Newsletter Ninja

by Tammi Labrecque

  Your organic subscribers—the ones who sign up from your back matter or your Facebook page, or some other location that they found after reading one of your books—are generally a higher quality of subscriber than ones you get through less organic methods. These are readers who sought you out and signed up because, one can assume, they liked what you wrote and would like to see more of it. We love these readers, and we onboard them and treat them differently.

  Some people never mingle their organic people with their incentivized people, and that’s an absolutely valid way to do things. I have a compelling reason to do it the way I do: I’m lazy and a bit scatterbrained. If I have to create slightly different content for different types of subscribers, and then remember to send that content to multiple lists, it just makes me less likely to do the most important part, which is to communicate regularly with all of my subscribers. So once someone makes it through my onboarding, which I think is pretty rigorous and weeds out the people who aren’t likely to be enthusiastic subscribers, I throw them on the main list and call it good. You may choose to do something different, and of course that’s fine. As I’ve said, each author is unique, and so should their newsletter be.

  So, once you’ve decided on the basic flowchart of where people will come from, what tags or custom fields they might acquire, and what path they will follow until they ultimately exit your onboarding sequence, all you have to do is actually write the onboarding emails. So great, right?

  Well, not really! You’ve got things to do and every five hundred words of email you write for your onboarding sequence is five hundred words you didn’t write in your current work-in-progress. But this is important, so let’s figure out how to make it as easy as we can on you.

  7 - The First Date

  When I’m teaching MLE students, I frequently compare their onboarding sequences to the dating process. It sounds silly, but it’s also a decent comparison, if I do say so myself. In these initial emails, you are introducing yourself to your new subscribers, and you’re also watching their actions and responses to see if they’re a good fit for you.

  And, as with dating, many won’t be. As we’ve discussed (ad nauseam, really), that’s fine. Enough of them will be a good fit that you can build up quite a stable of … dates? (I guess this is where the dating analogy breaks down—unless we want to get into polyamory, which is really outside the scope of this book. Ahem.) So the key is to write these initial emails in a way that highlights all your best qualities while at the same time sending subtle signals to those who aren’t right for you that they can show themselves out.

  However, before we get to the brilliant emails you’re going to write, there’s a little bit of automated business over which you only have partial control. If you have your signup set to require double opt-in (which you should, without exception), your email service provider will send out both a confirmation email and a welcome email. It’s not a bad idea to take a look at those and optimize them as best you can.

  The Confirmation Email

  First up is the confirmation email. When someone puts their email address (and whatever else you ask for; we’ll get to that in the next chapter) into the signup form and submits it, they will get a message that they need to confirm their email address. So off they go to their email inbox to find the confirmation email. Our hope is that it’s sitting right there at the top of the inbox ready for them to click-to-confirm and get this party started.

  Sometimes, however, it won’t be. Even here, right at the beginning, that email may go to a Spam folder (or, in Gmail, possibly the Promotions tab). Savvy subscribers will know to look for it there, but—and this is important—not everyone is a savvy subscriber. Without intervention from you, there is a non-zero percentage of subscribers who won’t see the email, will shrug and figure “Maybe it will come in a little while,” and move on to do something else. This person may never see that email. They might forget about it, or try to sign up again and give up when the email still doesn’t come.

  Help those nice people out. When they click to submit their information and sign up, they will see a message on the signup page, or will be redirected to another page (this will vary, depending on your service and your setup). Make sure that the first thing they see after hitting Submit is instructions on how to do two things: First, how to check their Spam folder and Promotions tab and pull your email out of them; second, how to whitelist your email address so that your future emails will not be diverted out of their main inbox.

  Whitelisting is the process of letting an email provider know that emails from a specific contact are trusted emails, and should never be sent to Spam or Promotions. Some email providers require that the receiver add the address to Contacts, or an address book, or what-have-you. There are actually quite a few ways to do it, depending on the email provider. In the Helpful Links section, I’ve included links to several different pages that explain how to whitelist; you should make one of these available to your subscribers.

  When should you give them these instructions? Well, I include whitelisting instructions in literally every email I send; it’s that important. But nowhere is it more important, or more likely to be successful, than in this first contact. There is no better time to get someone to whitelist you than when they have just fished your email—an email they know they requested, and therefore might be peeved about not receiving—out of somewhere other than their main inbox. A subscriber who just had to go hunting for your email is going to be more receptive to instructions about how to prevent that from happening. So definitely include whitelisting instructions everywhere a subscriber’s eyes might land in the signup process and the confirmation email.

