Browsers to buyers: a multi-part challenge

Improve your hit rate. View in browser Hey, If you have taken my free course Starting From Zero, you will know I spend a lot of time talking about getting to know your niche, and then packaging your book in a way that readers will respond to it. Less experienced authors often want to jump right to the sexy stuff: launch plans, promo sites, Facebook whizzbangery.  However, savvy self-publishers glom on to any branding insights going to see if there is any drop of knowledge they can apply to their own books. And the reason is simple: the math of conversion is perilous and inescapable. As I will show you in a moment. We often think of conversion as a singular process – someone sees your book and buys it… or not. But more usually it's a multi-step process. Just one example: a reader opens her email, clicks on the BookBub Featured Deals message, scrolls all the way to the bottom after nothing catches her eye, sees your ad, likes your graphic, notices the special offer, clicks on it, looks at the cover on Amazon for a few seconds, half-reads the blurb, glances at the price again, notices the large number of positive reviews, thinks about hitting the sample button, but decides to buy instead as it is so cheap. All of this can happen quite quickly in real-time, but if we slow down for a moment, there are multiple times when the sale must be closed here, and multiple places where you could have failed.  Conversion isn't a light-switch, it's a process with multiple stages. A million variations on the above example play out every day. Sometimes the purchase-consideration process is quite elongated – consumers can weigh a potential buy for any length of time but the higher the price, the more cautious they might be. In other words, you're going to spend more time weighing the pros and cons of a $300 mattress than a 99c book. And you might spend more time reading the reviews (or sampling first) if the book is $9.99 versus $2.99. Other times the purchase-consideration process is more truncated – you might be one of the featured deals in that BookBub email, rather than an ad at the bottom, where the combination of low price, high visibility, and killer cover pushes readers straight to that Buy button without a moment's hesitation. In either case though, your book must convert readers multiple times. Even if you speak about your most hardcore fans – the eager beavers on your list who are primed to buy your next book the moment it drops – you still have to convert them twice: once in the email, and once more on your Amazon page. (And if you are linking to your website, perhaps so you can cover multiple retailers, you might have to convert them three times: once in the email, once again on your site, and once more on your Kobo page.) Just think about that for a second: even with your most hardcore fans, every single opportunity to make a sale contains at least two or three points where you could lose them. Even your "gimme" sales need to be closed two or three times and you have a huge influence on the outcome. Let's look at some hypothetical numbers. Martha Midlister Lands The Plane Martha is releasing the fifth book in her hilarious epic fantasy series that has proven a hit with readers. Her list is up to 5029 names now and they are pretty engaged and looking forward to the next book. She sends her launch email, and because she has taken the time to do some nice branded graphics, but also test her send first so it avoids the dreaded Promotions tab, it has an open rate of 43% and a click rate of 15% - meaning 754 readers happily click through to her product page on Amazon. Now let's also assume that our diligent author Martha has crafted a compelling blurb, is not gouging her readers with the price, already has a dozen glowing reviews from superfans, has stellar series branding and the cover is totally nailed-on for the niche too. With super qualified traffic like that, excellent presentation, and this being the Book 5 of the series – meaning most people clicking through from her email are pretty darn well hooked at this point – Martha might see a very high on-page conversion rate of 60% or more. Meaning 452 readers immediately complete the transaction on Amazon. (We are estimating this, in case you are wondering; retailers don't share this data.) That isn't all the sales Martha will make for this book, of course, and it's not all the sales Martha will get from her list – it's the immediate, direct sales she generates from that email send. Seeds which will grow into many more sales. More readers will complete the transaction later, more again will purchase when they are reminded to do so by one of her ads, and even more again will act on an Amazon recommendation, etc. But for the purposes of this example, 452 readers complete the transaction on Amazon on receipt of Martha's email. Martha Midlister Cuts It Fine Now let us imagine for a moment that Martha hadn't quite been so diligent. Let's pretend Martha ran this release a little close to the wire, and barely had time to implement her editor's suggestions before uploading it to Amazon – racing against time to meet her pre-scheduled launch date. She knows it probably could have done with another proofing pass, but she had no choice: the clock was ticking and she had too much promo lined up to delay anything just for a few typos. And yeah, she didn't have time to make her nice branded graphics either, but whatever. It's Book 5. Readers will either buy it or not at this point, right? She also can't seem to avoid the Promotions tab with this email for some reason but doesn't have time to go down that rabbit hole, not with the dog barking and the kids screaming and the doorbell ringing – God, can I not just get twenty minutes of peace to sort everything out on launch day? (Martha: I'm not judging you here!) She hits Send and then goes to remind the kids that the dog is not actually a horse. Her email gets an open rate of 36.2% and a click rate of 8%. Meaning only 402 readers click through to the book. And because the blurb is pretty tired and unexcited – because Martha was pretty tired and unexcited when she penned it late last night – the on-page conversion rate, even among her most eager fans – drops to 49%, delivering Martha just 197 sales from her email send instead. 452 sales versus 197 sales. Chaining Failures What looks like a moderate drop in performance can have a severe effect on the bottom line. A couple of minor preparatory steps which were skipped or rushed, and suddenly your launch email is delivering half the sales it could have been. Now imagine the range of outcomes with colder traffic – i.e. the less forgiving readers who aren't fans yet, who come to a book's page from an Amazon recommendation or a Facebook Ad. The range of outcomes widens considerably. It's kind of like credit card debt. If you don't clear your balance each month, the interest starts to snowball to crazy proportions. Your Opportunity But this is all starting to sound a little depressing, so let's flip this around: small, incremental improvements can have a massive effect when chained together. Conversion is the great unspoken variable in book marketing. We don't just speak about it too little, we discuss it in the wrong way too. It is important to recognize: Conversion is a multi-step process. You can lose the reader at any step. Small, incremental improvements can have a huge overall effect. If you want to explore these ideas further, check out Strangers to Superfans.  It's a very useful process to run through whether you check out my book or not. Think about your readers and all the different pathways they take to your books, whether that's through Amazon recommendations or human ones, ads or emails. Identify the different failure points along the way – where the leaks are in your bucket. And then plug them. It's something that experienced self-publishers often do after losing a lot of money on ads, once they have finished liberally applying rum to the problem.  But we really should be thinking along these lines before we turn up the juice and torch money and ads which don't convert. And if that doesn't sound thrilling enough for you then consider this: your reward is: higher open rates more clicks increased conversion a bump in sales...  ...and more cash money in your pocket. My favorite kind of money. Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Solomon Linda and Mbube. DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe