Email marketing is the most powerful tool at your disposal and not taking advantage of its unique benefits is really missing a trick. Here's why.

I'm sure all of you know the power of having thousands of committed readers signed up to your mailing list, allowing you to send each new release into the charts. Even if you're not there yet personally, this should be something you are aiming for. Every single author should have a mailing list and be seeking to actively grow it.

But before we fly through the basics and delve into more advanced topics, let's be clear about something: email marketing is not about spam. It's not about fake intimacy. It's not about posing BS questions to create false engagement. And it's not about bait-and-switches, contrived urgency, click-baiting subject lines, or other emotional tricks; that's what cheesy internet marketers do.

It's a huge mistake to look at someone doing email marketing in a slimy way and decide that email isn't for you. There's a right way and a wrong way to use every tool.

Example of a spammy use of email by an internet marketer sending sleazy messages every two days to a totally unengaged audience
Definitely don't do this.

Email Marketing Basics

I recommend MailerLite (aff link) for the job, which is free for the first 1,000 subscribers and reasonably priced thereafter, has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for creating pretty emails, enables you to slice-and-dice your lists whichever way you please, gives you a nice clean and clear interface, offers great customer service, and allows surprisingly powerful automations.

(Note: I switched to MailerLite from Mailchimp, for reasons detailed in this post – Time To Ditch Mailchimp? – which also recommends MailerLite alternatives for those with specific needs).

Also make sure to have an enticing call-to-action right at the end of all your books, pointing people towards a clean sign-up page on your website, so that you can capture as many of those readers as possible who were delighted with your story.

Okay. This is just the bare minimum reader-capturing apparatus that you should have in place, preferably with some form of welcome sequence too.

Writing good books, releasing as frequently as you can manage, and growing your list over time organically will get you going. But email marketing can do so much more for you than simply roll out launch announcements.

Reader Retention via Email

As authors, have various techniques aimed at getting people to check out our work, whether that's engaging in price promotions, giving our work away for free, buying a spot on various reader sites, advertising on Amazon, Facebook and BookBub, engaging in cross-promotions with other writers, beefing our review count by giving away ARCs – the list of such tactics is endless, and the amount of time and money and headspace we devote to these activities is considerable.

But you know what's way easier than gaining a new customer? Keeping an old one.

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