Mastering the art of email marketing might sound like an impossible task, but it doesn’t have to be.
If you’ve been online for any amount of time, you’ve probably found yourself signed in to at least one email list. You might not even remember how you managed to opt into that list, but the emails started arriving on a regular schedule and quickly filled up your inbox.
You know how frustrating it can be to get swamped by unwanted emails.
Don’t do that to your followers.
Now, how do you create an email list that people actually WANT to sign up for and read? That’s what I’m going to teach you here.
Mastering the Art of Email Marketing
There are a lot of ways to encourage your followers to sign up for your email list.
You could add an opt-in form on your contact page. Collect emails at an event. Add a signup button to your social media page. Build a personalized page on your website explaining the benefits of signing up with a form to fill out if they agree. And so many more ways.
The most important first step, is that they chose to sign up. Don’t ever send unsolicited emails or you may quickly find yourself automatically dropped into the spam folder and blocked from future contact.
Whatever method you use, the key to successful email marketing is to create emails that your followers want to open and read.
The first thing you need to focus on is who your target audience is.
Why did they sign up for your email? What problem can you solve for them?
If you’re a writer, they may want to know when your next book is going to be released or what you are currently working on. That’s great! But how do you keep their interest up if your next book isn’t coming out until next year? What if you’re taking a brief hiatus from writing? You don’t want them to move on to the next author and forget about you, right?
It’s okay, you can still provide them with quality entertainment in the meantime. You can keep their interest and keep their attention, even without having an immediate solution to their problem, and here’s how.
Just like Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, email is another form of a conversation you can have with your fans.
Something I’ve learned from having a 9 year old in the house, is that people love to peek into the private lives of other people. They want to know what’s going on behind doors. Reality TV shows are ridiculously popular because people are naturally curious about what other people are doing.
So, leverage this in your emails.
Share with them a story from your past and how it led you to become a writer.
Share how you almost lost your home because the books didn’t just fly off the shelf and you were terrified that you’d never make it.
Share how excited you were when that first book sold and how you celebrated that achievement.
You’re a writer, write them a story.
Now the best emails will be a sequence of events which eventually come to a resolution, being the publication of the promised book. So if you can reference the book in your emails each time, it will keep that book fresh on their minds.
For example:
The first email could be about the events or experiences which first inspired you to write the book.
The second email could be about the events or experiences which inspired the characters in the book.
The third email might be a story about your car being repossessed but by golly the characters in your book just had a huge breakthrough and they might just find the Jewel of the Nile this time!
The fourth email might be a short story about a funny dream you had about the characters and how you might try to work it into the book.
The fifth email might be funny story about what you did for you birthday, Christmas, or Thanksgiving, with a snippet from your book as a sneak peak gift for your readers.
There are endless possibilities, but the most important thing you can do is make every email an engaging story of its own. Readers love to read, so turn your emails into short serial stories they can read about you and your work.
The keyword there is short. Don’t send novel length emails. Just short moments of humor and insights to touch base with them. Something short and sweet that you might laugh at with a friend over a quick telephone call.
Keep your readers engaged doing what they love most, reading quality stories.
Answer back when you can. Or offer further details and discussion on your blog, or your social platforms.
If they love your voice and you do your job well, they will come back again and again for another funny story and a peak into your life.
And when your book comes out, they’ll already be in love with your writing style, so of course they’ll be eager to buy it!
