Email marketing for every Author Ecosystem

In the sales and marketing game, the email list is king. Unfortunately, many authors hate sending email. Luckily, that's probably because they are not optimizing their own ecosystem.

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We’ve all heard the expression “email is king”. When it comes to marketing, there is no better investment than building your email list.

When it comes to email marketing, companies make an average of $36 for every U.S. dollar they spend on email marketing. Among many industries, the retail, ecommerce, and consumer goods business had the highest return on investment (ROI), at $45. -Constant Contact

If that’s true, why do so many authors evade their mailing list like the plague, and why is it so hard for writers to extract value from their email list at a level on par with other industries?

Well, one of the main reasons is that instead of keeping readers in their own direct sales environment to maximize the value of every sale, they are instead sending readers to retailers where they are getting a fractional share of an already minimal average order value.

Average Order Value (AOV) is an ecommerce metric that measures the average total of every order placed with a merchant over a defined period of time. AOV is one of the most important metrics for online stores to be aware of, driving key business decisions such as advertising spend, store layout, and product pricing. -BigCommerce Essentials

Most other businesses send subscribers to a web store or sales page with products that range from $20-$1,000+, instead of $1-$10 like on book retailers.

The average order value globally is $110.

In July, the AOV from Home & Furniture was the highest, at $265 – this is a 4% spike from June. In general, over the past twelve months, Home & Furniture has seen the highest average order values, at $238, and Pet Care & Veterinary Services has seen the lowest, at $70.

EMEA has witnessed the largest average order values overall ($195), followed by Americas ($106), and then APAC ($102). And in terms of device type, desktop has been responsible for average order values of $121, with mobile representing $104, and $80 from tablet. -Dynamic Yield

This is the kind of thing The Author Ecosystems can help you with, but that’s still only part of the story.

The other part of this story is that every ecosystem should approach email marketing differently based on their strengths and challenges, but we’re all told there is only one way to do email marketing.

You should know by now that there is not a one-size-fits-all strategy to anything, especially email. In this article, I’m going to break down an email strategy for each ecosystem that will hopefully make you fall in love with email marketing.

Desert

Advantages: Because of their desire to optimize every part of their business, it’s easy to see why the traditional email strategy pushed by the publishing industry won’t work for a Desert. It’s a ton of effort to set up swaps every week, coordinate freebies, and create a gigantic monster of an email that will probably lead to few, if any, sales. It’s a horrible strategy for anyone, but it would be especially frustrating for a desert.

Instead, I would recommend Deserts implement something more akin to what Morning Brew, Tim Ferris, or 1440 used to grow their list to 100,000+ without investing a ton of time into any individual newsletter.

Every Friday, I send out an exclusive email with the five coolest things I’ve found (or explored) that week. It could include exclusive giveaways or chances to interact with me, books, gadgets, albums, articles, new hacks/tricks, and — of course — all sorts of weird stuff I dig up around the world. -Tim Ferris

Namely, a daily/weekly/monthly digest or roundup where you are gathering the most important news about an industry and disseminating it into short news bites.

This is something Book Riot does already with Today in Books. You can also provide information on an industry, a genre, or just about anything that has a large audience, which is something you are uniquely qualified to analyze.

I also use this strategy with my weekly digests, and it allows me to get an additional email out to subscribers every week with less than an hour of work.

One of the reasons I love this strategy is that it doesn’t have to be about you or your books. Deserts usually want to work in the background anyway and let their writing do the talking. This strategy allows you to create a brand around your newsletter that has nothing to do with you while still collecting an audience of fans and funneling them to your work.

The best part of this strategy is that it’s almost infinitely scaleable with advertising. Companies like Beehiiv and Sparkloop have created recommendation engines like Substack, but they are powered by ads. For instance, Beehiiv has a program called Boosts.

Boosts is a marketplace feature that allows you to grow your newsletter by defining the exact cost per acquisition of subscribers. You can adjust this as much or as little as you like. The subscribers you gain through this feature are guaranteed to be active and additive to your ecosystem. If they're not active, you don't pay for them.

