You need to keep the give-to-ask ratio at the forefront of your mind when you’re planning and composing campaigns—and, for that matter, your autoresponders, though I would say that any ask in an autoresponder should be a very soft ask (no hard sells, nothing labor-intensive). You’ll find a ratio that’s comfortable for you, but keep in mind that it should heavily favor the subscriber rather than you. You are competing with countless other authors, all vying for subscriber attention; make sure that your list is the one they wouldn’t dream of unsubscribing from.
The give-to-ask ratio doesn’t have to be a specific formula, like “For every ask you must first have three gives.” You can have a formula if you like, if that helps you to police yourself and make sure you’re keeping an eye on it. But if you’re the sort who can just kind of feel that you’ve been good about not asking for things for a while and now would be a fine time to do so, go right ahead and keep it informal. Whatever works for you.
One thing that will help a lot with that give-to-ask ratio is keeping your release emails completely separate from your regular newsletter. For example, my newsletter goes out with an attractive header, a give or two, and unobtrusive, in-line sales links if I mention one of my books, but there’s no overt direction to go buy something. We’re just talking, my subscribers and me, and I’m not going to ruin our nice conversation with a bunch of slick sales talk. But when I have a new book, readers get an email from me that doesn’t look like my newsletter; it’s stripped-down, no header, few or no pictures, just a short and sweet “The new book’s out, here’s a link, go get it.”
So if you email every other Friday, or on the 15th of every month, or whatever your schedule is, do that as promised. Then, on release day—whether that’s every month or every three months, or whatever—send them the release email. This email doesn’t count as your once-a-month (or however often) newsletter, because (she said for the millionth time) the purpose of your newsletter isn’t to sell books. Selling is different than talking to your people, and if you can divorce those two things, you will be solid.
I do it this way for a couple of reasons. One, I want my newsletter to feel a little like getting an email from a friend. Now obviously my subscribers and I aren’t friends in any traditional sense, but I want them to get something akin to the warm fuzzies when they see my name in their inbox. Keeping sales emails to a completely different format and not replacing the regular newsletter with a sales email lets the reader know that I like them quite apart from trying to sell them books.
And, it’s worth pointing out, those stripped-down release emails are less likely to trigger Spam flags, so the open rates on my release emails tend to be 10-12% higher than any individual newsletter open rate. That’s a win right there.
This will usually keep your give-to-ask ratio well in hand, because almost no one I know is publishing books so fast that they would send more release emails than newsletters. So the pattern will automatically set you up for more give interactions than ask ones. People worry a lot about not having enough to talk about between books, but I promise, you have plenty to talk about. Just the lists of question in the last chapter will keep you busy for ages, and if you Google “conversation starters” like I recommended, you could probably write a weekly email even if you only release once a year and never make your subscribers feel like you were wasting their time. And that, of course, is the one thing we must never, ever do. Respect your subscribers’ time and treat them well; it will build goodwill, and then those subscribers are there for you when you need them.
Treating Your Subscribers Well
So, how do you do that—treat your subscribers well? What can you do to make your newsletter something readers don’t just welcome, but look for and are excited about? Aside from keeping your give-to-ask ratio in mind, there are some other principles that will help you make your newsletter a great experience that keeps them coming back for more.
Ask yourself, before each email you send, “What’s in this for my subscriber?” If there’s nothing exciting, interesting, or notable about the email you’re about to send, don’t send it! Respect your subscribers’ time by making sure they’re always glad they opened your newsletter, because there was something in it for them. That’s the one thing no email can be without.
Make your subscribers feel special. They’re your fans, which makes them part of a community of people who love your work. Even if that’s a community of ten, so what? Always treat your list the same—as though you’re honored that they chose to spend time with your newsletter—no matter what size it is. (And remember, your subscriber avatars come in handy here.)
Make it so good they recommend it to their friends. New books, deals, book recommendations, funny memes, cool research, travel diaries, pet pictures … always and forever with the pet pictures. If you’re constantly delivering laughs or feels or great recommendations or whatever it is that your subscribers love, they’re going to tell their friends “You’ve got to sign up for this; it’s awesome.”
Only send them relevant emails. As I mentioned in The Sign-Up Process, this is a great time to start tagging or segmenting people. Higher-end EMS like Drip and ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit will allow you to set tags that will be applied when a subscriber takes a certain action, and that allow you to sort out groups of people to target with specific emails. Other EMS have similar, if slightly less robust, options like segments and groups.
Let me take a break from the list for a second, and give you an example of a good thing to select for: In the last email of my romance pen name’s onboarding sequence, I list the major ebookstores (Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, B&N, and Google Play, at the time of this writing) and ask subscribers to click whichever platform they prefer to shop on; there’s also a “No Preference” option. In this way, I can be sure not to send Kobo readers emails about books that might only be available on Amazon or iBooks.
