In this piece, we will discuss author email campaigns and beyond-the-click strategies for connecting with your readers.

Author Email Campaigns: A Valuable Tool

Effective email marketing is a worthwhile venture that can help you grow your readership. Author email campaigns have proven to be really valuable for writers. Readers want to support their favorite authors and feel connected to them.

Email campaigns for authors help writers reach out and keep in touch with their readership. Crucially, by putting together a mailing list for an email campaign, you are basically compiling a contact list that you own full of people you know are interested in your work.

In an email campaign, you can share your story and promote your work to an ever-growing list of readers.

Things You Need for an Email Campaign

To set up an author email campaign, you need:

• Custom email address (generally, emails tend to have limits on the number of emails you can send)
• Mailing software (e.g., MailChimp)
• Landing page (more about this later)
• Lots of ideas for content.

Options for Email Campaigns

Here are three effective email marketing strategies beyond click strategies that you could include in your author email campaigns:

• Newsletters: Monthly or weekly roundups of various things that are going on in your life and the literary world, as well as updates on your writing projects and some stories.
• Surveys: You can use these to gather further information about your readers and find out what they want to hear.
• Blog posts: Your blog posts could really be about anything loosely related to your work.
• Promotional emails: You can offer special deals on your next book or any other subscriptions you may be offering.

Effective Email Marketing

For email marketing to be effective, you need to use some beyond-click strategies (that is, strategies that mean people do more than just click on your email). Here are some things to keep in mind when thinking of email campaigns for authors:

• The subject line is really important; it's worth putting time into brainstorming them and considering what the best way of selling your email content is. For effective email marketing, you need an effective subject line.
• In the body of your email, try telling a story. This will help keep the reader hooked throughout and make them want to read more.
• Don't overload your readers with emails. 2 or 3 a month is enough. Avoid sending multiple emails a day.
• Send a thank-you email to new subscribers to make them feel welcome.
• Be consistent with your emails. Aim to send them out at roughly the same time each month (for example, the first Monday of each month). If you disappear for long periods and only send sporadic emails, then your readers will forget about you.

Starting Email Campaigns for Authors

If you're going to be effective at email marketing, you need one thing: people's email addresses! So, for an author email campaign to get going, you need some sort of landing page where people can sign up for your email list.

You could, in theory, just have a standalone page, but honestly, the best thing to do is put some work into an author's website. You can have spaces on your website for a blog, a gallery, your social media, and somewhere to promote your books. You could even directly sell your books! It's best to optimize your website for search engines so that people can find it. It may be worth hiring freelance writers to put together content for your website.

On the website (and it's worth buying a domain name), you can have a page where people can sign up for your mailing list. You really just need their name and email address. It may be off-putting to people if you ask for unnecessary information. Another crucial component of your mailing list sign-up page is a privacy agreement. You basically need to ensure your reader agrees to you contacting them via the email you are providing. And if you are planning on sharing any of their data, you need to tell them this before they sign up.

You'll also need to promote your mailing list, so people want to sign up. The best way to do this is through social media. TikTok is particularly effective for selling books.

You can regularly review how effective your email campaigns have been by looking at data analytics. This will help you determine your book marketing strategies going forward.

In Summary

Author email campaigns are an effective marketing tool for helping you grow your readership.