Okay! Now that you’ve got everything set up for subscribers (and tested it yourself, don’t forget!), let’s do a quick overview of signup forms—but first let’s talk for a minute about what it really means for someone to sign up for your list.
We’ve already talked about this from the subscriber’s end—it means they love you and they’re fortunate to be able to receive your weekly or monthly brilliance in newsletter form. Obviously.
But you also need to think about what the signup requires from you. Yes, having someone sign up for your list is awesome; it means they like you, and (one hopes) will find your newsletters both edifying and entertaining, and (one really hopes) will launch your new books into the top 5 on Amazon (and you into that pied-à-terre in Paris, or whatever your particular dream is). But you must always remember that your newsletter signup is a contract between you and the subscriber. They gave you an email address, and you’ve promised them some things in return (or you will have, once you’ve got things set up properly).
You told them they’d get something for signing up—a free story, maybe, or some cool swag, or just a periodic update on you. (We’ll talk more about this later.)
You told them you’d never share or sell their email address. Don’t. I’m not even going to try to crack a joke about this, because it’s absolutely serious. Never betray the trust your subscribers gave you. Just don’t. For one, it’s a lousy thing to do. For another, it’s illegal. (Some folks will tell you that, technically, you can’t sell email addresses but you can “rent” them. Personally, I tend to avoid people who make moral or business decisions based on what they can technically get away with. I urge you to do the same.)
You told them how often you’d email them and why. This sets expectations, and it also might send them looking for an email if they’re expecting one in two days and it doesn’t come.
You told them, or at least implied, that your newsletter will entertain or inform them, and it should always do so. As I said before, do not send unnecessary or boring emails. Respect your subscribers’ time—and your own!
Those are just a few things you might have promised; there are more. Things about you, about the list, about the goodies, about myriad things. But what’s important here is that whatever you tell them at signup, you have to stick to it and be consistent.
This is another reason you have to make decisions before starting, because once you’ve said “I’ll send you a free story,” you’re obligated to make sure that you get that free story to them in a timely and convenient (for them) fashion. Once you’ve said “I’m only gonna email you when I have a new release” (please don’t say that!), you’re stuck.
If you want to change up an ongoing promise you made, you have to give your subscribers a chance to nope out of it. You have to email them and tell them what the changes are going to be, and give them a chance to unsubscribe if that’s not what they want. And you’ll lose folks, every time.
But if you do the signup process properly in the first place, they’ll know what to expect. The key is that while you’re enticing them with your brilliant mailing list bribe, you also need to make sure your signup is clear about what you plan to do once you have their email address. To wit: “We are gonna have some conversations; this is not just a place where you’ll get a free book and then you’ll never hear from me, or where you just get an email every two days about somebody else’s book on sale, or whatever. That’s not how this will be.” (I’m paraphrasing. Obviously you say it better than that, and probably not quite so bluntly. Say it like yourself—your authentic self!) Be clear about what they’re getting, and they won’t sign up if they don’t want it.
Do You Want All the Subscribers?
Hold up a second. I hear you freaking out, because I’ve just said (super casually), “Then they won’t sign up”—am I freaking crazy? You want them all to sign up. You want every person to join your email list, so they’ll buy your awesome books, right?
No.
You don’t want all the people; you want the right people. The ones who are there for the one thing no one else can provide—which, as we’ve discussed, is you—not the ones who are just there for the next book fix. Those people are maybe not the exact right people for you. You don’t need them.
I know I sound cavalier when I say “Whatever to them, we don’t need ’em,” but we don’t need ’em. You are building a list—a strong list—of people who like you, like what you have to offer, and will become advocates for you. That’s the kind of fan that you want, the kind of person who pushes your books into someone else’s hands and says “You’ve got to read this, this author’s so cool.”
So if folks sign up because you’ve got a little reward (which is perfectly fine), they can take the reward and run, or they can stay and get to know you a little bit better. If they’re the right subscribers for you, they’ll want to stay; if not, they’ll hit the unsubscribe button.
And if they do unsubscribe, now or in the future? That’s fine as well. Make sure your goodbye email (or the unsubscribe page they land on, or whatever final communication you have with them) says something like, “If you just want to know when I have a new book, follow me on Amazon or follow me on Bookbub” (and give them links to do so). Some authors even maintain a separate list for people who only want release emails. I don’t do this—frankly, Amazon and Bookbub have way better deliverability than I do—but it’s a valid option.
But whichever option you choose, just try to catch them as they unsubscribe, in a way that will allow them to still buy things from you but not be in that dedicated fanbase you’re building. Because you are truly building a fanbase, not a bunch of people who may or may not open, and may or may not buy. Remember that. Believe it. There are plenty more subscribers where those came from, and you will gradually pull in more and more of them, letting the disinterested ones fall by the wayside, always building up that core of true superfans.
Your Signup Form(s)
So now that we’ve gone through what it means for someone to sign up, and why they should (or shouldn’t) let’s talk about the actual mechanics for a minute—the signup form itself.