You can also sort of jerry-rig this stuff with the less expensive options, but you have to consider the balance between spending your time on something or spending your money. As with so many things in indie publishing, when you’re starting out, you probably have more time than money, and it makes sense to bootstrap what you can and DIY as much as possible. But as money becomes more plentiful, the value of your time will increase, and there usually comes a point where paying for convenience or assistance is worth it. You’ll know when that time comes.
Okay, back to ways to treat your subscribers well:
Don’t be spammy. This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. Don’t be one of those people who does so many newsletter swaps you’re sending an email to your list every day. Don’t recommend books you haven’t read (or otherwise know to be good, like ones from a favorite author that you know never disappoints). Don’t resend an unopened email more than once. Don’t email the non-openers asking why they don’t like you anymore. Remember what you told people they were signing up for, and only give them that. That’s all you have permission for, really.
Solicit replies in every email. Building a two-way relationship with subscribers makes you feel like a real person to them, someone they know, and they’re more likely to continue opening your emails and deepening that connection.
Give readers what they want. How do you know what they want? You ask them. Ask them either/or questions, poll them, make suggestions and tell them to reply and let you know what they think. They will absolutely weigh in on the things that matter to them.
And, of course, as a bonus (everyone knows what’s coming, but I’ll say it anyway): When you do those things and people respond by opening, clicking, replying, you improve your reputation.
Also, keep in mind that anything you send that’s relevant to you and your work—especially cover reveals, sneak peeks, excerpts, and the like—is a powerful form of selling without selling. Hyping up your work by letting subscribers in on the creative process, in large or small ways, gets them excited for the release day, and means they’re looking for that email
that says “The book is finally here!” Ultimately, good marketing is about putting a product or service in front of the people most likely to want it. This is exactly what you’re doing with your newsletter.
And for the people who don’t seem to be excited about the new book, or your newsletter, or even you? The ones who don’t open, click, or reply? First, you try to bring them back into the fold (re-engagement); if that doesn’t work, you dump them (purge the dead weight) without remorse.
Let’s start with re-engagement.
17 - Re-engagement
Re-engagement is the process of identifying the people who aren’t interacting with your emails and targeting them with specific campaigns designed to get them opening, clicking, and replying again. In my opinion, all engagement is really about re-engagement, because the people who are opening and clicking and replying aren’t the ones who need to be engaged; they’re not the problem. The people who have whitelisted you are really not the problem. The problem is the people who are simply not opening your emails. You’ve got them; we all do, and that’s just the way of things. The key is to try to weed those people out whenever possible, so they’re not hanging around like so much dead weight, screwing up your open rates and causing the people who do want your emails not to see them.
But first we want to make sure that either they really don’t want to hear from us or, for whatever reason, they aren’t seeing our emails and we can’t overcome it. Sometimes you won’t be able to tell which, because they look the same: someone is sent your re-engagement campaign and never opens. But in the end it doesn’t really matter which camp they fall into; if you can’t get them to open an email, out they go. The interval is up to you, of course, but I try to re-engage and purge twice a year.
So how do we get them to open emails, when by definition they haven’t been for a while now? By taking what we know about how to craft killer emails and turning it up to eleven. (Oh, man, I really hope I’m not the only one who gets that reference.)
What?
I hear you. You’re already doing your best, writing emails that would make angels weep (if angels cared about emails, which they don’t), delivering value in every paragraph, every sentence, every semicolon; and here I come to tell you to work harder.
Yeah. I’m like that. But take heart; it’s not hopeless, and I’m not actually telling you to work harder. I’m telling you to work differently. There are specific methods to re-engage people who have fallen by the wayside, and they’re actually not the same ones that you use to keep month-to-month engagement with the section of your list that’s responsive.
The first—and probably most important—part of your re-engagement campaign is writing absolutely irresistible subject lines.
Now, obviously you should have been writing great subject lines all along; I’ve chosen to put it in this chapter because even though they’re important to every email (and you should be making them as good as you can, every time), the engaged portion of your list, as I mentioned above, is not causing you trouble. They’ll forgive you if your subject line isn’t honed to diamond-like brilliance. But here, among people who seem not to care about you, you really need your subject lines to shine.
Remember, you’re dealing with non-openers, so you absolutely cannot rely on the content of the newsletter to do the work of re-engaging. You have to grab them with the subject line—to the point where, even though they have been ignoring your emails for a while, they simply have to open this one.
In the Helpful Links section, I’ve linked to some really excellent articles on how to create great subject lines, but let’s also talk about it a bit here. Subject lines are at once one of the easiest things to do and one of the hardest. Easy, because you know how to entertain people and get their attention; you’re a writer, for crying out loud. But hard, because subject lines can be tricky, and the advice you get about them is pretty much always contradictory. They need to be descriptive, but not too long, especially now that everyone is reading on their phones and only sees a little bit of the subject line. They need to be straightforward, so people know what they’re getting, but also intriguing, so they want to open. If they’re time-sensitive, you want to say so, but you don’t want to sound like that store that’s had a “Going out of business sale” for the last 3 years. Being funny helps a lot, but you can’t be too weird or it’ll put people off.