  I also recommend adding a header graphic or some other image that aligns with your branding. My romance pen name has a very specific website design, and the header graphic in her emails carries over that branding, using the same fonts and logo. Right from this first confirmation email, I’m starting to build my brand in the subscriber’s mind.

  The Welcome Email

  The second email that subscribers will receive is generally another automated email, this one welcoming them to the list or thanking them for subscribing or confirming. Depending on your EMS, it may simply tell them their subscription was successful. Some services also include signup information like what IP address was detected during the process, or password information, or any manner of things.

  The important thing from our perspective is that, like the confirmation email, this is almost always something that you can customize. And as with the confirmation email, I recommend branding and whitelisting instructions.

  But there’s one pitfall to avoid here: Many authors put a link to their cookie in this welcome email. Do not do this, because in doing it you miss a key opportunity to increase the deliverability of your newsletter.

  We’ll talk about deliverability at length when we get to that chapter, but for now I’ll just touch on one aspect of it. The automated welcome email may have your email address in the From or Reply-To field (which is great), but the subscriber’s email provider can see that it came from a Mailchimp server, and quite possibly not the same one that will handle your ongoing emails. Without getting into the technical mumbo-jumbo (which, to be perfectly frank, has been explained to me a dozen times and still doesn’t quite click), basically, there’s a decent chance that Gmail or whoever won’t see this email as coming from you the way it will see your automations or regular newsletter.

  Why does this matter? Because every time an email from you is delivered to a subscriber, the email providers are watching to see what the subscriber does with that email. Does she open it right away? Does she click on the links inside? Does she reply to it? Those actions contribute to your sender reputation (which, again, we’ll discuss when we get to the chapter on Engagement), and it behooves you to begin building your reputation as early as possible. If the email in question—the one the subscriber does a lot of interacting with—comes from MailChimp instead of you, you
won’t get the “credit” toward your sender reputation.

  So use the welcome email to thank the subscriber for confirming, and to direct them to find a new email from you—an email which contains their cookie. Nothing works so well to get someone looking for an email as telling them there’s something cool inside it for them!

  Your Onboarding Sequence Begins

  That email that they go looking for is what we will consider the first email in your onboarding sequence, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it (and what you want, incidentally, is to entice people to open it, give them something cool to click on, and solicit a reply).

  When they open that email, it should of course be tightly branded like everything has been up to this point, and it should definitely contain whitelisting instructions, though you can include them at the end instead of beating people over the head with them. This will be the third time you’ve talked to them about whitelisting in the last quarter of an hour, and they may well be tired of hearing it, so feel free to dial it back a notch.

  In addition to your tight branding and your incessant banging on about whitelisting, you want two things in this email: the link to your cookie and a question for them to answer.

  The link to the cookie is easy, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a click; this is, after all, probably the reason they signed up. Composing a question they’ll feel compelled to answer is harder, but not impossible. We’ll talk about what makes a good question when we get to the Engagement chapter, because it’s worth doing right. As I keep saying, every interaction a subscriber has with your email(s)—opening, clicking, replying—contributes to your reputation; this is a golden opportunity to get the trifecta. And in your first real email, no less! Gmail is going to looove you. (Not really, but they might be slightly less hostile, and we take what we can get.)

  But all this preceding business can be summed up neatly like so: these first few emails are an opportunity to talk to readers when they first sign up, and it should not be wasted. Welcome them, offer whitelisting instructions, give cookies, build up that history, and start training them.

  You have to start fighting right from the start to make them understand that if they want to see your emails, they probably have to do something proactive. And many of them won’t do it, or won’t do all of it, but you will continue to show them what they have to do throughout the sequence.

  Okay, so now that we’ve got confirmation, welcome, and cookie delivery out of the way, what next?

  Well, first, give them a damn break. They just ran an exhausting gauntlet of subscribing, hunting up emails, clicking on cookies, and (one hopes) whitelisting you. Wait a couple of days before you send anything else.

  When you send your next email, make it short and sweet—a check-in to see if they got the cookie is the standard, and it’s really the perfect thing to do, so why reinvent the wheel? If you’re doing your own cookie delivery, you’ll end up getting some replies to this email that will require customer service from you—explaining to people how to get the cookie onto their various devices, mostly. If you’ve contracted this out, you can just direct subscribers how to access customer service for whoever is doing your cookie delivery.

  One more domino down; they’re all confirmed and welcomed and full of cookies (yum). Now what?

  Now—finally!—you get to show them a little of the ol’ razzle-dazzle. (Do yourself a favor, and Google “razzle-dazzle meme.” Endlessly entertaining.)