Sparkloop has Upscribe and their Partner Network.

For newsletter operators, this is an amazing, low-effort opportunity to increase revenue — in a way that your audience will love. We expect the average newsletter to increase their subscriber lifetime value by $3-10/subscriber with the Partner Network.

What’s nice is that you can both make money from the platforms and also spend money to grow with them. I’ve been testing this out with the Beehiiv network, and while it’s more focused on AI and tech than Sparkloop, I’ve still made $100 in the last week on my recommendations. I plan to dump that money back into ads in order to keep growing.

Challenges: The challenge here is scaling the right audience to buy your books. Hopefully, you’re creating an environment where this whole enterprise is profitable by itself, but you should remember that you’re looking for people to buy your books at the end of the day…unless you aren’t. It’s not impossible to build a big email list for a random project, and then sell it through a company like Duuce. Then, you can rinse and repeat, or move on to something else.

Grassland

Advantages: While the above strategy can work really well to build up a sizeable email list quickly, Grasslands are more focused on being seen as thought leaders moving the industry forward. A big list is good, but what they’re really looking for is influencing the movers and shakers of the industry and causing seismic shifts over a long time horizon.

For this reason, you should consider creating a newsletter that is almost purely value-based and lives on a platform on Substack or your own blog. That way, it has the longevity to keep “putting pennies in the bank” for years.

The main problem with sending a normal promotions email for a Grassland is that you can’t disseminate it widely. Once you send it, the value drops to zero, which isn’t ideal for a Grassland marketing strategy. Instead, their goal is to make something once and keep extracting value from it forever.

Whereas, if you can create a more content-focused newsletter, it allows you to syndicate it widely and get maximum value out of your work for the longest time.

For instance, this article lives on Substack, but it also gets disseminated over email, and then is cached on Google and other search engines. I could also syndicate it out to Medium and other platforms, though Substack doesn’t have that functionality natively.

Syndicating content allows you to distribute content to new audiences. So you can maximize your investment in content creation.

Work with relevant content distribution partners, digital publishers, or industry influencers to increase brand awareness among your target audience. And establish your brand as a trustworthy, authoritative voice in the industry.

Plus, the publisher may include a link to your site. Which can drive referral traffic and benefit your SEO. Because Google treats certain types of external links (known as backlinks) as “votes of confidence.” -Erika Varagouli

If I did my job right, then people will be able to search it for years, bringing people into our ecosystem long after it gets emailed out to subscribers.

This is the ideal situation for most Grasslands. A round-up strategy is perfect for Deserts who are trying to tap into the zeitgeist now, but you are more likely trying to tap into where the industry is going in a couple of years.

My main publication offers a new article every week AND a roundup of my favorite articles from the past week, so I try to have my cake and eat it, too.

One thing you might want to consider to bring in more income is to offer sponsorships like Simon Owens and most mainstream publications do.

A newsletter sponsorship is a paid advertisement placed within the body of an email newsletter to reach a community of engaged audiences. Unlike standalone content like pop-up or banner ads, newsletter sponsorships are often integrated into the surrounding content, similar to YouTube or podcast partnerships.

Many marketers successfully incorporate email sponsorships into their advertising plan to bypass ad blockers, spread awareness, gain leads and increase sales. On our platform, we serve advertisers of all sizes, from Fortune 500 companies to early-stage startups.

Sponsorships are a common monetization strategy for all types of publishers. You’ll find placements in a range of publications, from well-known daily newsletters like Morning Brew and Owler to niche players like Sideline Sprint. Because email advertisements are typically priced per thousand impressions (CPM), most creators aim to reach the 1,000 or 10,000 subscriber mark before launching a sponsorship plan. -Paved

You can also use the Paved or Sparkloop network, but you will probably see more success with a deeper partnership that you can vet for your audience.

Then, you can put ads in your newsletter or do an advertorial for an advertiser you believe in to share with your audience.