No problem, right?
But some best practices are universal. Make your subject lines relevant to the content inside. Make them catchy. Give people a reason to open—a benefit or surprise or mystery. Ask a question. If you can get a very short quote from a testimonial, those work great.
Interestingly, numbers seem to increase open rates. “The 10 best books I read last year,” for example, or “5 authors that are automatic release-day buys for me.”
Giving someone a command rather than just declaring information works well; “Get my new release today!” as opposed to “My new book is here!”
Seasonal things are always a hit. If you’re a romance writer who doesn’t send a special email around Valentine’s Day, or a horror writer who’s not taking full advantage of Halloween, then you are really asleep at the switch and need to up your game.
Puns! People freaking love puns, and just wordplay in general. So if you can be clever—or so cringe-worthy that it circles back around to being clever again—go for it.
And one weird thing (ha! See what I did there?) that works like gangbusters is emojis—particularly the poop emoji. Yes, it’s true; in terms of increasing open rates, the poop emoji outperforms all other emojis by a notable margin. (There’s a link to an article about this in the Helpful Links section.)
The poop emoji is probably not appropriate for what you’re writing (but if it is, whatever, you do you), but other emojis also increase open rates. If you can relate them to the subject of the email, or just to your genre, tone, or theme in general, subscribers are quite responsive to that as well—hearts for romance authors, for example, or a robot for science fiction.
You definitely want to be aware of what words will get you flagged as Spam (both in the subject line and in the email itself, actually); we talked about this in the chapter on Deliverability. But you also have to understand that you are in fact selling books, and you are in fact sometimes giving something away, and if you have to say that in plain language then that’s just how it is. Fortunately, since you’ve been working so hard to build a great reputation and encourage whitelisting, and all that good stuff we’ve been talking about, your deliverability can take the small hit that comes with using the words “gift card” or “free” or whatever.
And you want to split-test everything. You can test some really general things, like whether your subscribers are more likely to open if the subject line references a popular movie, or if books get a better response instead. But you can also get really granular with this, and split-test subject lines that differ in some very small way; for example, “You have to read this book!” vs “You have to buy this book!” (The first one’s going to work better. There, I saved you a split-test.)
When you begin your re-engagement campaign, though, all of that flies out the window. There’s really only one rule at the start of re-engagement: The subject line needs to make it clear that there is something really good inside, and that it’s not going to cost them a cent. It’s that simple. Make them absolutely have to open, and give them a really great freebie that no sane person could resist clicking on.
If they click, great. They move on to the next part of the sequence, and—this is the important part—no more freebies for them. The next email can offer an inexpensive book, even 99 cents if you’ve got one to offer or know of one you can recommend, but you aren’t going to send any more freebies to this campaign. The freebie was solely to get their attention; now that you have it, you’re going to determine if this is the sort of person who ever clicks on something that might cost them money. If they don’t click on your next few emails, don’t open
them, or didn’t even open the first one, they’re deadbeats and they have to go. We’ll talk about how to get rid of them, but first I need to address a special kind of non-opener that you need to treat better than these deadbeats—because in this case, you were the deadbeat.
Special Case: When You’re the Reason They’re Not Engaged
Sure, sometimes people aren’t opening your emails because they’re not engaged or they’re busy or they’re free-seekers or … you know, a million reasons. But sometimes subscribers are unresponsive because you weren’t handling them right. Maybe you only email when you have a new release, and you only release one book a year. Or maybe you got caught up in newsletter swapping and alienated subscribers by sending emails too frequently. There are a few different ways you can turn off your list—and they will get you a lot of unsubscribes, but some people will stay on the list, hoping that it might be good again.
If you have existing lists like this—ones that are fallow or that you haven’t been treating right—you re-engage them like any other non-opener (with a crazy good email they can’t resist opening). But once they’ve opened that first re-engagement email, you want to shift them into a short little sequence (similar to your onboarding sequence) where you re-orient them to you, your books, and your newsletter; and where you make it clear that this newsletter is about to become awesome, so they should give you another chance.
If you’re making changes to the frequency of your newsletter, this is a great time to tell them that. If you have something to apologize for, just do it. You’ll win some people back by saying “I didn’t know how to do this newsletter thing right so I was doing XYZ, and that’s not any fun for you,” and the people you can’t win back weren’t going to love you again anyway. Treat it like any other relationship you screwed up: say you’re sorry, try to fix it, and then move on if you have to, wiser and determined never to make that mistake again.
Newsletter Ninja Page 9