The one field that every signup form must have (literally; there is no mailing list service that would even allow you to create a form without it) is, obviously, the Email Address field. This is, after all, how you’ll send the newsletter. Wow, ground-breaking stuff, huh?
But apart from that, you have some options, and we should talk briefly about those. Most services allow you to ask for a wide array of standard information—first and/or last names, dates of birth, gender, age, birthday, phone number—and, if you use custom fields, virtually anything else you might want to ask. None of it is strictly necessary, and much of it is off-putting to a new subscriber.
Rule of thumb: Every item of personal information you ask for will lose you a certain percentage of potential subscribers. Once they’ve turned over their email address, many subscribers will begin to eye with suspicion any further questions from you. “Why does she need my last name?” they'll ask, or “I’m not sure I want to give her even my first name.” And, for sure, “What the hell is she going to do with my phone number?”
So, sure, you can ask them their birthday because you want the software to send them an automated birthday greeting every year … but it might be better to wait until they’ve been through your onboarding, and then give them the option to update their information to include their birthday if they want to participate in that.
Personally, I ask for a first name, but I don’t make it a required field. Having a first name makes it possible to have the subscriber’s name show up in the subject line or in the email itself, which personalizes it and increases open rates. But you have to pay attention to whether the subject line or sentence where the subscriber’s name appears is going to sound ridiculous or nonsensical without the name. If it is, you must either require it of everyone (which, again, will lose subscribers before they even sign up), compose your emai
ls in such a way that they still make sense with the name missing, or resign yourself to weird emails with sentences like: “[First Name], I’ve got big news for you!” or “ , my new book is finally here!” This is, needless to say, not terribly professional.
To Tag or Not to Tag—and How
One final thing you can do with signup forms is use them to tag or segment subscribers as they join—either behind the scenes or right out in the open. I’m a fan of behind-the-scenes, but let’s touch on both.
Some authors like to have visible checkboxes or some other way for subscribers to segment or tag themselves as they join. A signup form like this might ask readers to choose which retailer they purchase on, or whether they want to receive all your emails, or only emails about a particular genre or even a particular series. And, of course, the dreaded “Check this box if you only want to hear about new releases.”
Some providers allow for forms that do this; some don’t. If yours doesn’t, I wouldn’t sweat it. I don’t really like to let new people self-segment anyway, for a couple of reasons.
First, at that point readers don’t know you yet. They don’t know what they’re going to get from you, nor do they know how awesome you are. So they might choose “New releases only” when your monthly campaigns are a blast and they would become one of your superfans if only they had the chance to read a few of them.
Second, if you’re looking at tagging them by something like genre or interest, they’ll either choose the option that they hope will result in fewer emails, or they’ll choose everything and defeat the purpose of tagging them in the first place. (I believe most self-tagging should happen during regular campaign emails, and we’ll talk about that in the chapter on delivering value.)
You may want to do some behind-the-scenes tagging of your own, however. When someone uses the form on my website to join my list, my EMS tags them as “organic.” That’s a segment I want to keep my eye on, always. They are almost without exception the first to open, the most likely to click, and the most responsive to questions. My open rates for that specific segment of the list are reliably 80-85%, which is spectacular. (Open rates on the list as a whole are not nearly so good.) If I need to deploy those loyal subscribers strategically, I want to be able to parse them out of the surrounding noise with ease.
As far as what tagging or segmenting options you should build into a signup form, that’s another one of those “it depends” situations, and the options are too varied to get into in a general book like this. One word of advice I will give, as it’s pretty universal, is this: tag/segment way more than you think you’ll need to. I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve sent a campaign or built an automation, only to decide later that I wish I’d set a link to tag who clicked on it or set up an automation to tag someone or move them to a different list. I end up going behind myself, building segments after the fact, and that’s not a good use of my time—not when I could have handled it on the front end, at the planning stage.
As with many things involved here, begin as you mean to go on, and you’ll have set up the perfect list—or as close as you’re going to get without sending some actual people through this whole process.
That means, we’re ready—finally!—for subscribers. Now we just have to figure out who they are and go find them.
9 - Your Perfect Subscriber
Your mailing list, I am fond of telling students, is a bunch of little points of light that all need nurturing. And despite not normally being the kind of person who says things like “people are little points of light,” I truly believe this.
That said, though, you can’t talk to a thousand people, or ten thousand people, at once. I mean, you can, but it’s not going to resonate the way speaking to each reader individually will.
“Wait, what? Speak to each reader individually? I’ve got shit to do, Tammi!”
I know. That’s why we’ll shortcut our way to that ideal one-on-one dialogue, by creating a subscriber avatar to stand in for those little points of light. This allows you to send emails that resonate with all your subscribers—every one of them a unique individual who shares at least (and maybe only) one thing: a love of your writing—without driving yourself mad trying to tailor your emails to however-many thousands of people.