An advertorial is a form of advertising that is designed to look like an editorial feature in a publication.

It is essentially a paid ad or advertisement that appears in print or online but is written in the style of a news article or feature. The purpose of an advertorial is to promote a product, service, or brand by presenting it in an informative and persuasive manner, while also making it appear as if the information is neutral and unbiased. -Mailchimp

You are probably already covering the industry closely, so it would make sense for advertisers to work with you. If you have a stellar reputation you can probably charge top dollar for a spot in your publication.

The advantage of an advertising strategy is that when you have something to promote, you can pop it inside the ad spot and use it for your own promotion.

If that doesn’t work for you, then you can offer a membership like Monica and I here, or like

Jane Friedman

does with the Hot Sheet. Or, you can use it as a launching pad for consulting and courses, like

Writers at Work with Sarah Fay

or

Marlee Grace

.

Challenges: Having a value-based newsletter is not the easiest thing to monetize during a launch. Because you are not sending sales emails often, you have not developed the sales habit in your customers. This is why having advertising in your newsletter could be an effective strategy. Not only are you building revenue, but you are also training your subscribers to click and buy.

Tundra

Advantages: The hype train is strong with you, so you’re going to get a lot of value out of building up an audience and then monetizing them with launch events.

It’s best to think of your email strategy in three stages: Building, Launching, and Recovery. I wrote about it in This is Not a Book.

I try to think of my release calendar in seasons, with every launch being the crescendo of the wave I'm building up to or recovering from. Knowing that, I set my launches based on when I know I can crescendo effectively. 

There are three parts to a launch - Prep, Launch, and Recovery. In prep, I build up to my next launch. Then, there is the launch itself. Finally, in recovery, I give both myself and my fans a chance to relax and catch their breath before we do it again.

For me, that means January, March, June, and September, I launch books. I have always had effective launches in those months for different reasons.

In January and June, there are fewer books launching, so I can capitalize on that with my less popular books. In March and September, there are tons of books launching, so I put out my most popular books then so they get the most eyeballs on them.   

Once that is set, I know I need to spend a month building up to that launch, which means the lowest point on the release wave will occur every year in December, February, May, and August…My biggest book launches last 31 days, and my shortest can be as short as five days. It all depends on the project and how much I think people can stand me talking about it. 

It's important to note that this is my launch schedule for core books ONLY. I lay this out FIRST, before anything else, including experimental projects and other things I'm adding to the mix. 

Then, I plan every other launch around this schedule, as it is my moneymaker. It took me a LONG time to learn this, and it wasn't until I did that I had any consistency in my career.

Once I have planned these core launches, I figure out what else I want to try in the remaining time.

This brings us to the next thing. 

In the building phase, you’re using places like Bookfunnel, StoryOrigin, Bookdoggy, Booksweeps, and Written Word Media to build up a big mailing list, along with organic traffic and advertising. The goal here is really to give value with a free book or other piece of content. Then, use an automated email sequence to get them excited about your work.

An email sequence is a series of marketing messages targeting your audience on a set schedule.

If you already use email sequence software, you know there are several types of automation that can be used to reach your audience. With email sequencing, you use marketing automation software to set up and publish these campaigns depending on the actions they’ve taken on your website.

Email sequences are also known as lifecycle emails and email marketing automation because they allow you to schedule specific content to be sent out.

Marketing sequence emails can be sent to customers or prospects, depending on the type of business you operate. They can welcome new customers and engage with them regularly to keep your brand at the top of their minds and make them more likely to purchase your products and services. -Mailchimp

These new emails should be segmented out from your main list so they don’t get your main emails. However, that doesn’t mean that your main list doesn’t get love during the building phase, too.

During this phase, you are delivering value weekly by sharing free books, behind-the-scenes processes, and generally getting people to know you, like you, and trust you. More importantly, you are using this time to get them excited for your next big project.

It’s really important that you focus on sending emails with one call to action.

