Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools for connecting with readers and selling books. Obviously, you want a lot of email subscribers, but it doesn’t matter how many subscribers you have if they don’t open and read your emails.
How do you craft good emails that capture your reader’s attention and help you sell more books?
Your email open rate is driven by the three components of an email: the from line, the subject line, and the content of the email.
The From Line
The from line of the email is the element that has the greatest impact on whether your email gets opened.
If that surprises you, consider which emails you open. If your significant other sends you an email, you’ll open it regardless of the subject line or any other element of the email. If your boss emails you, you’ll open the email because your boss’s name is in the from line.
That’s why figuring out your author name is so critical. Figure it out at the start of your career, and don’t fiddle with it. If you must change the from line of your email, do it with much fear and trembling.
If people see your name and want to open your emails, consider that a reward for writing good emails in the past that have thrilled your readers. Having a good reputation with your readers means they’ll be more likely to open your emails.
A good open rate is also a reward for having a good onboarding sequence. An onboarding sequence is a series of emails that are automatically sent to your new subscribers at predetermined intervals. That series of emails introduces new subscribers to you and your writing. To learn more, check out our episode on How to Create an Email Onboarding Drip Campaign.
To build a great reputation for your from name, or your author name, you must implement a three-word strategy: Give consistent value.
Give
Cultivate in yourself an attitude of generosity and service. Your email should be something people would be willing to pay for but are pleasantly surprised to discover it’s free.
The emails you send are for your reader. Having a spirit of generosity will change how you approach email. In fact, this is a top-button-of-the-shirt issue. If you get this attitude right, all the other buttons below will line up. If you are not generous or don’t see your email as a gift to your reader, none of the other aspects of your email will work.
Consistent
Readers will forget about you if you wait too long to email them. Plus, email addresses occasionally expire. Occasionally, people get a new internet service provider or a new job, and for one reason or another, their email address stops working.
For a short time, any email sent to that old email address will bounce. You’ll get an immediate response saying, “This email is no longer valid.” But if you wait too long to send your email, it no longer bounces but will become an auto-spam honeypot. If you email that address, you’ll automatically be marked as spam, which is bad for your email reputation.
If you don’t email your list frequently enough, even your good emails will all go to spam because the rotten emails are poisoning your list. To keep your list clean, simply email your list once per quarter. I recommend sending more frequently, but at a minimum, you should email your list four times per year to clear off the bounces.
If you get a bunch of immediate “unsubscribes” from your quarterly newsletter, that’s simply your email platform, like MailerLite or ConvertKit, unsubscribing the expired addresses, so don’t take it personally. Humans aren’t making a mass exodus from your list. It’s just your email provider helping to keep your list clean so that you won’t ruin your sending reputation or theirs.
How frequently should I email my list?
Your sending frequency depends on your Timothy. Some readers are fanatical and love hearing from authors. Romance, fantasy, and sci-fi readers tend to be the most fanatical. They’re happy to hear from an author as frequently as weekly. Tammi Labrecque, author of Newsletter Ninja, recommends a weekly email schedule for romance readers.
Evan Gow, the founder of StoryOrigin, recently spoke at the Novel Marketing Conference and recommended sending an email every two weeks. His research shows that a fortnightly frequency has the highest open rate.
If you’re unpublished, monthly is the best frequency. Sending monthly forces you to prepare something to share every month. But sending quarterly is the bare minimum.
Value
The third part of our three-word strategy is “value,” and by that I mean financial value. When you send an email, ask yourself, “What would people be willing to pay for?”
On Substack, subscribers regularly pay to receive emails and blog posts from creators. Some of the newsletters on Substack are offered for free, but content creators can charge. As an author, you can create a free and/or paid version of your newsletter. Many independent journalists and authors are making a living by emailing subscribers who pay for valuable content.
The value will vary between audiences. Most people are looking for encouragement, entertainment, or education. One of those will probably be your path forward.
Entertainment, Education, or Encouragement
If your emails are always funny and entertaining, people will be willing to pay for them. If they find out that your email is actually free, they will open it right away. The same goes for encouragement and education.
The Author Media newsletter is aimed at being educational and helpful. Your email might educate people about the news or offer commentary on the news.
New Reader Magnet
You can also share value with your audience through a new reader magnet that encourages new people to sign up for your list. You can still share your new reader magnet with your current subscribers as a benefit of being on your list.
Blog Posts or Podcasts
If you’re blogging or podcasting, those blog posts and podcast episodes make for great email newsletters. You can include the entire blog post in the email or just the first two or three paragraphs with a link to read the rest.
