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Hey, We are returning to the topic of email this week – from Meta to meta, if you like – and the construction of our dream welcome sequence. To catch yourself up, here is what we covered so far:
- Why you must welcome readers properly.
- How to break the ice.
- What the perfect welcome looks like.
- When you should give readers a cookie.
Don’t forget my big list of email marketing tools on my website also. (Most are free!) If you have followed everything up to this point, you will have completed the perfect digital handshake with your new reader, maximizing deliverability and pushing open rates as high as they can go – and engaging them on the human level as well. Now our task is to keep those metrics – both robot and meatbag flavors – as high as possible until everyone graduates from our welcome sequence. But we will be a trusted sender now, to a certain extent at least, so the shackles can be removed and the straitjacket ditched for a nice sun dress (don’t judge). In other words, the spam filters won’t be quite so sensitive – meaning we can start sharing stuff. And then selling stuff! But before we get into that... Coming Soon to YouTubeNow that the construction that has been plaguing me for 12 months has (mostly) wrapped up, it’s much easier to record videos - and I’m taking advantage. Later today, I’m recording another quick guide on Value Rules for Facebook Ads - this time showing you how to control what gender sees your ads, as I’m getting questions about exactly how to do that, and how to implement it along with Placement controls - particularly as conflicts can arise when you use more than one rule, which I’m guessing romance authors in particular will be keen to do once Manual Placements go away. The short version is that the details really matter in how exactly you construct the rules, otherwise you can end up invalidating them - so keep an eye out for that step-by-step guide coming in the next few days. I’m also sketching out a video on winning welcome sequences to go along with this series of emails, and another on the biggest Facebook Ads mistakes I see authors making right now. Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you get a ping as soon as they drop - and to let our algorithmic overloads know that I am hot stuff. Want me to cover something in particular? Let me know by reply! All these videos were requests from you guys. I’m like a wedding DJ with a webcam. Speaking of requests, some of you seem to enjoy even shorter content and I’m practicing carving out a Short or two quickly from each video which summarizes a key point, which then leads back to the main vid. So let me know what you think of this kind of 2-minute thing.
The Check In EmailOK, this is the less exciting email, soz, but it’s pretty important in the overall scheme of things and getting it right will make next week’s Moneygrab Email much more effective. Here, you will do all your housekeeping and social sharing and so on, just holding back the hard sell until the next email. (Obviously, you can play with the order of these things, but I like this approach personally.) The exact cadence will depend on you and your list, and especially how often you plan to send out regular newsletters. But, in general, I like to send out this email a few days after the cookie. You should, as the name suggested, check in with readers to make sure that they received their free book and were able to download it without issue. That’s the main mission here and everything else is secondary. Some readers may have received your email but not opened it or acted on it yet – this serves as a nudge to that cohort. Some may not have received it at all. And for those who have received it and downloaded your book without issue, well, it just shows you care and it’s an opportunity now to send them to some other part of your online universe. It’s useful to drop the BookFunnel download link again here, to minimize any customer service burden, and to point them once more to that “Need Help?” link in the top corner of your download page – so they can communicate with BookFunnel directly for any technical assistance; they are better placed to serve those needs anyway. And now that the spam filters are less sensitive, I will take the opportunity to link them to my site (holding back the hard sell for now), and my various social channels. At least, that’s what this email is for in a dry, email marketing sense. What is much more important is how this email will make people feel. This is your opportunity to really connect with readers on a personal level, and you should seize it with both hands. You have confirmed their email. You have given them their cookie (and checked in to make sure they got it). We’re going to sell them something in the next email. This is the time to connect with them on a human level. So, tell them a story. Some of you might be getting hives at the very thought of getting personal with readers but don’t make the mistake of thinking you must get intimate or reveal something private. I’m sure subscribers to this here newsletter feel like they know me and my personality pretty well because I am my authentic self when I sit down to write them. But I don’t go into huge detail about my private life because I’m naturally a private person; you have permission to draw these lines exactly where you feel comfortable. Besides, what readers will respond to most of all is your shared passion for the same type of books. (And you don’t need to be so rigid in interpreting that, I’m sure romance readers would also love your take on Heated Rivalry, if that’s the genre you write in, just like SF junkies might be curious on your thoughts about the upcoming Neuromancer adaption or how fantasy nerds should happily devour a breakdown of why the latest Game of Thrones spin off takes the world in a promising new direction.) It’s the kind of content you should consider sharing regularly – in between emails about your new releases, upcoming launches, and backlist promos – so it’s good to get your brain thinking this way. Books, movies, shows, games, any genre-flavored thing is fair game and likely to be of interest and help foster the desired engagement. Weave in some personal perspective about how you experienced these things and you are on the way to developing a new writing muscle that will do these things instinctively. And while your readers are blissed out on this wholesome human connection you have created, we’ll rifle through their pockets. Dave P.S. Music this week is Pharoah Sanders with Love is Everywhere. |
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