018: Email Marketing 101 (And Why Email Is So Important)

Building up an list of readers is one of the best things you can do as an author. But how do you start the process? This episode covers exactly why email is so important, how to incentivize people to sign up for your email list, and what to do once they've signed up.

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email marketing 101 (And why email is so important)

Welcome to "Blank Page to Book" a podcast for writers and anyone who dreams of someday writing a book. I'm Katie Wolf and each week, I'll bring you short actionable advice on the craft of storytelling, writing your book, editing your manuscript, the business of being a writer, and working through mindset blocks, holding you back. Follow for weekly motivation and inspiration to move from blank page to book. Thanks for pushing play today and let's get started.

I'm excited to talk about email. I hope you're excited to this topic idea came from Instagram, I put out something in my stories saying, Hey, I'm doing some podcast episodes like what what do you want to see? What do you want to hear on the podcast? And this was an idea from someone. So thank you. I haven't talked about email marketing on the podcast before I've talked about it a little bit on tiktok. But I want to just say before we dive into why you need an email list, how to set one up how to get started all that kind of good stuff. I am coming at this more from the perspective of someone who has an email list and does email marketing for my business.

I don't have a book published yet. So I have not gone through the process of author, you know, marketing, and selling my book on an email list. There's a lot of overlap. I'm very familiar with email marketing. I've been doing it since 2020. So I can offer you a lot of wisdom and tips and perspective. But I just want to make that clear that I don't have an author newsletter. You know, I do keep my cats meowing. You want to be on the podcast eddy? I do keep my email list updated on you know where I'm at in my publishing journey, but just want to get that out of the way because I think it's important to be transparent about that.

Okay, so let's talk about why an email list is such a good idea why email marketing is such a good idea. And when you should start implementing this when you should build an email list. The great thing about an email list is that you own those subscribers. And that's a funny way of saying that, let me explain what I mean. I mean that you you own those addresses those email addresses, you are not at the mercy of a social media algorithm. When you are relying only on social media only on tik tok, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. You're kind of powerless. As far as like who sees your content, the Instagram algorithm might change one day, for example, and be worse than it already is. And maybe only 1% of your followers even see your posts about you're writing your book, whatever. Same thing with Tik Tok.

You know, we've already seen since Tik Tok exploded in popularity that the algorithm has changed. It's not as easy to get massive numbers of views on your videos as it was when TikTok was first created. And it makes sense because these are businesses they want you you know, they benefit from yes, they benefit from watch time and from people being on the app, but they benefit from advertising dollars. So if these social media platforms get to the point where people aren't seeing, you know, your your content, then you might be tempted to go with paid ads, social media ads, you know, it's definitely a marketing strategy. It's one that I've used in my business. But that's a topic for a different time.

The other thing to consider when social media, you know, with social media with algorithm, I forget what the exactly what the stats are for Instagram, I think like between four to 6% of your followers, see your content, on average, that is so low. Whereas with email marketing, when you send an email to your list, open rates are much higher. And it does vary depends on you know how big your email list is, it depends on how often you're emailing it depends on your industry. But I mean, you can expect between 15 and 30% open rates, generally speaking, that's so much better. So that means that 15 to 30% of the people who are on your list are going to open your email, see your content, see whatever you're sharing with them. It just makes sense, right? I think there's also a little bit of people who are on your email list are going to be automatically a little bit more invested in you. Because they have to part with something they have to trust you with their email address. I don't know about you, but I don't give out my email address to just anybody. Whereas social media, it's a little bit more impersonal. You can be like, yeah, this isn't my social media handle. It's not really a part of me, it doesn't feel private. But my email, especially my personal email, I don't just give that out to everyone that I have to want to be on a list before I'll part with that.

So that's why email is so important now when should you start email marketing? Again, because I have not gone through this as an author specifically, I'm just going to give you my thoughts from like marketing, like a marketing perspective. If you're self publishing, I think it's a good idea to start building up your email list way before you publish your book. And that makes sense, right? You want to get people to promote your book to before it's out, I would say, when you have something written, and you know, you're in the process of writing your book, that's when you can start. And I say when you have something written, because it's a good idea to offer people an incentive to get them to sign up for your list. And we'll talk about that in a few minutes. If you are doing traditional publishing or trying to do traditional publishing, if you get a book deal with a b Big Five publisher, they have their own setups as far as like author newsletters. So I wouldn't worry about doing that right now. If you're in the querying process, I wouldn't worry about it. But I think this is still good to listen to, it's still good to kind of keep in mind because email marketing is a skill, it's a skill that you can learn how to send out emails, what to send out, like, those are all things that you can kind of file away in the back of your head so that when you're ready to start doing this, you're not just added to total loss, and starting from scratch.

