How beginner writers can improve book email outreach
Most authors think that writing a book is extremely difficult. While this might be the case, the truth is that it’s even harder to sell the book once you’ve completed it. According to the research, almost 80% of authors are making less than $1,000 a year.
This fact clearly suggests that you have to come up with a good marketing and sales strategy before publishing a novel. Although there are all sorts of different marketing tools available today, traditional emailing remains one of the most productive channels in that regard.
The reason is simple – people read more than 200 billion emails every day, while the ROI is massive and reaches $38 per $1 spent. In this article, we will show you how beginner writers can improve book email outreach.
7 Ways to Design a Kickass Email Campaign
Marketing experts at Aussiewritings.com recently stated that each campaign has the purpose to raise brand awareness and eventually increase the number of conversions. From the perspective of a novelist, email campaigns serve to promote your work among readers or publishers and to convince subscribers to buy the book.
But how can you design a good email marketing strategy? Here are the 7 most important suggestions in that regard:
Email promotion is impossible without a solid base of subscribers. You should use social media and website to grow the network of email receivers. The mechanism is simple – you give users valuable content free of charge while they leave their email addresses in exchange. This could be the first chapter of your book, the “10 Books You Must Read” list, or anything else that resonates to the interests of your target audience.
A subject line is the most important element of email advertising because no one will read the message if it doesn’t promise great content. An average user receives almost 90 emails per day, so your subject line really needs to make an impact if you want the subscriber to open it. It must be interesting, catchy, and appealing to raise curiosity. Of course, it’s not easy to create such titles all the time, so we suggest you use online tools like CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to get the most out of your subject lines.
As a writer, you should know that the best stories are short and direct. The same logic applies to emails: they should be simple, well-structured, and straightforward. Write short paragraphs, keep the language plain and understandable, and get to the point as soon as possible. Contemporary readers don’t spend too much time analyzing each piece of text they encounter, so you have to be precise and highlight the most important conclusions.
You don’t send emails just for fun. On the contrary, this is the marketing channel that is supposed to have the sales effect. That’s why you have to include CTA buttons to all of your emails and allow subscribers to take concrete action with respect to your book. This is usually the link such as “Buy Now” or “Get a Book of Your Own Here” but you are also free to come up with a more interesting CTA line.
Almost 30% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails more than once per week, while the vast majority of subscribers expect you to send them a message 2 to 3 times a month. To put it simply, people who subscribed to your mailing list really enjoy your content and you need to keep them updated about your current work/book. Don’t let them forget about you.
Users open more than 50% of emails on a mobile device, which means that you have to pay attention to the technical aspect of the campaign. Make sure to test all emails before sending and see how they appear on different devices. This is the only way to make sure that everyone will actually have the opportunity to read your email in its entirety.
Unfortunately, some users will not appreciate your content and you will have to give them the chance to unsubscribe. Adding a special unsubscribe link down at the end of your email, at least you force them to scroll through the entire message before they go away.
Conclusion
Writing a novel is difficult but selling it might as well be even more challenging. If you want to become a best-selling author, you need a great marketing strategy. An email campaign is the first step in that regard and we showed you how beginner writers can improve book email outreach. Feel free to use our tips and leave us a comment if you need more suggestions about this topic.
About Author:
Olivia is a passionate blogger who writes on topics of digital marketing, career, and self-development. She constantly tries to learn something new and share this experience on different websites. Connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.
