Newsletter Ninja

by Tammi Labrecque

  Basically, no matter what you write, there’s probably some sort of non-book bonus that you can think of if you try hard enough—and if you talk to your readers and watch what other authors are doing.

  As I mentioned in the Onboarding chapter, some people have a separate cookie for each of their series. This is a great idea, because it gives an entry point for every series, which will naturally result in more signups. You can even create a box set and give away a collection of your cookies in hopes that, as people who signed up from one series read through it, they will want to read the other series.

  And if you write a new cookie, send that to your existing list, too! They’ll love you for it, and be incentivized to stick around because every once in a while they just get a cool freebie from you for no reason at all. Never forget, while you do want to attract new people to your list, your first priority should be treating well the subscribers who are already there. They’ve stuck with you; reward them whenever you can.

  Now let’s shift gears and talk about engagement (and re-engagement), so you’ve got a responsive list to send all these fun surprises to.

  13 - Engagement

  I can’t count the number of complaints I hear—from both incoming students and other author friends—that run along these lines: “I send out an email every time I have a new release, but my open rates just go down and down, and my click rates are even worse. Why are these people on my list if they don’t want to buy my books? If they don’t want to open the emails, why haven’t they unsubscribed?”

  There is so much wrong with this that I’m going to break it down sentence-by-sentence for you:

  I send out an email every time I have a new release, but my open rates just go down and down, and my click rates are even worse.

  Okay, so back in the chapter on the sign-up process, I made some snarky remarks about sending newsletters only when you have a new release. If you were wondering what the hell I have against this method, well, I’ll tell you.

  Sending an email only when you have a new release is, for most people, not an effective strategy at all. I definitely know plenty of people who follow this method, and only a handful have what I would call a successful list—one with subscribers who open and click on their emails regularly.

  But as a general rule, if you only send an email when you have a new release, you create for yourself a threefold problem:

  First, unless you release very frequently, readers are not hearing from you often enough to keep you at the forefront of their mind. If you release two or three books a year, chances are good you’ll have been forgotten by the time you email them again.

  Second, you’re not emailing often enough to cement your reputation as a good sender. Remember, we spoke briefly about reputation back in The First Date; let me elaborate now.

  Your reputation will first be affected by the EMS you choose. Some EMS have quite generous free options; as a result, the sorts of people who do unsavory things with email (and spoil it for the rest of us) or people who are new to their author career (and as a consequence don’t have a huge budget for an EMS, and may just not be that good at email) tend to use those services. If your email comes from one of those, it may not be as well-received as an email from one of the other EMS. (I don’t necessarily think this is a huge consideration in choosing an EMS, but it’s good to be aware of it.) Getting few or no Spam complaints helps reputation, as do good open and click rates, and frequent replies. Basically, as I’ve been saying, the way subscribers receive and interact with an email from you contributes to your sender reputation.

  However, reputation does not last forever. If there’s a long window of time between two of your emails, your reputation will decrease, or possible disappear entirely (there’s some disagreement about this, among those of us who find that kind of argument exciting). We can’t say for certain how long that window is—I’ve heard people say 30 days, 6 weeks, 2 months, you name it—but we do know it’s there. Some folks say it’s a hard window and if you go over, you have to start from scratch. Some say it’s more like a points system, where you might take a hit in reputation from going over 30 days, but the 4 emails you sent before count, too, so it’s only a small ding.

  Whatever the interval is or how badly it can damage you, everyone agrees that if you go longer than that, your reputation is harmed in some fashion, and it certainly isn’t improving. With some subscribers, this isn’t a huge deal; if they’ve been very engaged with you, you’ve probably become a trusted sender. But if you haven’t been getting replies from this person and they haven’t whitelisted you, Gmail has nothing other than your (lack of) reputation by which to judge you—and may very well judge you worthy of the Promotions tab.

  I’ll talk just a bit more about reputation in later chapters, and I’ve included links to some very good articles in the Helpful Links section. You should definitely check them out.

  The third problem with only sending when you have a new release—and perhaps most important of the three, from a fan-building perspective—is that if you choose to do this, your give-to-ask ratio is way out of whack. (“My what ratio?” I hear you saying. We’ll get to that shortly.) Every time your readers hear from you, you’re asking them to do something to benefit you—specifically, to buy your book.

  When we get to the whole give-to-ask thing, you’ll understand what I mean and why that’s bad. For now, suffice it to say that if the only interactions you have with your list are asking them to do something for you, you’re going to lose them—and, in my opinion, you deserve to. Mailing only for new releases sounds like a great way to get subscribers but doesn’t in fact get you any subscribers that you can leverage effectively when the time does come to ask them for something (and it will).

  Why are these people on my list if they don’t want to buy my books?

  This is the big question, isn’t it? And there can be a variety of answers.