  Your Onboarding Sequence Continues

  So, with the preliminaries out of the way, let’s look at the onboarding sequence proper, which I recommend you start 7 days after initial signup, and 5 days after the check-in email. You can do it sooner (though not much) or later (though not so late they forget you), but 7 days is a good workable span of time.

  This email they get after the check-in is the prime time for you to introduce yourself and your work. Tell them who you are (again), remind them how they ended up on your list (yes, again), and link to your cookie (yes, again). Then give them a little background on you—your favorite books growing up, maybe, and what you write, and a few personal details if you’re comfortable with that. Remember, it doesn’t have to be your bank PIN; even “I love tacos and The Bachelor” qualifies as personal detail—and if in fact you do love those things, the people who also love them will begin to identify with you. And the people who don’t will, one hopes, forgive you for your terrible taste in TV shows. (Everyone loves tacos, so that part shouldn’t cause any problems.)

  This is a good point to mention that you very well might want to tailor that email to take into account where a subscriber came from. For example, if they signed up organically, you might greet them differently than if they came through a paid list-building promo. If you’re the sort who has more than one cookie, each initial email will deliver the cookie you’ve designated for that particular signup source, and subsequent emails might deliver other cookies in a specific order, as you gradually work your way through the genres or series that best relate to that cookie. As we talked about in the previous chapter, there are almost as many ways to set this up as there are authors.

  Follow-up emails should follow a natural arc. First, introduce yourself and talk about some aspect of your work, or one of the genres you write in, or your first book, or your favorite book. Use subsequent emails to explore other genres or parts of your catalog, or tell them what you love about certain books you’ve written, or explain how your series relate to each other. Do what works for you, based on your books, but make sure every email leads naturally into the next and that the sequence tells an overall story. You’re an author. You can do this.

  But don’t feel like you have to write a long or elaborate sequence. Remember: as long as it needs to be, and no longer. And make things as multi-purpose as you can, so that you’re not duplicating effort where you could conserve that creativity for, you know, writing your books.

  I am, as I said, lazy and scatterbrained, so I keep it as simple as I can. You might recall that I divide my subscribers into just two categories, organic and giveaway. I have a short onboarding sequence for organic subscribers, because people who seek out my website to sign up have almost certainly read at least one of my books and are already predisposed to like me. The tone and number of those emails is therefore a bit different.

  I have another onboarding sequence for subscribers who come to me through non-organic means—giveaways, cross-promotions, etc—but just one. I could set up a separate onboarding sequence for all the possible entry points, but there are a lot of non-organic ways to get subscribers. If I set up a separate onboarding for (just throwing out examples here) every Bookfunnel cross-promo, BookSweeps list-building giveaway, or newsletter swap, I would be recreating the wheel many times over, with only subtle changes.

  What I do instead is exactly what I recommended earlier: I tailor the first email in the sequence for each new subscriber source, while attempting to only have to write one version of subsequent emails. So my first email might say something like “Hi, thank you for downloading my novella in the January 2018 Bookfunnel Romance Bundle!” or “You’re here because you entered to win a free book at Booksweeps”—that sort of thing. With this method, everyone in my “giveaway” onboarding sequence gets a relevant first email to introduce me, personalized to acknowledge how they got on my list. Then the next three emails are exactly the same. In a flowchart, Emails #2-4 would be lined up one right underneath the other—nothing fancy, but with any number of Email #1s pointing to a shared Email #2. This will save you a ton of work and hassle; as I mentioned in the last chapter, you only have to write those subsequent emails once, and there’s nothing I love more than working once and benefiting in perpetuity.

  When I add a new source, like the Bookfunnel bundle I’ll be doing later this month, I just duplicate an existing Email #1, change up the relevant details, and voila—new introductory email, but I do a minimal amount of work to tailor that email, and I never have to rewr
ite or even duplicate the rest of the sequence.

  And, of course, in each email in the sequence, I aim for a killer subject line (more on that later), at least one awesome thing for subscribers to click on, and a question they’ll really want to answer. Remember the triad: open, click, reply. Get them to do at least one of those things every time you send them an email, and by the time they make it to your main list or start getting your regular campaigns, you’ll be several lengths out in front of the authors who don’t have your exceptional email game.

  This, like everything else we’ve discussed, is worth doing right, but don’t make it so convoluted or difficult that you won’t want to set it up or maintain it; even a good onboarding sequence should be evaluated a few times a year, and subsequently updated or revamped to include any changes in your catalog or availability or what-have-you. So don’t have fifty onboarding sequences that you have to completely rewrite every time there’s a change. Save all that effort for writing books—that is, after all, what your subscribers are waiting for!

  8 - The Sign-Up Process