7 Tips (and a Warning!) for Authors on Email Newsletter Building in 2024

When you become an author, you need to build some skills that will help you succeed in the business. And one of those all important skills is building, maintaining and marketing to an email list. And boy oh boy has that landscape changed a lot as we roll into 2024. So if you want to make sure you know all the things you need to know to succeed this year and beyond, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad. I'm founder of Book Launchers and a four time author. One of those books is Self Promote and Succeed and you can get it free in audio format right now if you'd like, just head to self promoteandsucceed.com audio now what I did there, that's one of the things you need to be doing all the time, inviting people to join your email newsletter. Because you see, yes, you're getting that fantastic book for free when I could be selling it to you. But I'm getting something that is potentially more valuable than the four to six dollars I'd make if you bought the book. I'm getting your email address and hopefully a long term positive and prosperous relationship with you. If you are the commitment phobic type, it's okay. And you can unsubscribe at the bottom of every email. And I respect your choice. But seriously, why so much emphasis on email lists and in my case, email list over even getting you to buy my book? Well, we covered some of this in the video on giving books away for free, and I'll link to that for you at the end. But let me give you three quick reasons why 2024 is no different than any of the last 15 years where building an email list was vital to your success. In fact, it's even bigger in 2024 because of direct selling to readers. So three reasons direct selling to readers costs keep going up and your email list is something you own and control, unlike pretty much everything else. But let's pause on the big one. Direct selling to your readers is a big trend that is here to stay. And how do you sell to your readers if you don't have their contact information? Also, in the nonfiction author world, our end goal is not usually just a book sale. It's a speaking engagement, a consulting gig, filling a workshop, selling a course, buying, offering a service, or maybe all of the above. At Book Launchers, we have courses and full service offerings to help you with writing your book. We have full service offerings to support you editing, designing and publishing the book with marketing strategy and tactics layered into that. And we also have a course and a mastermind and a team of marketing professionals who surround you like a team of cheerleaders and help you get the book into the hands of readers, influencers, engagement booking professionals and and so much more. You can set up a call to speak with us@booklaunchers.com bookacall or visit our website to learn more. The point is, a book sale is nice, but my focus is on building a relationship. So you work with me and my team in a much grander level where we can truly have an impact on you and your book. Email is the cheapest and most targeted marketing channel you will have. Platforms change so fast. I mean, look at last year where Twitter became X and people exited fast and went to threads. And for some threads was awful and they went back to X while others kind of abandoned everything. What stays the same through all of that? Your email list. All right, tip number one. Google and Yahoo require custom domain mailing. Now, effective January 2024, you have to create a DKIM or a DMARC, a DMARC authentication. Because as of February 1st, Google and Yahoo will reject emails from domains that don't meet their new DKIM and DMARC authentication and compliance requirements. And I don't know if they're called DKIM and dmarc, but it's faster than saying it letter by letter. So don't know what any of that means. Well, basically my simple brain understands it as a redirect sender. Domain authentication is a bit like an ID card. It says who you are and these systems are requiring you to be verified and identified. So when you mail from certain mailing companies, it comes to an email provider with your mail company as part of the domain. If you haven't done this step. But because of the issue with spammers using these services to spam, and Yahoo and Google trying to crack down on spamming, they won't accept emails from unauthenticated domains. I use keep and they require it or we can't mail from them. I would assume most other providers are doing this too. So you need to get yourself set up if you haven't done it already. Now, I can't walk you through this setup because I didn't do ours. It's a bit complicated to set up a dmarc. This DMARC thing ensures that emails actually come from the domain they claim to represent by verifying the alignment of the spf, the sender policy framework, and the domain keys identified mail records. I know, right? So configuring this is something that protects you from phishing and spoofing attacks. In other words, it ensures only legitimate emails from your domain reach recipients inboxes, improving your reputation as a sender and your delivery rates. But we actually hired somebody on Fiverr to help us finish the setup. There was a handful of providers that had a ton of really great reviews on Fiverr, so if you need help, you can go there. There's also plenty of articles and helpful resources online, and your email provider probably has help for this as well. I've also been told but I don't have this as fact. I couldn't find evidence evidence to prove it or to be in the contrary. But if you mail a Gmail account that hasn't been used in the last two years, so somebody hasn't logged into it in two years and you email them more than once, Gmail will start blocking you from mailing Gmail. In other words, vigilant list cleaning is going to be more important than ever. So let's hit up tip number two, which is clean your list more often than you clean your car. My neighbor actually has a detailing company come out and clean her car monthly. No joke. I have a kid and two dogs. I should probably be doing the same thing. But while I'm not vigilant about keeping my car clean, I am vigilant about making sure we're keeping our email list clean on a monthly and even more frequent basis. You'll hear this called email hygiene or cleaning a list. But what we're really talking about is keeping your email list in a good standing. This is partly because my list is expensive. We pay a lot of money every month and and if we're paying for a bunch of people who never read our emails, they're costing us and not doing anything positive for us. Plus, if people aren't engaged and then one day look at your email but don't remember signing up for it like three years ago, they're more likely to mark your message as spam. And with the extra spam protection, Gmail and Yahoo are rolling out, well, email deliverability is at risk if you don't stay clean. So what do you do? Well, in general, you want to check out your email provider's recommendations for cleaning your list based on the tools they have. But generally you're going to be looking to remove anyone who has not engaged with you in the last three to six months. Engagement means opening emails and clicking on links. Whether a reader is disengaged or not will look different depending on how much you mail your list, but hopefully you're mailing more than once a month. So an unengaged reader would be someone who hasn't taken any action on any of your emails in a six month period. If you mail more frequently, that would go down in time frame. Now this is not a perfect metric as many emails will appear unopened because they were