  Maybe you enticed them onto the list with the wrong thing. I see people giving away gift cards and Kindle Fires, and this is a dreadful way to list-build. It won’t benefit you in the slightest, because those kinds of things have nothing to do with your books, but lots of people will sign up because people love free stuff. Always make sure your cookies are the sort of thing that will be loved only by people who like your books (or books very much like yours), not by every person who might want an Amazon gift card (by which I mean “every person with an internet connection”).

  I’d also think about where you got the subscribers. If it was in a big cross-promo or some sort of list-building giveaway—or any situation, really, where they had to exchange their email address to get something free from you—they may very well not want to buy your books (yet). They may have joined simply for the free taste and they either haven’t gotten around to reading it yet or they weren’t interested enough in what they read to continue opening your emails. Fixing (or preventing) this is, as we’ve discussed, the job of your onboarding sequence. If you’re finding that people aren’t interacting with emails right after the onboarding—or, worse, emails that are part of your onboarding—you either have a massive deliverability problem or your onboarding isn’t doing what it’s supposed to.

  Sometimes—and oh boy does this one suck—the problem is with the books. If subscribers liked your books when they signed up, but stopped enjoying them, their urge to open your newsletter will wane as well. If you’ve noticed markedly decreased sales followed by fewer signups and less engagement with current subscribers, you may have a sell-through problem, and that’s usually down to something about the books. Figure out where the dropoff is happening and fix the problem. I can’t solve that problem here, obviously, but this is the sort of thing that it’s great to get someone to help you with—a book doctor or consultant of some kind. Ask fellow authors for recommendations of people who might be able to help you.

  (An aside: Never take advice from someone who doesn’t have a demonstrable track record or great word-of-mouth from authors you know or who
are well-respected in the author community—and even then, use your head. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And if someone suggests a solution to an issue you’re having, and it makes absolutely no sense, they’re probably wrong. Every time in my career that someone has given me really good advice about an issue I was having, it’s been like someone turned a light on—“Of course that’s how to fix it!”—and you should have a similar reaction to any advice you paid for. If you don’t, it may not be very good advice.)

  If they don’t want to open the emails, why haven’t they unsubscribed?

  That’s a fair question. Again, the answer could be one of several things, or even a combination.

  They might just not have gotten around to it; I am personally guilty of not unsubscribing until I notice I haven’t opened someone’s emails in months. And even then it might take me a while to get to it if I’m swamped with other things.

  They might be waiting to see if you offer more free stuff, and not opening because they figure they can deduce from the subject line if you have a freebie for them.

  They might actually be opening your emails, but you can’t see it. What I mean is, they might be reading email in such a way that the open doesn’t register with your EMS. Some people read in Microsoft Outlook’s preview pane, for example, which does not register as an open. Many people turn off images to conserve data if they read on their phones, and some email providers—Gmail, for example—disable images by default in many emails, particularly ones it determines are marketing-related. EMS like MailChimp use an invisible image to tell them if someone has opened an email. If the image doesn’t load, you don’t know that the subscriber opened your email. You can get around this by making them click—clicks always register—but some people refuse to click on links in emails, and there’s very little you can do about that. When the time comes to re-engage people who aren’t opening and/or clicking (more on that in a moment), you’ll have to use some special techniques for folks like that.

  The second thing to consider is that they might very much like to open your emails, but that they simply aren’t seeing them. Delivery is a real problem, and only becoming more difficult. So let’s take a few minutes to talk about deliverability—or lack thereof.

  14 - Deliverability

  Deliverability—defined here as the likelihood that your emails will be delivered to the inboxes of subscribers, rather than flagged as Spam or Promotions—is inextricably linked to engagement. Basically, you need to keep people engaged if you want them to continue to see your emails, but you need them to see your emails if you want to keep them engaged. It’s a real chicken-or-egg situation, and no one wants their livelihood dependent on a causality dilemma, so you want to start engaging them right from the start, as we talked about before, and you want to make sure that they understand they need to be proactive about looking for your emails. (You see why I bang on so endlessly about whitelisting?) One thing I find effective is to post on Facebook and Twitter when I’ve sent out a newsletter, so that subscribers who see the post might go look for theirs. It’s not foolproof (because visibility on social media is universally pretty rubbish), but every open helps.

  Deliverability is going down for lots of people; if you’re seeing this, you are not alone.

  When you send, Gmail (or Hotmail, or whomever) decides what to do with your email. Mostly, it seems they decide that the one thing they should definitely not do is show it to the person who asked for it. There are a few reasons.