Your strategy will depend on how long your blog posts are. Ours are 2,000-4,000 words long, so we don’t include the whole post in the email. Some people prefer a really long email, and they hunker down and read it.
I pay for a subscription to The Hot Sheet by Jane Friedman. Her emails are so long that I have to click a link at the bottom of Gmail to read the rest because it goes over Gmail’s word count limit.
Guest Interviews
If you’ve been a guest on a podcast or radio show, you can link to that episode. You can share that with your audience as well, as long as it’s interesting to your reader.
The bottom line is that your email must be interesting to your audience. They need to know who you are, and they need to like and trust you. If you get that one element correct, the rest of this episode matters very little.
The Subject Line
When we talk about email open rates, people usually think first of the subject line. Believe it or not, the subject is the least important element when it comes to open rates.
It’s still important, but I want to relieve some pressure on you. Don’t stress too much about the subject of your email. In my testing, I’ve found that subject lines rarely count for more than a 5% swing between a good or bad open rate. Often, the difference is much less.
The key to testing subject lines is to use the A/B test feature that comes with nearly every email marketing service provider. The A/B test features allow you to send one subject line to a small percentage of your subscribers and a second subject line to another percentage of your subscribers. Your email service will monitor the open rates, and the subject line that generates the most opens or clicks will be sent to the remainder of your list.
A/B testing is a quick way to educate yourself about what kinds of subject lines work. You may find that cryptic subject lines with one or two words work better than longer ones. You may find that promising something that the reader wants or making the reader curious causes emails to be opened.
Including emojis in the subject line may help improve your open rates. I’ve had good results by including an emoji in the subject lines for my courses and conferences. For example, all the emails for the Novel Marketing Conference had a taco emoji because we had Austin tacos at the conference. Those emails had a 60 to 80% open rate.
You can experiment with subject lines and approach them with an attitude of fun and play. Don’t stress about them because they affect open rates less than you’d think.
The Email Content
What on earth do you put in your emails?
Unpublished authors often wonder and whine about not knowing what to put in their email newsletters.
The most important thing to include in your author newsletter is the word “you” as opposed to “I.” Make your emails about your subscriber. You’re an unpublished author, so you’re not very interesting to strangers yet.
Even if you are a published author, don’t make the emails about you. The email should be about the reader. Ask yourself, “What would be interesting to my reader?” It might be news about the book’s progress, how your book is selling, a bestseller status, a response to the book review, or reader feedback.
A roundup of industry or genre news is interesting to readers of that genre or people interested in a particular topic or industry. The Hot Sheet newsletter I pay for is nothing but news and commentary on the news.
Consider what would cause your reader to say, “That’s great news!” and then share that kind of interesting news with your readers.
Reviews of Movies Related to Your Book
If you are writing a superhero book, you should be reviewing all the superhero movies. You might ask your readers how they like the direction superhero movies have taken. Explain what you would have done differently if you were writing the script of the most recent Marvel or DC movie.
Book Reviews
You can also review similar books in your genre. I like this practice because it forces unpublished authors to read books in their genre. Some authors feel that’s unnecessary, but neglecting to read in your genre is a terrible mistake. If you don’t know what’s going on in your genre, you might sound derivative on accident. You want to use the most popular tropes on purpose.
Book Recommendations
Recommendations are a reader favorite. You might say, “If you like the books I write, you’ll like this other book I recommend.”
Discounts
People love getting discounts, but I would include more than mere discounts in your newsletter. An email about discounts is not enough to sustain a newsletter, but it’s a great seasoning to sprinkle on your regular newsletter.
Links to Content Around the Web
Linking to related content or other articles your readers might find interesting is an easy strategy. Every Author Media email we send has at least ten different links to interesting places around the web. Again, the subject line doesn’t have to carry the email. Even if someone isn’t interested in that week’s episode, they may still open the email to see the links to other online resources.
Photos
Readers are always thrilled with photos of kids, pets, and book cover reveals.
Personal Anecdotes
A well-told personal anecdote can work well if you follow the rules of flash fiction. A well-told story isn’t about you even though you’re the subject or hero of the anecdote. The point of the story is to thrill your reader, and if you tell the story well, it will.
A Question
A question is effective because it causes a reader to reply. Receiving reader replies can increase your deliverability to their inbox, which makes it much less likely that your good emails will end up in their spam filter. Replies also help you understand your reader better.
Every email should trigger responses from your subscribers.
Experiment With the Format
Feel free to experiment with the content and format of your newsletters. You might try different combinations of the content pieces suggested above. After a while, you’ll find a formula that’s reproducible and resonates with your audience.
