In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, Savvy Book Marketer Dana Lynn Smith discusses how to add email and autoresponders to your author platform bag of tricks.
Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, it’s important to have an opt-in form on your website to capture email addresses of visitors, so that you can contact them now and in the future. Keeping in touch through email helps to build relationships, reinforce your expertise, and keep potential customers from forgetting about you.
You can send "broadcast emails" to your list at any time and use "autoresponders" to automatically send out one or more pre-written emails at specified intervals after someone joins the list. Here’s an example of an autoresponder: when you submit an online form to get a free ebook from someone, you might get an email with a link to the ebook immediately, and then get a follow up message seven days later, and another message ten days after that.
Here are just a few of the ways that authors can promote through autoresponders and broadcast emails:
- Offer a sample chapter, short story, prequel, ebook, report, or instructional video to people who sign up for your mailing list. This free bonus should be designed to promote your book or other products.
- Send a newsletter to subscribers with educational or entertainment value.
- Send your list an announcement of new books or products, and new editions and formats of your book.
- Offer free or paid mini-courses, online training, or teleseminars, and use the autoresponder to deliver information to the registrants on an automated basis.
In my latest newsletter, I published a more in-depth article that explains how autoresponders work, explores ways that fiction and nonfiction authors can use autoresponders to promote books, and offers tips on choosing a service provider. If you’re not already a subscriber, sign up today to get access to the archive of in-depth newsletter articles and get three free ebooks on book marketing.
This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.
