How to give a cookie 🍪

(i.e. immediately)  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Hey, We are continuing to build out our ideal welcome sequence this week. If you missed the start of this series, catch up here: What you need for a good welcome sequence. How to speak to your readers. Why you should customize your double-opt in. Also relevant: these are The Best Email Marketing Tools for Authors. Today we are covering the first email (proper) in your welcome sequence, which I see playing out something like this: The Cookie The Check-in The Moneygrab The Surprise (optional) It’s very important that you send out the freebie ASAP. It should be the first email you send, not counting the double-opt in we covered last week. And it should go out immediately after that double-opt. Last time I recommended communicating that in the double opt-in email. Aside from managing subscriber expectations, you are engaging in a little training, teaching readers to look out for your emails, open them immediately, and click something inside them. I was just about to type “We are not quite Pavlovian dogs…” and then I started thinking about Pavlova for more time than I care to admit. the cost of delay The most important job of this email is to dole out your freebie, your cookie, your bribe, your reader magnet – i.e. the thing you promised readers in exchange for their email address. If you don’t give it to them right away, many of them will assume they have been duped; this is the internet after all. Not doing so can cause an immediate and irreparable breach of trust. People can get surprisingly mad with even the smallest delay, but I worry much more about (what I assume is) the larger number of people that simply shrug their shoulders, close their browser, and swear never to read anything by you again. I’ve heard some mention of putting the cookie later in the sequence. I don’t get the logic here at all, quite frankly. I think the idea is to ensure readers are truly committed before giving them your precious free book. I don’t agree with that line of thinking AT ALL. Starting off a relationship with some kind of gamesmanship or test or broken promise is never a good idea. Please don’t do this. I’d much rather approach the reader with open hands, give the thing I promised, and trust that my fancy words will seal the deal. delivery service Given that the cookie should go out immediately, the importance of an efficient delivery system becomes paramount. I strongly recommend using a dedicated service here. You can’t send the book as an attachment, so the solution is to link to a download page. You could host that yourself, in theory, or have your email marketing service host the file perhaps. But I don’t recommend this. Instead, I suggest using a service like BookFunnel. They will host your file, help you create the download page, and – most importantly of all – handle the delivery/customer service for you. The burden of the latter can be considerable. Ask any author who has been around longer than BookFunnel (we’re going back over a decade here!) and you will get this 1,000-yard stare as the PTSD kicks in and they are assailed by the shrapnel of painful memories, assisting hundreds of non-technical people over email on how to sideload a book to a Kindle. I really, really don’t recommend doing this. BookFunnel isn’t free, but it’s cheap for what it does (and it does lots of other cool things to which you can check out). Plans start at just $2.50 a month – and that will cover you for 1 pen name and up to 500 downloads a month. So, you won’t need to upgrade until your list is rolling, and paying for itself at that point, one sincerely hopes. The basic plan allows you to participate in Author Swaps too, which can be attractive for newer authors especially. ​Check BookFunnel out here. Just FYI: I don’t have any affiliate relationship with BookFunnel, this isn’t sponsored content, but I have met the team and they are great people – anyone going to indie events will likely meet them because they are hugely supportive of self-publishers. But I genuinely consider a BookFunnel subscription one of the essentials of being an author. There are also alternatives like Story Origin which you can check out if you want to compare and contrast - and it has its fans also. bookfunnel setup I won’t go over the full setup on BookFunnel because they have excellent help pages and support and it’s pretty straightforward. I will highlight a common error, though. BookFunnel has several types of landing pages; I want to ensure you use the correct one. Authors might think that what they need to use here is what BookFunnel calls a Restricted Landing Page – i.e. one where BookFunnel’s system will check that readers really are subscribed to your list before allowing them to download your book. I can see why authors might make this mistake but it’s an unnecessary step. Just use what BookFunnel calls A Simple Download Page Without Email Collection. You might worry that someone will stumble across the page and get your freebie without signing up, or that someone might share the link with them. My reaction to that prospect is a big ‘ol “So what?” I’m confident that my book will hook the small minority that find a hole in the fence. It's certainly not worth inconveniencing the rest of my subscribers over. I want them to get their promised book with minimum fuss. fortune cookies The messaging around the cookie delivery is important; you definitely want people contacting BookFunnel with any delivery issues, rather than yourself – that’s what you pay for, after all. I usually put a big red button near the start of the email with something like GET YOUR FREE BOOK written on it and have some text around it in my author voice, with a call-to-action telling them to click the button, and then explaining it will bring them to BookFunnel to download it. I also recommend adding that, if they have any issues, they should click the “Need Help?” link in the top right of the BookFunnel page, and that someone from BookFunnel will assist them. (This link is included be default and opens a chat support window for readers.) Again, I really recommend letting BookFunnel handle that side of things – they are far better equipped to do it. But the nudge is important too, so that they don’t just reply to the Cookie email with lots of tiresome technical questions which you might not be able to answer anyway! While The Cookie Email is strictly a Give to readers, rather than an Ask – and should remain that way – I do recommend adding one thing beneath your big red button and associated messaging. This is the perfect time to do some safelisting/allowlisting. This is an area where best practice advice has streamlined considerably in recent years. These days I just encourage readers to add me to their Gmail contacts (and provide a link for the minority that use another service). I find this has much greater effect overall than trying to provide direct info for a bunch of platforms. The exact welcome sequence you get for this list will depend on how and where you signed up, but you’ll likely see some form of words like this: If you are using Gmail on your computer, simply add me to your Contacts. You do that by hovering over my name at the top of this email (or in your inbox) and clicking the little plus icon on the right of the box which pops up. And then I have the following graphic, which seems to have helped hugely. I then have a short bit of text to cover non-Gmail users, and link to a page on my site with some instructions for them – but almost no one clicks that, tbh. And that’s it! That’s how I handle the cookie email. As with all aspects of this welcome, you can tailor things to your specific needs. For example, for one entry point on this list, I push the safelisting advice to the next email in the sequence and include the video welcome here, below the cookie delivery, instead. But then for another entry point onto this list the safelisting is much more important for lots of technical reasons I won’t bore you with! There isn’t One Way to handle any of this stuff, but these are all notes you should try to hit during onboarding, and what I’m trying to do here is give you a suggested serving rather than declaiming scripture. However, the cookie should go out immediately – I stand firm on that point – and you will get better results the earlier you do safelisting. But doing it in email two or three or whenever you can squeeze it in is better than not doing it at all. OK, that’s it for this week. Stay safe! Dave P.S. Writing music this week is The George Kaplan Conspiracy with Again. Interesting Paths, Apartado 108, Loja CTT, Lagos, Faro 8601-902 ​Unsubscribe | Update your profile​