Call to action (CTA) is a marketing term for any design to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale. A CTA most often refers to the use of words or phrases that can be incorporated into sales scripts, advertising messages, or web pages, which compel an audience to act in a specific way. -Wikipedia

Ideally, you want them to do one thing with every email. The emails you write in any of these phases, but especially this one, should be short and fun.

Our goal is to crescendo our building phase to maximize excitement at the launch of our next product or project. The whole of our marketing should be about cresting and receding like waves so that we can maximize our launches. I call this a rolling launch strategy because they rise and fall a bit like a series of rolling hills or rolling waves.

During the launch phase, you’ll be sending way more launch emails than any of the other ecosystems. I recommend daily emails during a launch, each one highlighting a different part of your exciting new project.

Here is a sample email strategy during a launch, from Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter. You can get a free copy of the book right here.

Day 1 (Tuesday) - 3 emails -  I send a “we launched” email in the morning with a graphic of my early bird perks. Then, I send a mid-morning bonus perk email assuming we do well enough to qualify for it. Often, this perk is tied to backing on the first day only. Then, I send a final email at night saying the first-day “bonus” perk is going away.

Day 2 (Wednesday) - 1 email - The first day is for hitting people that already know and love the book. The second day is about introducing people to the book a second time, sending the blurb and going into depth about the book.

Day 3 (Thursday) - 1 email - This email is to tell people there are only two days left for early bird perks. I use this email to talk about early bird perks. I recommend having 4-5 early bird perks available for backers

Day 4 (Friday) - 1 email - This one is to say there is only 1 day left for early bird perks.

Day 5 (Saturday) - 2 emails - I send a “last day for early bird perks” in the morning. Then, a “last chance for early bird perks” at night. I have tested this all sorts of different ways, and sending the second email is very effective.

Day 6 (Sunday) - 0 emails - break.

Day 7 (Monday) - 1 email - This is an email talking about week 2 perks. I recommend 4-5 week two perks. This also sets up that you’ll be spending the second week going deep on different aspects of the book.

Day 8 (Tuesday) - 1 email -  Dive deeper into the main character or the story idea (though you probably covered the story in the previous week’s emails.

Day 9 (Wednesday) - 1 email - Dive deeper into the setting, or the art, or another part of the book.

Day 10 (Thursday) - 1 email - Dive deeper into the reason you made the book. This is your WHY email, and critically important to get people who’ve heard all about the book and just need one little push to go over the edge.

Day 11 (Friday) - 1 email - 1 day left for week 2 perks. This is the same as the previous week.

Day 12 (Saturday) - 2 emails - Last day for week 2 perks in the morning. Then, last chance for week 2 perks at night. These emails are exactly like the first week’s emails.

Day 13 (Sunday) - 0 emails - break.

Day 14 (Monday) - 1 email - Introducing final week perks. You don’t have to go as hard this week. You can just have 2-3 perks for this, since you’ll get a lot of traction out of the campaign ending.

Day 15 (Tuesday) - 1 email - I send a “2 days left” email in the morning, knowing that Kickstarter sends a “48 hours left” email to people watching the campaign in the afternoon.

Day 16 (Wednesday) - 2 emails - 1 day left in the morning. 24 hours left in the afternoon, or whenever there are only 24 left in the campaign.

Day 17 (Thursday) - 4 emails - 12 hours left, 8 hours left, 4 hours left, 2 hours left.

This can get very exhausting, which is why we need so much recovery time after a launch, for both ourselves and our audiences to settle from the excitement and reset.

Challenges: The challenge of a Tundra is they always want to launch the next thing, and they don’t take into account the building or recovery phase. If you don’t have ways to build up your audience between launches, then you will see your success dwindle.

You also have to contend with the fact that launch emails lose all value the minute after you send them.

Most importantly, if you’re not delivering a ton of value to your audience between launches, they will think you are just withdrawing from the goodwill bank instead of making deposits into it. I wrote about the goodwill bank in How to Build Your Creative Career.

Think about your goodwill like it’s a bank. We’ll call it The First Bank of Goodwill. This bank works like any other bank, except that it runs on your goodwill instead of money.