read on a mobile and there's some tracking things that Apple has stopped doing that or stopped allowing that mean somebody is actually reading your email but it doesn't show. The best thing you can do is encourage clicks so you can see who is alive and reading because a click will show. Now one idea for cleaning a list is to say you want to keep everyone who has clicked on an email in the past 365 days and anyone that has joined your newsletter in the same time frame. Now that is going to give you a pretty clean and active list. But you also, as I mentioned, should be scouring out those bounced emails and make sure you don't have a bunch of emails bouncing every month. I know. All right, number three Try a monthly activation campaign or a RE engagement campaign. Once you clean your list, you'll find yourself with a lot of unengaged people. If you haven't done this in a while, we remove these people, but not before trying to get them involved at least one more time. So can you send them something a little different and catch their attention? Be a little weird or go opposite from what you've done before? At Book Launchers, we'll send free books. We'll test odd subject lines and do a variety of things different. I usually find I can get about 17% of the unengaged people to re engage. This varies from attempt to attempt, but taking my last four emails I've sent to reignite an email that's been dead. Sometimes it's been as high as 28%, but most of the time I'm averaging 17%, so I'm saving 17 of every 100. So what do you have that you could give as a gift? Or what could you say to get their attention? Sometimes being direct like I guess it's time we said goodbye can be enough. Tip 4 Create a consistent Content Schedule Being consistent is a really important piece to email success when you mail too little or on a weird schedule. Unless you're delivering massive value when you mail like Dave Chessen from Kindlepreneur does in his all over the place mailing schedule, you should be in your reader's inbox at least monthly. But more often than monthly is better like weekly is ideal if you can surprise, inform, educate or entertain in each message. People who are a good fit for your content will look forward to your messages. You can email more frequently than you schedule, but emailing less frequent makes it easier to forget you unsubscribe and unengage. Plus again, if people don't remember who you are, they're more likely to mark you as spam, which will hurt your email deliverability if it happens too often. Going back to the Google changes Their new rule effective February 2024 is maintain a rate of spam reports in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.1% so you need to be careful. Also, I always think twice before I mark an email as spam because I don't want to hurt people's email deliverability. That said, there are some lists I know I unsubscribed from multiple times and I still get emails from them when that happens. And it's really only from a couple of Internet marketing gurus that I know I do mark them as spam, but everybody else I just politely unsubscribe. Alright, tip 5 watch the kind of links you're sending. Again, this one is a bit of hearsay and a bit of what I've already seen happening. I just couldn't find a good source online. So please let's comment and chat about this below if you know more specific details about these things. But I've already found that certain links impact deliverability when you put a link in your email as much as you can use a pretty link or clean URL, not a weird long link like the one from the Amazon product page page or a big long affiliate link. If you're doing an affiliate promotion, set up a link like we do for our affiliate relationships like book launchers.com Rocket so the link is more clean than the one with all the characters. It's a good practice to create a link like a universal book link on your book. Anyways, I did a video on creating a clean Amazon link which I'll link to at the end, but a simple plugin like pretty link on your WordPress site can make this easy and improve deliverability. Number six collect and review your data. Now one thing I used to do more of was create individual links for podcasts and other appearances so that I could track what worked to get people onto my email list. This gave me fantastic data. The truth is though that when my podcast interview count got to above 50 I stopped trying to do this and since I've done more than a hundred podcasts, I don't even think about it anymore. That said, when I do a speaking engagement, I do do this so I can track the origin or the email subscribe to the engagement. I also do this for events when we have sponsored a booth because this is how we know well, this is how we know in 2024 to do less events because we've paid a lot of money to have a booth. And when we used to do PodFest, Podcast Movement, FinCon, NSA on a regular basis, and we tested plenty of others, we had a lot of fun at the booths. We enjoyed meeting a lot of people. We usually added about 100 new people to our email list at each event. But because we've been tracking that data, we have found that it's not even been anywhere near profitable to do all these events unless I had a speaking spot. When I get to take the stage, our ROI goes up dramatically. But we wouldn't know any of this if we didn't track the data. So tracking your data of where you get your email subscribers from from allows you to know what you should do more of and what is not worth the effort or the investment. If you don't know what's working to grow your list, build your sales, and achieve your bigger picture goals, you'll waste time and energy on things that don't work and may not double down on the things that do. All right, tip number seven Don't Be boring. It's not just about no boringbooks around here. You need no boring emails too. And while kicking off with some personal stuff now and again is totally, totally fine. Every email shouldn't be about you, just like your book shouldn't be all about you. Put yourself in your reader's shoes. They don't know you that well, so when you say I had a lovely holiday with my family, I like it when the cool weather settles into the area for the season so I can sip hot chocolate and watch my two golden retrievers play in the leaves. Some people might feel a connection and appreciate the personal story, but time after time you'll find people going, who cares? So now if you want to tie a personal reflection into something the reader can benefit from, you can do that. Find your voice and lean into it. Share something of value, surprise the reader, interest them, offer something insightful and you will find your ideal readers will look forward to your message and open them up. Test different things one time. Do a shorter email. Do links to videos. Do emojis if your email provider lets you. Mine does not memes or punchy subject lines. Watch how it impacts your open rates, your click rates, and the replies you get to your emails. And when you do this, more emails will be opened. So when you have a book sale, a course to offer, a speaking engagement that you want supporters in the audience for, or you have an amazing affiliate offer to share, you have people who are opening your emails and clicking the links. So your author business is booming. You might want to bookmark this one because it was a big and juicy video. But after you bookmark it and say hello in the comments below, here's the email I promised on the clean Amazon links and this video is the one on giving your book away for free. Both are great watching to supplement what we covered here today. And I can't wait to see you over there. So click on over.