While the popularity of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and others continues to wax and wane (remember MySpace?), email remains a popular online activity. Therefore, email should be a key component of your marketing plan.
In a previous post, I wrote that your author website should help you build a mailing list because you have more control over your outreach to followers via email than you do in social media. In another, I encouraged you to strategize for “top of the mind awareness” and build relationships with your audience by providing them with valuable content on a regular basis. Now I have some tips to share about delivering that content.
Tips for Writing Email Content
- Be yourself! Use a friendly, personal, conversational tone.
- Tell readers something they don’t already know.
- Avoid promotional hype. Be helpful, interesting, informative. Constant promotion is tiresome.
- Avoid jargon. Use simple language.
- Be brief.
- Ask your readers to forward your email to interested friends.
- Remember that email messages are short and personal. Provide readers with clickable links to your website for “more information.
Elements of Good Email Design
- Whitespace
- Short paragraphs
- Images (but not too many)
- Bold headlines
- Clearly labeled sections
- Brief enough so that the reader doesn’t have to scroll very much
- Easy-to- find “unsubscribe” and “forward” buttons
- Consistent branding (logo, colors, fonts)
- Tested in various email programs and browsers
- According to the Yahoo Style Guide, “Text that works best on the Web is text that gets to the point fast and that makes it easy for readers to pick out key information.”
Consider Using an Email Marketing Service
There are many email marketing services to choose from. AWeber, MailChimp, MadMimi, and Constant Contact are among the most popular. The best services have various features that help you to easily create emails and mailing lists and provide reports that provide valuable tracking information.
- Creating and updating a mailing list is easy
- Professional designed templates
- Free and low-cost services available
- Email campaigns can be tracked, analyzed, and measured for effectiveness
- Email campaigns can be created and delivered quickly
- Autoresponders and automatic distribution of blog posts *
Evaluating Email Marketing Services
- Can you try before you buy? How long is the free trial period?
- Is the cost determined by the number of addresses in your list or the number of campaigns you mail? Which option will work best for you?
- Are there hidden costs? For example, some services charge extra for image hosting or an archive of your emails.
- Is there a wide variety of help resources such as FAQs, tutorials, live chat and phone support?
- Is the service’s website user-friendly? Well-designed, organized, and easy to navigate?
- Are there a variety of well-designed templates for you to choose from? Can you easily modify templates?
- Can you easily import your mailing list, group names into interest lists, and automatically detect duplicates?
- Are people who want to unsubscribe easily and automatically removed from the system?
- Is a form provided that you can easily to add to your website which enables people to opt into your mailing list?
- Do opt-ins receive customized auto-response emails when they do so?
- Is an automatic checker available that will scan for triggers that could get your email marked as spam?
- What tools and reporting are available for you to evaluate your email campaign’s effectiveness?
- Does the system track these basic statistics: number mailed, bounces, spam reports, opt-outs, opens, click-throughs, and forwards? Can you easily view and download these reports?
* If you subscribe to updates to this Florida Writers Association blog, what you receive is a newsletter auto-magically generated when a new post appears on the site. If you have a WordPress (WP) site, it has a mechanism to set this up easily, but WP doesn’t allow you to access subscriber data or change the design of their very generic looking mailer.
If you’re not building your own mailing list and taking advantage of email to market your books, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to build you audience.