When you do something nice for somebody, you make a deposit into this bank. Whether it’s writing a blog post, speaking on a panel, providing advice over coffee, or even just retweeting an interesting article, everything you do for your audience is a deposit in the goodwill bank.

By contrast, everything you ask of your audience is a withdrawal from the goodwill bank. Every time you ask somebody to buy your product, every time you pitch them something, and every single time you ask them to share your posts, you are withdrawing from your goodwill account.

If you have been depositing into the goodwill bank over and over again, you can make these withdrawals without overdrafting your account; however, if you haven’t been making these deposits, then you can’t afford to make an ask of your audience. Imagine trying to buy a $50,000 boat in cash when your checking account only has $3.27 in it. You just can’t do that.

The same is true with your goodwill.

You absolutely must focus equally on all three phases to make the most out of this strategy. Unlike some other ecosystems that can supplement their income with advertising, you probably don’t need that kind of stuff because you’re constantly in a launch cycle.

Forest

Advantages: The people who designed the email strategy people teach for the publishing industry must be Forests because the only ecosystem that could get away with the type of email we’re told to make are Forests, who have very, very forgiving audiences.

Additionally, the only people who would possibly spend the hours upon hours it takes to design one of those emails are Forests, who will spend countless hours making something if they think their audience will like it, even if they don’t sleep for a week.

I think a lot about RJ Blain and her Sneaky Kitty Critic email list “written by her cats”. Even after knowing her for years, I have no idea what she’s doing with her email. It’s chaos, but I love it. She knows how to engage her perfect people and make them feel special.

That’s what really matters. Forests know their audience so well they can send just about anything and their audience will eat it up.

Because Forests have such devoted audiences, they are also the only ones who should be even thinking about monthly emails over weekly ones, and only then because they probably have a Circle community, a Facebook group, a Discord channel, or somewhere else where they interact with their readers all the time. If you have that kind of interaction with people, you don’t need to send them a lot of emails.

Even if you send monthly emails, you might also want to consider doing a weekly digest of comments from your group, or something similar.

An email digest is basically a single email that summarizes all of your emails published during a specific time period or when a volume limit is reached (e.g. every 10 or 100 messages) into one single message and sent to your email subscribers at each selected interval.

The arrangement of an email digest or the adjustment of its frequency may differ from tool to tool, but generally, all have the same purpose: to summarize! -Zeynep Serra Avan

This is something you can set up automatically on some services, but you might have to do it by hand, or have an assistant do it.

Kathryn Vercillo

does these amazing roundup of interactions she’s had/seen in the past week which I think could be really interesting for a Forest to explore.

Challenges: Forests are incredible at making their own people feel special, but an email list is also a great way to find new people. Everything I mentioned above is great fan service, but you also have to develop a good autoresponder to bring people into your ecosystem and make sure they are set up for success.

An autoresponder is a script that automates email replies. The script is triggered by user actions either on a site or when a user sends an email directly to another email with an autoresponder in place.

Marketers use autoresponders to streamline their campaigns and cut down on the amount of work they do. For example, rather than emailing each individual who signs up for a newsletter, an autoresponder may send out a welcome email that other scripts have personalized. -Campaign Monitor

However, as autoresponders have gotten more complex, marketers now use them in broader ways to maintain contact with subscribers.

Don’t assume everyone on your list knows what you’re talking about, especially if they are new. I suggest you segment out new people and run them through an extensive email sequence to make sure they are well-educated on your space before you show them maximum weird.

The key to a Forest succeeding with email is consistency. If they can develop consistently, then they can send just about anything to their audience.

Aquatic

Advantages: Aquatics are almost the perfect marketing chameleon who can get a lot of value from integrating anything I’ve talked about so far into their email practice.

Because they are building one overriding fan experience across many formats, they can create a huge audience through advertising and digests or create unique fan experiences like a Forest. They will probably be launching often, so having a rolling promotion strategy of a Tundra would work for them, too.