In the Author Media newsletter, we always include news first. News might include information about an upcoming webinar, a course that’s on sale, a registration deadline, or an upcoming conference. It’s usually news from the Author Media world. If we don’t have new news, we don’t include a news section.
The second portion of the Author Media newsletter is about the latest podcast episode we’ve published. We’ll include the title of the episode and two or three paragraphs summarizing the episode and explaining why it’s worth listening to. It helps subscribers know how they’ll benefit from the episode and whether it’s for them or not.
Next, we offer links related to that episode’s content.
Finally, we have a section for recent blog posts. Not everybody opens every email. If a reader missed last week’s email, they can see a few of the most recent blog posts they may have missed.
Between the related blog posts, the recent blog posts, the news, and the episode that we’re featuring, we have at least ten different links to interesting articles in every email.
You don’t have to copy that format, but once you understand the different elements and how emails are formatted, you’ll see them in other author newsletters you subscribe to. You’ll start to see how the recipe works, and you can figure out what works best for you.
Watch Your Numbers
MailerLite and ConvertKit both report your open rates, which can be useful when comparing one of your emails to another. But the click-through rate is a more reliable and useful number.
Watch your unsubscribe rates as well. You’ll always get unsubscribes any time you send an email, regardless of how big your list is. However, if certain emails have a higher than normal unsubscribe rate, pay attention. Perhaps that email rubbed people the wrong way or wasn’t what they were looking for.
Survey Your Subscribers
Create a reader survey on Google Forms. Ask a few quick questions about what your subscribers want more and less of. If you don’t ask, your readers won’t necessarily tell you.
Avoid Fancy Designs
Many authors feel pressured to use the fancy email templates provided by tools like MailerLite and Constant Contact, but I don’t recommend that practice. Emails with a lot of design elements don’t look great on mobile, which is where most people read email. Designed templates make the email feel very corporate and impersonal.
Your biggest asset as an author is that you’re a human and not a corporation.
Many corporations go out of their way to make the company seem like a person rather than a faceless corporation. Geico spends millions of dollars to make you think they’re just a friendly gecko.
You can make yourself seem human for free simply by avoiding corporate-style emails.
When you open an Author Media email, you’ll notice that it’s just plain text and has the feel of an email that came from my personal computer. We have around a 50% open rate on our emails because we follow these principles.
That’s an impressive open rate. Some people have higher open rates, but for a list of over 10,000 that’s sent from a company, a 50% open rate is really good. Our click-through rate is also good, partly because the emails are filled with value but aren’t overly fancy. We’re not relying on style. We’re relying on substance.
Email is a medium that rewards substance.
If you can give consistent value in every email, people will want to open your emails, click on your links, and, if you’re lucky, forward your email to a friend.
Sponsor
Want more help with author email?
The Author Email Academy is a course designed to help you effectively grow and engage your email list, which is a crucial part of any author’s platform. The course teaches you how to create a reader magnet, techniques to rapidly grow your list, and strategies for consistent growth. It also covers how to craft emails your readers are excited to open and read, and how to avoid spam filters to ensure that emails reach your readers.
If you don’t have your first 1,000 subscribers, you need this course. After a couple of months of implementing what you learn in the Author Email Academy, you will likely have 1,000 subscribers on your email list.
The Author Email Academy is included for free when you purchase Obscure No More, which is another course I offer that helps authors connect with their target audience and implement effective book marketing strategies. If you’re already a student of Obscure No More, you have access to the Author Email Academy as part of that course.
You can also get an 80% discount on the Author Email Academy when you register for the 2024 Book Launch Blueprint, which will be the last time this course will be offered.
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Related Episodes
We’ve only scratched the surface on the topic of email. Check out our episodes on email-related topics:
- How to Create an Email Onboarding Drip Campaign
- How to Get a Professional Email Address
- Email Marketing for Humans
- How to Get More Email Subscribers
- How to Pick the Right Email Platform
- How to Take Advantage of an Email Drip Campaign
- How BookFunnel Can Help You Grow Your Email List
- How BookSweeps Can Help You Grow Your Email List
- How to Increase Your Email Delivery
- How Jason Porterfield Grew His Email List from 0 to 6,000
- in One Year
- Grow Your Email List With Short Stories
- 7 Ways to Avoid the Email Spam Filter
- How to Use QR Codes to Boost Book Sales and Grow Your
- Email List
- How to Grow Your Email List Using Delicious Reader Magnets
- Grow Your Email List With a Reader Quiz
- An Author’s Guide to StoryOrigin
