Newsletter Ninja Read online

  Newsletter Ninja

  Tammi Labrecque

  Copyright © 2018 by Tammi Labrecque

  * * *

  All rights reserved. Neither this book nor any portion thereof may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Print ISBN 978-0-9982127-5-3

  v. 190305

  www.newsletterninja.net

  Contents

  Foreword - by David Gaughran

  Acknowledgements

  1 - Who Am I (And Who Are You)?

  2 - You Are Not Your Reader, But You Are a Rock Star

  3 - Why You Need a Mailing List

  4 - My Mailing List Philosophy

  5 - Planning and Setup

  6 - Onboarding

  7 - The First Date

  8 - The Sign-Up Process

  9 - Your Perfect Subscriber

  10 - Strategies vs Tactics

  11 - Organic List-Building

  12 - Straight-Up Bribes

  13 - Engagement

  14 - Deliverability

  15 - Building Relationships

  16 - Delivering Value

  17 - Re-engagement

  18 - Purging Dead Weight

  Afterword

  Do You Need More Help? (aka The Inevitable Upsell)

  Helpful Links

  For my students.

  You’ve got this. Keep killing it out there.

  Foreword - by David Gaughran

  I've been self-publishing for seven years. That's quite a long period to be screwing up almost the entire time, but I managed it! My whole approach to email was backwards. I did all the don’ts, ignored all the warnings, missed out on so many opportunities to build myself a happy and engaged audience of readers that it causes me literal pain when I think about it. I don’t say this to elicit sympathy. Rather, I hope that my long experience of doing exactly the wrong things can act as a deterrent—a giant sign made of bones spelling out “Here Be Wolves.”

  What did I do exactly? I only emailed people when I had a new release. I thought I was being considerate and not clogging up everyone’s inboxes when, in reality, I was only turning up at their door when I wanted something: their money. This was compounded by my slow production speed, particularly with those painstakingly researched historical novels I seem to enjoy writing for some reason. That problem was further exacerbated by working in more than one genre, so the books came out even slower and the emails were even less frequent. Clearly, I felt I wasn’t antagonizing my most loyal readers enough with this set-up, so I decided to have one Frankenlist—my fiction and non-fiction peeps all lumped together—neatly ensuring that everyone really wouldn’t care about at least 50% of the (increasingly infrequent) messages I was sending out.

  Yeah, I was officially Bad At Email.

  There were more insidious effects too. Deep down I knew I was Bad At Email, but instead of this manifesting in some change of tack, I retreated into myself. Messages became less personal. I lacked confidence—dreading launch day instead of getting a thrill of anticipation when hitting my list. Because I knew I’d see a continuation of several disturbing trends: falling opens, reduced clicks, less conversions, increasingly tepid engagement, and then people unsubscribing or marking the email as spam as the final kick in the teeth. How did I get here? And how did I climb out of that hole?

  I started listening to Tammi, is the short version. She started teaching a course on email and I was one of the first people to sign up. Yes, I was at least partly motivated by wanting to support a friend, but Tammi sounded like she knew her stuff and I was beginning to accept that I needed to radically change my approach. I had already taken one important step: I had separated those fiction and non-fiction readers. But I didn’t really know what to do next, and I was hoping I’d get some ideas from Tammi’s course.

  Eh, yeah.

  Within a month I had started a brand-new mailing list with a five-part automated onboarding sequence, during which I doled out my custom-written reader magnet which was getting rave reviews. I had pivoted to a weekly newsletter approach and weeded out the dead weight on my old list, and open and click rates were climbing.

  Within two months I had launched my first book to these new readers, and it hung out at the top of the charts for a considerable time. My newsletter subscribers were responding in greater numbers than ever because my “ask” (and a new release is still an “ask” because you are looking for their money!) came after a string of “gives” for a change.

  Within six months I had re-energized my existing non-fiction list and had a brand-new list containing thousands of new readers— passionate and engaged and loyal subscribers who not only opened and clicked but actually looked forward to getting my emails. I know this because they email me and tell me! I can’t explain to you what this means to me, how much I have been reinvigorated by this. My whole career feels like it has been rebooted, and I look to the future with confidence rather than trepidation. I get a tingle again every time I hit my list.

  I don’t know where you are in your career or whether you have made all these mistakes too. If you are just at the beginning of your journey, you have the chance here to do things right from the start. But if you have screwed things up as badly as me, I want to give you the confidence that you can turn things around—remarkably quickly too. Even quicker if you haven’t ticked every box on the Giant List O’Mistakes!

  So, just listen to Tammi, learn how to put value in every single email, and start building a passionate list of engaged readers. I wish I did it years ago.

  Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements are hard, y’all. But here goes:

  I would be an ingrate and a fool not to make a special point of thanking David Gaughran—for his wonderful foreword, his insistence that I must write this book, and his many glowing recommendations of the course that gave birth to it. But most of all, I have to thank him for his unfailing friendship. It’s by no means a certainty that when you meet your heroes, they will be every bit as wonderful as you’ve imagined. I got lucky.

  Chris Fox has been my dear friend for several years now, and I have literally no idea what my life would be like without him. He was the first person who believed in my ability to be an editor, the first person who told me I could be a teacher, the first person who convinced me that the things I knew had actual real value to my fellow indie authors. His faith in me is the bedrock on which I’ve built every good thing over the last 3+ years. There aren’t words enough to thank him.

  The members of Authors’ Corner have done so much for me, and become a special sort of family. I love you guys so much.

  My IPI students make me smile every day, and I’m so proud of all their accomplishments, big and small. Whether it’s a good launch, a high open rate, or an ass-kicking ad, every time they succeed, I feel like part of me succeeds as well.

  Sean Platt championed this book with his usual enthusiasm—which is a great deal of enthusiasm indeed—and the rest of the Stone Table buoyed me with their approval and excitement.

  Sondra Turnbull, Christine Mancuso, Mike Omer, and Michelle Hart read pieces of this manuscript hot off the keyboard, gave me encouragement and redirection, and cheerleaded (cheer-led?) me ever onward when I wanted to give up. It may be true that only I could have written this book, but I couldn’t have written it without them.

  And, lastly, while I was building my author and publishing business(es), my daughters Isabella and Caroline didn’t see me for longer periods than I care to admit, put up with a lot of penny-pinching, and ate a great deal of takeout without complaining (though perhaps that last part wasn’t so bad). You two are my heart and soul, and the best th
ings that have ever happened to me.

  1 - Who Am I (And Who Are You)?

  The first part of that question is easy (for me, anyway). My name is Tammi Labrecque, and I’m an indie author, editor, and publisher. I write and publish my own books under a couple of pen names, and freelance in what feels like every related field, from plot doctoring to editing to ads management. I’ve been writing since I was a tween, was traditionally published in the olden days (the 90s), and I’ve been doing this indie publishing thing since 2014. You might have seen me on the Self-Publishing Podcast, met me at the Smarter Artist Summit or 20 Books to 50K Vegas, worked with me when I was employed at Sterling & Stone, or heard about me from clients like Chris Fox, Wayne Stinnett, or David Gaughran.

  I’ve done just about every job there is in the indie publishing space, but—apart from writing—newsletters are my favorite thing. They’re my jam, as the kids say. (I have no idea if the kids still say that, or if they ever did, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole just now.)

  Now for the second part: Who are you?

  We can assume you’re an author, or maybe an author assistant. Either way, you’ve got an email issue. Generally, people come to me with one of three problems:

  They want to start a list but aren’t sure where to begin, or

  They’ve got a list but it’s not as big as they would like, or

  They’ve got a list that’s big enough, but not engaged.

  No matter which of those statements applies to you—or even if you’re a hybrid of those things, or stuck somewhere between two of them—I can help. I maintain my own mailing lists as well as several lists for other authors, I helped with the vast email enterprise that is Sterling & Stone, and I’ve been running month-long sessions of a class called Mailing List Expert (MLE) for almost a year now, testing out these techniques with students across the entire gamut of genres, mailing list sizes, and approaches. The stuff I teach works—and, more than that, it will make talking to your list fun instead of a chore you have to check off around release day.

  Let me pause for just a moment and make one thing clear: I am definitely not going to walk you step-by-step through the actual button-pushing of creating a list, making a signup form, or what queries to run to tell who’s opening emails or how many unsubscribes you got or anything like that. There are dozens of email marketing providers (Mailchimp, Active Campaign, and the like), and it wouldn’t be remotely practical of me to try to cover all the technical steps required to get each of them up and running—to say nothing of ongoing maintenance. So you will have to work through that part yourself.

  If that’s daunting, there are resources to help you. Many virtual assistants will handle email for you. Author friends can give you tips. The email marketing services themselves have help and support documents, and varying levels of customer service to help you answer your unique questions about your own circumstance. I, and many other people, offer classes or consultation that can address your individual situation. But if you were looking for a book that would deal in those kinds of specifics, you should definitely return this book. That’s not the value proposition here, and I have a near-phobia about not delivering value.

  This book is intended to be about a mailing list philosophy, a new way for you to approach the problem of email and make it easier and more fun for both you and your subscribers. This book will give you the foundation to seek out those more specific answers, because you’ll know what questions to ask. And yes, we will talk about every step of the process, but always in terms of how to approach the topic, ways you might do things differently, things you might not have thought of, pitfalls to avoid, and fun stuff like that.

