From Unknown to Bestseller: How Email Lists Can Transform Your Writing Career
- August 7, 2023
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Book Cover Design
For a self published author anonymity is an obstacle to overcome on path to success. Email lists are the MUST HAVE tool for any author while marketing his / her books to dedicated fan following thereby achieving a lasting success. Despite of large audience’s availability on social media platforms, email remains 2nd best way to market only to be surpassed by word of mouth (testimonials).
Building an email list requires dedicated efforts and most importantly financial resources. At A2ZPublishing we explored following options available to authors for creating email subscribers lists:-
Website Lead Magnet
Author websites are ideal for generating leads by offering something for free, it could be a chapter or some exclusive content for the fans. Problem with this approach I that it will require extensive efforts including paid ads for getting the traffic on website and getting email. While it differs for every website but Cost of getting an email may range from 1-1.5$ per email. It means in order to generate 1000 email subscriber’s list it may require upto 1500$. While the conversion rates via email vary from 3 to 10% so question remains about financial of feasibility of such approach.
Social Media Lead Generation
We used our Facebook page for lead generation / email collection, After spending 225$ we managed to collect only 67 email addresses. Cost per email 3.35$ which is highly expensive and not sustainable in longer run especially for new authors with minimum cash flow and limited followings.
Bookfunnel.com Lead Generation
In order to get emails for new authors, we experimented with bookfunnel.com and found it excellent choice for building the email subscribers list with less spending. To start with Bookfunnel.com mid level author package (which allows email collection) costs 100$ per annum and we tried with 4 x different accounts to ascertain cost per email collection across various genres (fiction / Non Fiction). The results are as given below:-
It clearly shows that Bookfunnel is one of the cheapest tools available to Indie authors for expanding their email subscriber list. It is important to understand the dynamics of platform and ideally offering some part or complete book for free can increase number emails collected.
Using Emails in Targeting Ads
When emails are collected, it helps not only in sending email blasts but also these emails can be used at Facebook, Google ads to target ads to specific people but also it helps in creating lookalike audience and hence an email of 1000 subscribers can be expanded to 6000 for ads targeting.
Conclusion
Creating and maintaining an email subscriber list for an author is essential. It can help reduce cost of marketing while developing fan following which can deliver consistent sales throughout the year.