So you know, me, for example, I mentioned obviously, I do email marketing for my business, but I don't have an author newsletter, I'm pursuing traditional publication, but I don't really have anything — an author presence yet, so that's why I don't have one. Okay, so the first step is choosing an email service provider, right, you have to have some kind of system, some kind of tool, a company that you choose, who sets up you can do your email marketing through, there are so many different email service providers out there, some are marketed more towards writer, some are marketed more towards creatives, some are more marketed towards like businesses, I'm going to mention two on this podcast. One of them is MailChimp, if you are on a shoestring budget, and you want a free option, MailChimp is great. They let you have up to 2000 subscribers and you don't pay anything. Once you get to a certain level level of subscribers, then you you do start paying, but that's a great option if you really don't have the budget to be, you know, spending any money. MailChimp is free. There's not a lot of fancy bells and whistles, but it'll get the job done.

For my business, I use a an email service provider called Flow Desk. And I'll link to both of these in the episode description. I don't get any sort of kickback, these aren't affiliate links, I just want to share with you what I use Flow Desk is great, because it's so simplistic. I've used two other email service providers in the past and Flow Desk is so much easier and intuitive. And it's just clean, like the interface is really clean. The other reason that I like flow desk is they don't penalize you for growing your list. So you do have to pay with flow desk to get started. But then you pay that same price forever. So, you know, if I grow my email list to 100,000 people, I mean, that's a lot of people. But if I did, I would pay the same price with flow desk, whereas something like MailChimp or some other service providers, you have to pay more as your list grows. So that's why I decided to go with flow desk.

Okay, so I'm gonna I'm gonna walk you through kind of the journey of getting people on your list. One of the biggest recommendations if you take nothing else away from this episode, please take this part away. I strongly strongly encourage you to have some sort of lead magnet or reader magnet or freebie as an incentive to get people onto your list. I see so many people posting on social media or on author websites or even in, you know, people who self publish, I'll buy their their ebook on Amazon. And I'll see they'll have a call to action in there that says sign up for my newsletter. Of course, you'll get people who are really invested and love you and will sign up, of course. But what's the incentive? Why would people sign up? Especially if they've just been introduced to you they just come across your account on social media or something like what's the incentive? Why would they part with their email address that tells them nothing about what kinds of stuff you're going to send out? It's just you have to think from a readers perspective. From a business perspective, this is super important as well and there's all kinds of different names for it. I mentioned a few it's called lead magnet or reader magnet a freebie an opt in some kind of incentive basically I have a few different opt ins and lead magnets that I've created for my business, you've probably seen me talk about them on social media. I have one and I'll link all these in the in the description in case you want to download a freebie and get on my email list.

So I have one, that's five tips to help you write your book, I have one that's a character profile template that you can use to, to kind of make sure that your characters are strong. And then I also have one that's like an ultimate resource guide to finding an agent. I offered those as incentives because I want people who are, for me, ideal clients, people to get on my email list. And if I were to just put on social media, like sign up for my newsletter, why why would people sign up for that? It's a great idea, I promise, you're gonna see so much more traction, and so many more people signing up if you do this, and it's also it kind of creates a positive association. I shared I made a Tik Tok a while back about, I read the love hypothesis recently by Ali Hazelwood, which just adored it. And I followed her on Instagram. And I saw that she had a freebie a lead magnet for readers. That was one of the chapters from the male characters perspective. And I signed up for that so quickly, because I was like, I want that, oh, my gosh, I want that so badly. I love the book, I want to read this chapter from his perspective. And now it creates this kind of like really positive association in my brain with that author.

So when you're thinking about what exactly this can be, what what this reader magnet could be, it could be exactly what I just shared a chapter from a different character's perspective, it could be a bonus chapter, it could be a short, totally free book, it can be a deleted scene, something that's going to get people excited, and you know, make them want to sign up. So put yourself in the shoes of your ideal reader, what would they want to see. And it doesn't have to be something you know, book if you do other things, and you want to do like a video series or training or something like of course, you can do a lot of other things. But those are the most common ones that I that I see, I signed up for one of the ebooks I just purchased from a self published romance author she had in her in the book, it was like, sign up for the newsletter and get a bonus chapter from this, like, minor characters perspective. It was a character that wasn't didn't play a huge role in the story. But there's kind of like a parallel thing going on. And anyways, I signed up for her newsletter because I was like, Oh, I liked this book. I would want to read that chapter from this different character's perspective. Like That sounds interesting. So okay, so you put this this lead magnet this freebie you start promoting on social media, you put it on your your website, you start to get people to sign up.