  But we have a couple of things to address before we get to any of the fun stuff.

  Now, before you nod off—or skip to something that looks more interesting—know that this technique is one you’ll be using a lot, to great effect, when it’s time to start your new approach to your email list, so you might as well learn it. It’s called answering the reader’s objections.

  “Wait a minute!” you're probably saying. (If not, you can go ahead and say it now, if only to make me feel better.) “How can I have any objections? We haven’t even begun.”

  Okay, that’s a fair point. But the thing about answering objections is that it’s ten times more powerful if you answer them before they even arise. So let me answer yours, even though you might not have developed them yet or known you had them.

  I’ve been teaching a class on this for a while now, and I’ve seen the objections that arise as students go through mindset shifts and learn new techniques and all that groovy stuff. Apart from the most common objection, which is something along the lines of “But I don’t want to write an onboarding sequence,” most people’s objections generally fall into two camps:

  I would never subscribe to (or stay on) a list like the one you’re describing, and

  I’m just an indie author; people aren’t interested in what I have to say.

  If you don’t actually have either of those objections, bear with me while I treat them as a rhetorical device. If you do feel that way, though, and you’ve been letting those thoughts stand in the way of your newsletter success, get ready—because I’m about to tell you that both of those statements are bollocks. Let’s turn the page and talk about why.

  2 - You Are Not Your Reader, But You Are a Rock Star

  You Are Not Your Reader

  It happens every time I run a class, and in every consulting session I do about email. It happens when I’m just sitting around with my indie author pals and put forth some tenet of newsletter philosophy I believe in (we indie authors are a real blast to hang out with, as you see). I’ll suggest something that seems pretty tame to me, something like “Email monthly” or “include cat pictures,” and someone is sure to say “That would turn me off,” or “that would make me unsubscribe,” or “No way would that work on me.”

  Well, good for you, you newsletter-hating edgelord. And what have you got against cats?

  My response to this is something I say to students so often that I’m thinking I might get a tattoo, or at the very least have a rubber stamp made: Do not make business decisions based on your own consumer behavior.

  One more time, for you clowns in the back throwing pencils and passing notes:

  Do not make business decisions based on your own consumer behavior.

  This is a huge mistake, and I see so many people make it.

  So what do you do instead? You make decisions based on how your readers respond to things you try—by getting reader feedback and by looking at measurable results (open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, conversion), not by guessing or defaulting to behavior that accommodates your own biases.

  Because there’s good news, and the good news is this: You are not your reader. I cannot stress that enough. Even if you read widely in your genre, even if you subscribe to author newsletters, you are not your reader. You are an author, and you view author newsletters through your own prism. Things that are intolerable to you as a consumer are not necessarily intolerable to your readers—and, in fact, may be things your readers like!

  All those things that turn you off, that would make you mash the unsubscribe button? I’ll give you ten to one, the majority of the reader audience you’re trying to tempt onto (or keep on) your mailing list simply loves those things. And I can prove it to you—but, even better, you can prove it to yourself. Because everything I will tell you to do is something you can test and split-test and test again, letting your own list tell you what they do and don’t like. (Split-testing, what some people call A/B testing, is the process of offering consumers two different things and tracking which gets a better response. We’ll talk about it more a bit later.)

  And all you have to do to make this work is to be open—open to trying new things, open to the idea that not everyone shares your disdain for autoresponders or polls or cover reveals or cats, open to the possibility of finally having the mailing li
st you want/need/deserve/whatever. All you have to do is make a pact with yourself that you will be guided by actual metrics instead of feelings.

  Easy-peasy.

  But You Are a Rock Star

  My response to the second objection—I’m just an indie author; no one cares what I have to say—is something along the lines of “Baloney” (mainly because I already used “bollocks”). You are not just an indie author. To the people who have read your book or downloaded your reader magnet (we’ll talk in depth about reader magnets later; for now, just know that they are a thing) or found you in whatever manner they found you, and then signed up to hear more from you, you are a rock star. (I won’t repeat myself this time. I trust the pencil-throwers were able to maintain their attention span for a few paragraphs.)

  How can you be a rock star when you’re just … well, frankly, just you? That’s easy: because to the reader, you’re not just you. You’re someone who wrote a book they loved enough to hand over their email address—a commodity that is getting more and more precious as our email inboxes become fuller and fuller—so they could learn more about you. That’s real, and it’s powerful. They like you. They are already predisposed to be interested in what you have to say.

  So I won’t repeat it, but I encourage you to repeat it to yourself from time to time—maybe when you’re casting about in vain for something to write about in your next email, and thinking that you might just skip sending one this month, as you’ve nothing to say and who wants to hear from you anyway? Say it: “I am a rock star.”