—and a deeper backlist—your onboarding sequence may get longer, and that’s fine, too. But it should never be so long that you’re struggling to find something to say.

  Actually, this is advice that you would do well to apply to all emails to your list, automated or otherwise, but it’s especially important here. This is the all-important “getting to know you” phase for you and your subscribers, and they don’t yet love you enough to be forgiving of unnecessary—or worse, boring—emails.

  That last bit—the bit about how subscribers are just getting to know you—is important. Generally speaking, people who are just joining your mailing list will have had, at best, a few intersections with you—maybe they’ve read a book or two; or seen you at a Facebook takeover; or joined during a list-building promotion, so they have your reader magnet downloaded but might not even have read it. While it’s true that the focus of this book is building a mailing list full of people that love you and everything you do, you should never abuse that by sending emails that don’t matter—and this goes double for your onboarding, where you can be fairly certain that a new subscriber knows little to nothing about you.

  But they will soon! The onboarding sequence is where you fix that—where you not only introduce yourself, but begin the essential task of showing these people how awesome you are.

  The Purpose of Your Onboarding Sequence

  So, your onboarding sequence has a few jobs to do. It needs to introduce new subscribers to you and your work, prepare them for the experience of being on your mailing list, and leave them wanting more. In fact, each email in the sequence should do at least two and hopefully three of these things.

  How you do that is really up to you; as with a few other mailing list topics, it’s virtually impossible for me to offer specific advice, because a successful author newsletter is unique to the author who created it and the people who receive it. I can offer a few guidelines, though.

  Make your sequence as long as it has to be to give a good overview of your work, and no longer.

  Offer something personal in each email—a funny anecdote, a peek behind the scenes of writing a specific book, a picture of your cat—within your comfort zone, of course.

  Make sure the first email reminds them how they ended up on your list. This, more than almost anything else you can do, will greatly decrease the number of unsubscribes you get in those first few emails, and will almost entirely eliminate Spam reports, which you (obviously) do not want.

  End the sequence by telling them what happens next (“You’ll hear from me about once a month” or “You’ll receive my biweekly newsletter and release notifications”), thanking them for letting you introduce yourself over the course of the last few emails, and inviting them to interact with you somewhere else, too, if there’s somewhere you hang out more regularly (a Facebook group, a subreddit, a genre forum, etc). While I truly believe the newsletter is king for building your fanbase, there’s something very powerful about the kind of quick, everyday chatting that happens in more interactive places—especially places where fans can talk not just to you but to each other. Let them build or join a community that includes you or is centered around you, and they’ll identify strongly with it.

  Somewhere in the sequence, give them something of actual value besides the cookie (which you’ll recall from last chapter is the signup reward for people who join your list). I like to do this toward the beginning for organic subscribers but toward the end for non-organic subscribers, because non-organic subscribers need to be discouraged from sticking around in hopes of free stuff—more on that in just a moment. This can be something free from you, something free from someone else (perhaps a link to a book you know is permanently free), or even just a really good bargain (your first-in-series that is always 99 cents, for example).

  I tend to offer freebies to organic subscribers, because they already like me and will be quality subscribers from the beginning, and offer bargains to non-organic subscribers, because this helps to weed out the people who only want free books. Those people can clutter up your list for ages, and you’re paying for them not to open your emails, or to open them and never click on anything that might cost them money. I hope I’ve made my point that your list is not just a tool to sell books, but you’re not running a charity here, either. If someone never, ever clicks on anything other than a free book, they should be first in line when it’s time to purge the dead weight (which we will talk about at the end of this book).

  All that said, keep in mind that not all non-organic subscribers are the same. You’ll hear from a lot of people that building any kind of list other than a completely organic one is a terrible idea; I think that’s hogwash. Some list-building promotions will net you pretty high-quality subscribers, others will get you thousands of people who don’t give a single damn about you and never will. We’ll talk about this some more in the Straight-Up Bribes chapter.

  All that said, it is true that, in general, your organic subscribers are going to be high-quality from the start, and they should be treated very well. Again, we’ll get to more detail on that; just file it away for now.

  If you follow those guidelines, tweaking them to your specific genre(s), subscriber avatar(s), and personal disclosure comfort level, you’ll have a series of emails that intrigues as it informs, and makes subscribers look forward to your next email.

  Designing the Onboarding Sequence

  So, great, that’s what your sequence should do. Now for the big question: How do you set it up? There are almost as many answers to that question as there are people to ask it, so let me once again just give some general pointers.

  Your onboarding starts right where your signup form leaves off—and that means if you have different signup forms in different places, you need to decide whether everyone goes through the same onboarding, or if you create a custom onboarding sequence for all the places where you might be picking up subscribers, or something in between.

  Some authors like to keep it extremely simple. Maybe every subscriber who joins their list, regardless of where they signed up, goes through the same series of onboarding emails and ends up on a single list, to which the author can then send his regular campaign emails.

  Other authors get really granular about this, setting up different signup forms for each possible subscriber source (we’ll discuss this more in the list-building chapter); delivering a different reader magnet to each subscriber based on where they signed up; building a separate onboarding sequence for each of those signups; and/or creating separate lists, tags, or custom fields, so that any individual group or type of subscriber can be isolated and interacted with in a situation-specific way.

  As an aside, let me make a suggestion. If you do want to have a different cookie and/or first onboarding email for each subscriber source, that’s awesome (in fact, I encourage it), but do yourself a favor: Write them in such a way that each can lead into the same second email in the sequence. If your onboarding will have four emails, only write emails 2-4 once, and write those initial emails to flow naturally into a single
second email (and subsequent emails) that will go to everyone. Then your onboarding sequence looks like a beautiful tree, with many branches all feeding into one main trunk, and you’ve saved yourself from writing three additional emails for every new subscriber source. I’ll elaborate on this just a bit in the next chapter.

  I have helped many authors set up sequences like this, and they’re actually a great deal of fun, but they require a lot of maintenance. Most authors I know who have a really elaborate onboarding have a virtual assistant to help out, because it takes a great deal of time and requires a skillset that doesn’t always come naturally to an author. I get a lot of requests to build and maintain this kind of setup, and while I’m always happy to build, it’s very rare for me to agree to ongoing maintenance, because it’s very time-intensive. This is the main reason I suggest that people rein themselves in as much as they can while still achieving their goals.

  But the authors who keep it super simple or go hog-wild are, in my experience, in the minority. Many authors, including me, wind up somewhere in the middle. For expedience, I’ll use myself as an example again:

  I break down my subscribers into just two categories. There are “organic” subscribers, who sign up at the links or forms found on my website, Twitter, and Facebook, go through a three-email onboarding sequence, and then drop onto my main list. Then there are “giveaway” subscribers, who go through a different, four-email sequence, and then if (and only if) they have opened every email, automatically move over to my main list. (If they open some emails but not others, there’s a small extra automated loop to make sure they want to be there—and that I want them!—but that’s my own personal quirk.) As I detailed above, each giveaway subscriber receives a first email that reminds them how they got on my list and delivers the cookie for that source (plus picks up a tag that tells me where they came from). But then each of those emails ends with the same promise about when I’ll send the next email and what will be in it, and from that point on everyone gets the same series of three more emails. It works beautifully, and is considerably less work than creating an entire unique sequence for everyone.