  For one thing, email providers are getting tougher in the way that they evaluate emails. Things that would have passed a Spam filter no problem a year ago will send up red flags now, and prevent you from reaching inboxes. I’m talking here about things like lots of links in the email, too many—or any!—images, too many exclamation points, certain words or types of links, etc. I’ve included some links in the Helpful Links section that will help you to avoid Spam filters. But this is something that changes over time, and you’ll need to keep yourself educated about what sorts of things may trigger a red flag. It’s worth making a note to yourself to Google a couple of times a year and see if something you’ve been doing for a while might now be negatively affecting your deliverability.

  Additionally, actions you take can also affect your deliverability. As we’ve discussed, getting people to whitelist you will affect it positively. Sending boring, too-frequent, or inappropriate newsletters will lead to decreased engagement, which leads to deliverability issues. Do not send boring emails, ever. Even one really bad email can cause a huge dip in opens the next time you send.

  And, finally, readers just have newsletter fatigue. This, again, leads to non-opens, which leads to poor deliverability. The solution to this is to have a newsletter that is so uniquely you that it will without question be something your readers look forward to—because they like you, remember? Be yourself, and they will like your newsletter as well.

  So, assuming you’re writing decent emails and not doing spammy things, how do you convince Gmail or whomever that they should be delivering your emails instead of routing them to the circular file? You do this by making damn sure that those people who do see your emails interact with them in the ways we’ve talked about, thereby raising your reputation and increasing the likelihood that further emails from you will not be judged as harshly. In a perfect world, after a period of time where you’ve proved yourself to be a wonderful sender with lots of engagement, you would somehow become safe, or see no declines. This is not that world.

  The sad truth is, you will absolutely see a decline in open rates over the lifetime of your list. Always. No matter how good your emails are, no matter how carefully cultivated your list, open rates will decline, because the deck is stacked against you. And then every email that doesn’t get opened only confirms the email providers’ bad opinion of you, which leads to more of your emails not reaching their destination, and now we’re back to a chicken-and-egg thing.

  You will fight for deliverability throughout the entire life of your newsletter, and I imagine it’s only going to get more difficult as time goes on. You’ll want to stay on top of this topic, for sure, and be ready to pivot when things change.

  So, knowing all this—and feeling hopeless now that I’ve been such a Debbie Downer—how do we increase deliverability when we see that ours is declining?

  Before we talk about the answer, let’s talk about what’s not the answer: getting more subscribers.

  Don’t misunderstand me; you want to be getting new subscribers steadily, from whatever sources you’ve determined work well for you. I’m not saying abandon list-building or anything crazy like that. But new subscribers aren’t going to do much for your deliverability; you have no history with them, and no reputation related to communication between the two of you. In fact, when you look at it that way, new subscribers are, in the short-term, more likely to give you a slight decrease in visibility. They are not the answer to this particular problem.

  So how do you increase deliverability?

  The first step is to start absolutely nailing this whole newsletter thing. This means building relationships and delivering value. We’ll hit those in the next two chapters.

  The second step is to be constantly re-engaging the list you already have, which is the chapter after that.

  And finally, once you’ve done your best to get people’s attention and given them great reasons to stick around and keep opening, you’re going to use the information in the last chapter to toss all the dead weight overboard.

  We’re in the home stretch now.

  15 - Building Relationships

  So the first order of business is building genuine, two-way relationships with your subscribers, which is neither as scary nor as difficult as it seems. This is where you start differentiating your list from everyone else’s and getting your subscribers to stick to you like glue.

  Now that we’ve got a handle on deliverability (I will never call that particular problem solved, but �
��got a handle on it” seems okay), we can think about the purpose of your emails. As I think I’ve made clear, selling books is a secondary purpose, but primarily you are building that list of superfans that I keep waxing rhapsodic about. To do that—to truly cement those readers to you and turn them into the kind of fans who go out and evangelize about you—you need to take it to the next level. And that starts with building actual relationships with your subscribers.

  This chapter is another long one, because this is a real sticking point for many people. Of all the things I teach in Mailing List Expert, I think this is the point on which I get the most pushback from students. For many people, this step seems like the hardest of all; fortunately, it’s not. It’s actually quite easy once you understand two things: why you’re doing it, and how to do it.

  The why is simple; as I’ve said before (and will say again, probably so much that you’ll have nightmares about it), you are creating a fanbase. Selling books is a happy side effect of that, but creating that fanbase must be your primary objective—because one will lead to the other, but only in one direction. I’m putting this next thing in its own paragraph, because it’s the bedrock of my entire philosophy, which by this point I dearly hope you’ve bought into:

  Not everyone who buys one of your books will become a lifelong fan, but your lifelong fans will buy all of your books.

  Do you see how powerful that is? I can’t stress it enough. Don’t direct your newsletter’s focus solely (or even mainly) on selling whatever book you happen to be flogging today; build superfans and they will buy the book you have out today, and the one you have in two months, and all the ones after that—without you having to sellsellsell to a group of folks who might shrug and decide they’re just not that into you.