Now what the other thing I really recommend doing is creating at least one welcome email. And this is all stuff that you could if it sounds overwhelming, you're like, how do I do that? This is all stuff you can do in your email service providers, they all have different language for it, what they call it. But basically, you can set up an automation so that when someone signs up for their for your reader magnet, they get a copy delivered to their email automatically. So you don't have to be monitoring your email and say, oh, so and so just sign up for this. Let me email them the PDF, like that's totally inefficient. People might sign up for something at 2am, you're asleep. And they're like, I signed up for this thing. Where is it? So it's all automated, it's a benefit of getting an email service provider. So they set it up so it gets delivered to them. And then the reason I think a welcome email is nice is because someone might, a reader might come across to your page or social media profile, buy your book, whatever, and not really know much about you like that, that does happen. So welcome email is a nice way to say, hey, thank you for signing up.

Here's a little bit more about me if you liked this book, here's the next one I've got coming out if you like this, you know stuff like follow me on social media. It's just a nice thing to do. I am shocked by how many author newsletters I've signed up for and there's no beyond delivery of the freebie. I don't hear anything from them for months after that. And then when I do get an email sometimes I'm like, Wait, did I sign up for this? I totally forgot. So that welcome email. If you send it a couple days afterwards, maybe maybe two days afterwards. You're kind of fresh in their mind because they've just received that freebie from you. So I strongly recommend at least one sort of like, welcome email. You can even let them know what to expect. Like hey, I sent out a dates once a month, I send out updates every two weeks, whatever.

So that brings us to our next point, what happens once you have people on your list? What do you do? I think it's a good idea to get in habit of emailing them regularly. And if you're like, What do I send them? What what do I do, especially, you know, if I'm like new to writing, and they don't really have a newsletter, you can find all kinds of different content. I mean, think about again, just keep putting yourself in the perspective of your ideal reader, what would be interesting to them, maybe share a behind the scenes content of you writing, sharing a bit about your process, sharing some Pinterest boards for mood boards for your story, sharing social media content, that's a good way to kind of come up with stuff for your, for your email list is just repurpose content from your social media. Because it's very rare that someone's going to see every single piece of content that you post, especially if you're on multiple platforms. If you blog, or you have a podcast, you can share that. You can also just let them know what's going on in your life like, you know, but always, I think it's helpful at every stage in this process of setting up this email list and creating newsletters, always put yourself in the readers shoes and think about what would be interesting to them. And if you really don't know, you can even put a post on social media like what do you guys want to see, what would be interesting, you know, you can kind of get some, some ideas from people.

And then obviously, something to include on your newsletters is promotion. Right, you can promote your book, you can have some launch emails for when your book launches. If you're self publishing. The reason it's a good idea to kind of establish a newsletter first so that people come to know you, they come to like you, they come to trust you so that when you're ready to promote something, they know who you are, and they're more willing to do to do that to purchase your book, because they're like, oh, yeah, I know. So they've been showing up in my email for the last four months, like, Yeah, I'll check out their book. If you only ever email your list, when you want to sell something, some of them might feel kind of like they're just there for, for you to make money. Right. So this is something I try to keep in mind with my email list, I try to provide value. And it varies how much I email my list I was doing once a week in the fall.

Now I've sort of dropped back to twice a month, I think is where I'm at right now that I'll send out two emails a month. But I do a lot of things that I just mentioned, I repurpose content. And I'll maybe if I made a Tik Tok video about something, I'll just write it out instead and put it in an email. I'll reshare you know, I'll copy the text of an Instagram post, I'll answer a writing related question that someone had, I'll share new podcast episodes. All of those things are providing value to people. So then, so then when I include a PS in my email and say PS, like, here's how we can work together, then hopefully, fingers crossed, people don't feel like I'm just there to sell like, I'm there to help. I'm, I'm showing up to help you like, I want to help you write your book, I want to help you edit your book, I want to help you like, with your mindset, I want to be providing value in all of those areas, and also share opportunities, if you feel called to do that, that we can work together there. But you know, there are people on my email list who are never going to hire me, I'm never going to work with them. And that's fine. Like, I'm happy that they're there. Same thing with you, if you're building up an email list, or readers, some of the people on there will never buy your books, and that's okay. You know, it's about building a community and, and they can still support you even if they don't buy your books, you know, they can follow you online, they can reshare your content, like, it's fine.

So that's again, that's email marketing 101 There's so much that we can dive into but this is kind of like a high level overview of how to get started important things you need to think about. And really why you should do it. I think a while ago, maybe like five years ago, there was this myth that like email is dead. No one reads email anymore. And that's just absolutely not true. Don't rely only on social media because again, let's just take Instagram as an example. Instagram could disappear tomorrow. And if you've built up a huge platform and Instagram, but you have no way to get in touch with your readers off of Instagram. If Instagram goes away, like how do you contact those people? You're sort of you know, screwed then. So highly recommend email marketing, starting an email list. And thinking about putting yourself in the reader shoes to see what they would find most interesting and helpful and valuable. Good luck.

Katie Wolf