The question for an Aquatic is where to start, and that’s kind of always their problem with just about anything. They want to do everything all the time and are most prone to shiny object syndrome.

Shiny object syndrome (SOS) is a continual state of distraction brought on by an ongoing belief that there is something new worth pursuing. It often comes at the expense of what's already planned or underway. It's rooted in that childhood phenomenon of always wanting a new toy, even if your current toy is just fine. -Product Plan

The key for an Aquatic is to figure out which strategy to try first and that’s going to depend on where you are in your career.

If you are “pre-launch”, you probably want to start building up an audience either like a Desert or like a Tundra, depending on which strategy feels right to you. The further you are away from launch, the more you should probably build like a Desert.

Why not a Grassland? Because nobody knows your universe yet, and so you’ll get the most value at building a “look-alike” audience filled with a ton of people you think would like your universe, but since there’s nothing out about it yet, you also have no hype. Instead, you could build on the hype other universes already have going for them while you build up your own.

Once you have an audience, keeping them engaged like a Forest makes a lot of sense. I would probably say that the last thing you should build is your Grassland-ed-ness, which seems to go against the true power of a Grassland, but people aren’t going to be interested in doing a deep dive into your universe until after you have a fandom, and you’ll probably get the least from content marketing than a Grassland because your universe will likely be quite niche for a long while.

Challenges: An Aquatic’s biggest challenge is F.O.C.U.S. They have a ton of trouble focusing on one challenge until they have success with it. They have big plans and huge ambitions. Because they have a thousand options of what to do next, they end up flitting between them, which is a really bad way to have success. You can have success in any one of these areas, but you have to pick one and stick with it until you either break through or you’re sure it won’t work for you.

By the way, it’s fine to give up on something. Just know why you’re doing it and make sure it’s a good reason. Don’t just give up because another pretty thing came up that you’re dying to try.

Final Thoughts:

Email marketing isn’t easy, especially when you’re first getting started, but it’s considerably easier once you have a process in place that works for you. Like any good flywheel, it gets easier the more you do it.

Flywheel marketing is an inbound marketing strategy that places customers at the center of your marketing efforts. Your customers then become the momentum or mechanical energy that drives your business forward.

The marketing flywheel has three spokes:

Attract: Attract leads with engaging, helpful content, such as blog posts, web articles, social media content, or pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Engage: Engage and nurture your leads to foster trust and convert them into customers. For this section of the flywheel, you might focus on strategies like email marketing and conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Delight: Delight your customers by continuing to market products of interest to them. Here, you’ll want to invest in tactics like omnichannel customer service, loyalty programs, and other customer retention strategies.

When you prioritize the customer’s experience at every section of the flywheel, you unify your marketing efforts and create a circular process that turns current customers into advocates who then bring new prospects to your business. -WebFX

For years when I was getting started, I did something called 7 Cool Things, which was modeled on Tim Ferris’s Five Bullet Friday. It was easy. It was fun. It gave my audience something of me when I didn’t have anything to talk about with my own work.

Then, I started to launch more often and fell into the rhythm of build, launch, recover. In the past year, I’ve focused heavily on Substack and building like a Grassland. There is no wrong answer, and if you see a strategy above that resonates with you outside of your ecosystem, try it.

The biggest thing that determines a successful email strategy is consistency. That said, the goal of each strategy I’ve outlined above is different. Only the Tundra is really set up to maximize money from the launch itself, which is why I showed other ecosystems different ways to generate income that might work better depending on your ecosystem.

The goal of email is often less about making money from a launch than keeping yourself at the top of people’s minds so that when you’re ready to launch they can find your work and make space for it.

At Writer MBA, we have a Grassland strategy on Substack while having a Tundra strategy on Convertkit. We have both a promotions email list and a value-based email list, and each has a different purpose. One helps us continuously grow, while the other helps us monetize to stay in business.

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If you haven’t had a chance to take our quiz yet, I highly recommend taking it before you read this article. Additionally, if you haven’t taken a look at our membership options, I think they are pretty neat.

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