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Hey, Did you know that over 160 billion spam emails are sent every single day? It’s an incredible number, going some way towards explaining why services like Gmail make us jump through such hoops just to get our newsletters in the inboxes of readers who have signed up to receive them! If you sensed some frustration in that sentence, that’s a literary device called “sharing how I actually feel about this nonsense.” It’s a feeling you share too, I’m sure, one which likely increased when reading last week’s email: Off to the uranium mines with you. You guys had lots and lots (and lots!) of questions about this – which I've answered below – but a recap will serve us well. Because Google is now penalizing newsletters which are sent infrequently or at irregular intervals – although I do recommend reading the entire email as it goes into some detail as to the nuances, which are key here. a quick reminderThe short version is that it is now critical that you send your newsletter regularly and consistently. It was always desirable to be regular – for all sorts of reasons from keeping subscriber engagement high on the human side of the equation, and for dodging Spam/Promotion filters on the algorithmic side of things. But now it is really important to be consistent also. If you usually email monthly and skip a month because of… life stuff… then you might see Delivery Errors and an open rate drop in your next messages. If you usually email weekly, and miss a few weeks for whatever reason, then you might see the same thing happen. It’s not about emailing within a certain time period, it’s about establishing a cadence and sticking to it. That can be weekly, that can be every fortnight, that can be monthly – but it’s recommended not to leave the gap between newsletters longer than that. What is likely to be penalized most heavily is having a completely random sending pattern or, even worse, not emailing regularly at all – for example, only emailing readers every few months when you launch a book. Operating your newsletter in this manner is extremely likely to result in Delivery Errors and open rate issues. That’s the short version, but I urge you to read the entire newsletter, if you haven’t already, because the details do matter. your questions... answeredBecause it is so important – your newsletter is the heartbeat of your marketing operation – I got lots and lots of questions from you. Well, most people basically asked the same two questions.
- What happens if I send more emails during a launch?
- What does this mean for welcome sequences or automations?
Which is fair enough. These are the two most important things we do with our mailing lists: releasing books and gaining new readers for the next launch. AKA the lifeblood which sustains our careers; the concern is wholly warranted. And then aside from those two question-types, there was a wide variety about different sending cadences. I was pretty sure of (most of) the answers here, but I didn’t want to guess. I went back to the Head of Deliverability at Kit – who are the best deliverability team around, in my opinion – to check if my instincts were correct. So, let’s run through a few scenarios you pitched at me here – with the caveat that these changes are still being mapped out by all the Email Marketing Services, so there is a little guesswork involved, and guidance will likely evolve over time as we collect more and more data.
I send regularly, but every 4-8 weeks. Do I need to start sending more frequently?
Switching to a monthly newsletter – and sticking to it – is strongly recommended now, yes.
I usually email every 2 weeks but have wanted to switch to a monthly newsletter for a while now. Will I get penalized?
I wouldn’t worry so much about this. Even if there is a temporary hit to open rates, Gmail should adjust quickly to the new cadence, and it will be more of a speed bump than anything. You aren’t locked into a certain pattern in perpetuity! I don’t recommend changing your sending frequency regularly, but aside from that you should be fine.
What happens with launches? I usually release three or four books a year. Outside of that I have a regular monthly newsletter, but during launch week readers can receive two or three emails.
This question came up a lot in different forms – understandably so! But I don’t think you need to worry if you are doing some form of this. My overall instinct is that decreasing cadence is more likely to be an issue than increasing it. In other words, if you are emailing monthly, and then miss a month or two, and then suddenly resume again… that can cause you issues. But a handful of extra emails during launch week? Don’t sweat it. But let’s look at a slightly different scenario that one of you contacted me about:
I normally email once a month. Once in a while it stretches to 5 weeks instead of 4, but I am usually quite consistent. Coming up to launch I can send three additional emails. Will this now be an issue?
It’s hard to be exact here – in this specific case – without more details. How often are you releasing books? How many emails are going out during launch week also? What does the overall pattern look like? I would recommend (a) looking at your email metrics and seeing if all those emails are benefiting you and your readers – are they engaged with all of them? – and (b) monitoring Google Postmaster Tools to see if this sending pattern is causing Delivery Errors. (And if it is, contact your Email Marketing Service for advice on the next steps.) But I would say that being a teeny bit more consistent with that monthly newsletter and not letting it stretch out to 5 weeks can only benefit you.
What about welcome emails? I usually hit my list once a month, but I just did a free BookBub Deal, and I have a surge in sign-ups right now.
The question about welcome sequences and automations came up a lot – in all sorts of forms – and there’s two important things to point out. First, this is likely determined on a volume basis. Meaning that if the influx of new subscribers is small compared to the overall size of your list, that’s not going to trip the wires at Gmail HQ. Second, as Kit stressed to me, Gmail looks at all sorts of metadata, aside from the things we typically focus on, and will likely see that all these new people have gone through a process of double opt-in and are now working through a welcome sequence, and can also view your established pattern of sends, and so on. In other words, you’re fine. Enjoy the increase in subscribers! Same goes for any other automations you might run, like a Happy Birthday email to subscribers, or a re-engagement process, or list optimization, or whatever. Unless you have something running to a huge portion of your list, I wouldn’t worry about it. (And if you do, monitor Google Postmaster Tools for Delivery Errors, and then contact your EMS if you get any.) But let’s look at something which might be a bit more of an edge case – a scenario which is not altogether uncommon.
My list is under 1,000 subscribers and I just joined a list-builder where I could get 400-500 new subscribers. Will adding all these guys cause me issues?
OK, here’s where things get more complicated because (a) doing this always had the potential to cause issues, and (b) that possibility has probably increased a little now, yeah, if I had to guess (and this is one scenario where I’m really leaning on guesswork – just FYI). What we can be reasonably sure about are more extreme cases. Kit gave the example of someone having a small list of something like 50 people, who then manually adds 200,000 subscribers and starts emailing them. Gmail is almost certainly going to freak out here because this fits the pattern of a spammer pretty well. But things are murkier in the (far more realistic) scenario above. This is partly because we are at the early stages of mapping out this problem, and partly because aggressively growing a list from a small base – and especially manually adding lots of subscribers who don’t come in organically via double opt-in etc. – always had the potential to cause issues, even before these changes. I would suggest, as above, that you closely monitor both the open rates on those welcome emails, and Google Postmaster Tools, and contact your EMS with any issues. This is a problem – or set of problems – which predates the issue at hand and is the old question of organic vs inorganic subscribers. And that’s a huge topic, worthy of a dedicated newsletter. In an ideal world, most of your subscribers would be organic – meaning that they signed up proactively themselves at the back of your books or on your website perhaps – because organic subscribers tend to be higher quality. And inorganic subscribers – those generated from things like competitions, giveaways, list-builders, or ads – can be of varying quality. This is not to say you can’t do it; one of the most successful authors I know began by growing their newsletter extremely aggressively, focusing almost exclusively on inorganic subscribers of uncertain quality, and they made it work. But that’s a tale for another day. to summarizeMuch to digest over the last couple of weeks but these are the key points:
- send newsletters regularly if you aren’t doing that already.
- try to be more consistent if your sending is all over the map.
- panic not, extra launch week emails are fine.
- welcome sequences and automations shouldn’t be a concern either unless perhaps you are manually importing a huge number relative to your list size.
Catch ya, Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Clutchy Hopkins with 3:02. |
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