Creating subscriber avatars is one of the first things we do in Mailing List Expert., and it’s the thing people seem most skeptical about. (It’s not the thing they least want to do—that distinction is reserved for writing autoresponders—but it’s up there on the list.) Admittedly, the process is a little strange, and at first it feels very unnatural, but I believe it’s crucial to mailing list success.
So what is a subscriber avatar, and how do you create one?
Reader Avatars vs Subscriber Avatars
Subscriber avatars are similar to reader avatars, but with some key differences. Before we talk about them in depth, let’s talk briefly about why we want to differentiate them.
First, you need to come to grips with one very important truth: Not everyone who might like your books will necessarily like your newsletter. This can be hard to reconcile with our desire to have every single person who might ever buy a book from us join our list. The author with the biggest mailing list wins, right?
Well, not necessarily; in fact, almost certainly not. The author with the most engaged mailing list wins—and, generally speaking, a smaller list will be more engaged, though the cause-and-effect actually goes in the opposite direction. A list is not engaged because it is smaller; rather, the process of building an engaged list means that those readers who are only somewhat interested in you will not stay subscribed to your newsletter (and that’s totally fine, as we discussed in the previous chapter), and those that stay will be your biggest fans.
The first step to creating this list of superfans is figuring out who your perfect subscriber is. While your perfect reader is not necessarily also your perfect subscriber, reader avatars are a great place to start, because your readers and your potential subscribers do share at least one similarity: they like your books. That might actually be the only thing that you can say with certainty is true of all of them, but it’s a pretty important one, no?
But even though your readers have that in common, when it comes to joining your mailing list, they diverge. Not all your readers will be good subscribers. (Add this to the list of tattoos I’m going to get, I guess.)
So let’s talk about how are they different, and why it matters.
A reader avatar is by its very nature a broad portrait. Something like: “My readers are age 35-60, upper- to middle-class, have white-collar jobs, enjoy fast-paced books, and read mostly on the weekends.” When you are trying to sell books, you have a more generic reader avatar because you want to sell those books to as wide a swath of people as possible. (Or, rather, you want to sell them to the widest swath of people who also read books like yours. The why of this is way outside the scope of this discussion, but has been covered in detail by many people who explain it better than I do. Two great resources to start understanding it are Chris Fox’s book Six Figure Author (you can buy that at books2read.com/NN-6FA), or Amazon Decoded, a short book that you can acquire by signing up for David Gaughran’s newsletter at DavidGaughran.com.)
But a subscriber avatar is not a broad portrait, and for very good reason. We create broad reader avatars because we want our books to appeal to many; we create focused subscriber avatars because we can more easily talk to one person at a time. Your mailing list will be made up of many people (hopefully many, many people), but it’s daunting to talk to thousands of people in a way that feels naturally intimate. So when you compose an email campaign for your subscribers, it’s often helpful to imagine that you’re writing to one specific subscriber.
It’s an interesting line to walk; you want to address the email to your wonderful readers (plural), but when you’re actually writing the content, it will naturally be more interesting and relatable if you are speaking to one person. At some poin
t, you may come to know some of your subscribers well enough that you set your subscriber avatar aside in favor of actual subscribers who’ve responded to you (and this is a wonderful situation to find oneself in). But when you’re starting, do yourself a favor and create a subscriber or two that you can address in your emails. You’ll avoid the stiff nature of emails designed to appeal to everyone (which somehow always end up appealing to no one), and you’ll find it much easier to be your authentic self.
So your subscriber avatar, then, becomes very specific. She’s not 35-60; she’s 38, married, with one kid and another on the way (and, apparently, a woman). She’s not middle-class with a white-collar job; she’s a financial manager with a health-care conglomerate, and she and her husband (a teacher) make enough money to afford a good day care and a very nice house in Austin, Texas. Hell, give her a backyard pool, too; it’s hot in Austin. She loves James Patterson, though she really only has time to read for a half-hour or so before bed, and on Saturday mornings when her husband takes their kid to soccer practice. Give her a name. This one’s Pamela.
Now, when you send a newsletter, aren’t you going to have an easier time relating to Pamela (who might even be a lot like you)? Won’t you naturally write your emails to appeal to someone like her, and in so doing write a friendlier, more enjoyable and relatable email?
I contend, quite fervently, that you will. And if you disagree, don’t tell me—because it works amazingly well for me, and for my students and clients. If we’ve only been succeeding by fooling ourselves … well, I don’t want to break the spell.
Now, will you alienate everyone who is not a 38-year-old financial manager? Of course not. Some things are universal: the joy of being a parent (stop laughing), the frustrations of a high-pressure job, trying to find time for self-care when our lives are so busy, navigating a marriage or relationship, worrying about money (even if you make quite a bit), daydreaming about a tryst with Chris Hemsworth or Scarlett Johansson (or both!). Having an avatar to think about when you’re composing an email allows you, almost paradoxically, to address specific universal themes that you would miss if you were trying to talk to however-many thousands of people, none of whom is exactly like the next.
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