Getting an Email List Provider
Can you believe that I used to manually emailed people when I first started my authorpreneurship business? Yup. I did. And it took me forever to email people to tell them what was going on. Marketing my books was a pain in the butt. It took way too long and was way too complicated. And at less than 1000, my list was too long. Imagine having that problem? Imagine that being too long? But it was when I was trying to do it manually. I knew there had to be a better way.
Well, guess what? There is a better way for us self-publishing indie authors.
I eventually heard of emailing list providers. There were several different companies offering email software packages. And some of them even provided free ones. I finally tried out Mailchimp. If we have under 2000 people on our email list, the email service is free. And as authorpreneurs, what’s better than free, right?
So, I gave it a shot. I watched a couple of tutorials on Mailchimp and read some about it. Then I uploaded my email list and was ready to send out my first email. Now I had to figure out what to email them. Well, I figured a monthly newsletter wouldn’t be too much. And announcements of when I have a new book shouldn’t be too much either. From there, I guess I can just figure out what’s next, right?
Well, I gave it a shot. I was a bit nervous that it wouldn’t work. But guess what? It worked. And it was so much easier than what I used to do. I had successfully taken my first step to figuring out email marketing. And if I can do this, so can you. Trust me.
Now, just a heads-up. I’m not trying to sell you on Mailchimp. There are a bunch of these email service providers out there. Do your research and use whatever one seems to make sense to you, okay?
These email list providers save us authorpreneurs some series time. And they do some other pretty cool things, too, that we wouldn’t be able to do on our own. Some of these email providers will actually track the response or lack of response behaviors of our email subscribers and then send the next appropriate email to just them. This would take forever for us to do. But through automation, these email service providers just pop it right out while we’re doing something else like perhaps sleeping.
These email providers can send a training series of emails to our people and virtually walk them through our sales funnel. Pretty cool, huh? Now that’s a powerful thing, isn’t it?
And don’t forget the autoresponder that these services provide us. Imagine if we had to personally and physically respond to every single email. We wouldn’t have any time to sleep if we tried to respond to hundreds or even thousands of emails a day.
We would all be prudent to learn email marketing. It’s the most potent marketing out there right now. Through email, our messages go directly to people’s inboxes. It’s way better than our social media posts in which only a few people are seeing. Email is the way to go right now. But it can be very time consuming if we don’t know how to do it.
Start simple and simply build some relationships with others through one of the software packages of one of the email service providers.
Now, here is a little email etiquette. Don’t just put people on your email list. They need to opt-in if you’re getting them digitally. If you meet people at parties or networking events, don’t just put them on your email list. You need to ask them first.
Trust me, you don’t want to put people on your email list who don’t want to be on your email list. If you do this, you are spamming them. And with spamming, all sorts of other headaches arise. It’s much better to have a smaller free list of people who want to interact with us. We don’t want a big expensive list that is unengaged, or worse, complaining about us spamming them.
So, in closing, begin learning about email marketing and its software. You don’t have to do all of this in a day. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. So take it slow and steady, but do learn how to use email in your authorpreneurship business.
*Check out the free video lesson on this chapter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0M2pCzads&list=PL_-39bUXJitwL8cHUpiZ5mO0-JJuaPOVl&index=50
https://tinyurl.com/y6neuegu https://tinyurl.com/tx5wphz http://tinyurl.com/y8opavl8