How Do I Use My Book to Get Email Subscribers?
Feb 10, 2021 
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Offer a Link to a Free Course
- Mainstream Publishers Don't Let You Do This
- What We Do at Launch Pad
- Email Them Once You Have Their Email Addresses
- Start With a Nurture Sequence
- Then Send an Email on the Same Day Every Week
- Your Open Rates Will Be Depressing
- So Why Do This?
- Consider Setting up a Funnel
Offer a Link to a Free Course
I've talked about this before but what Pat Flynn did to get email subscribers—and therefore to make one hundred and eleven thousand dollars—is for Will It Fly, he put links to a free course based on the book in the book, gathered email addresses through that and then sold those emails subscribers a paid course.
Mainstream Publishers Don't Let You Do This
If you are publishing a book through HarperCollins or Simon and Schuster—one of those places—it's very hard to get them to agree to let you put a link to your newsletter in the book. I did notice that Brendan Burchard was able to get that in The Millionaire Messenger, which was published by a mainstream publisher but usually they are not interested in helping you get email subscribers.
What We Do at Launch Pad
We put a QR code at the beginning of the book and say "scan here" and offer a lead magnet. For Make Your Mess Your Memoir, I offered a one-page memoir structure cheat sheet and made it a special link so I could track how many people came from the book. We have a client who is releasing a book about keto and he's doing a fasting guide. You can do a quiz you can link to—whatever is relevant for your book. We have a client who is creating all this video content that the book is going to link to. It just has to be organic and very much related to the book so that it's interesting to the reader.
Email Them Once You Have Their Email Addresses
I used to just have a sign-up on my regular website and people would sign up and I didn't do anything with them.
If you are just starting out in the newsletter game, MailChimp is the best option: it starts with a free plan for up to 2000 contacts and you can send up to 12,000 emails a month to that. There's nothing too complicated about it. When you get into other email providers, it starts you doing segmenting and you're doing all this other stuff. So I think MailChimp is sort of what we all start with.
And then you graduate. There's also Constant Contact, Convert Kit, Aweber and Drip. And there's what I use, which is Kajabi. I will say I went from MailChimp to Drip and oh my God, did I hate Drip. It was so complicated that I had to pay people to do it for me and I still didn't understand it.
If you want to have a site where you do everything—which is to say your website, courses, emails, products, anything you want—you can do it through Kajabi. And you can do things like segmenting, which means you can set it up so that if somebody clicks on one offer, they get put into one list and they click on another offer, they get put into another list. And let's say you have a specific campaign where you're going to send a bunch of emails in one week about something you can say at the bottom "Click here if you're not interested in hearing about this anymore. But you still want to stay on my list, click here" and it will unsubscribe them only from that offer.
Start With a Nurture Sequence
Set up a series of four to six emails for new sign ups that introduces who you are and spread them out over a week or several weeks. You could say you're completely going to overwhelm them if you send the four in a week or you could say over several weeks they're going to forget who you are. I don't know.
But set it up so that the nurture sequence doesn't come at the same time as your regular emails.
When I didn't have that set up, one girl wrote me and she said, "You know what? I'm so sick of reading your emails, you've got to stop sending me so many emails," and I wrote her back and I said, "I am so sorry. I am literally not selling you anything. I am just trying to help people who want to write books."
She wrote me back and she said, "Oh my God, you know what? I didn't really realize there was a person on the other end of this. I didn't think you were really going to see this. I was having a really bad day and I took it out on you. And I am so sorry." And I just thought that takes such a courageous, awesome person to admit that and to write me.
So I wrote her back and I said, "You are the greatest. You are my favorite subscriber." And she wrote back and said, "You are my favorite newsletter I subscribe to. So it became a total love fest. That can happen but it usually won't!
Then Send an Email on the Same Day Every Week
I decided to send my newsletters on Thursday mornings because a lot of people seem to send their emails on Thursday mornings. And so I figured out that must be the best way to do it. But that's actually very counterintuitive because if a lot of people are sending emails on Thursday mornings, I should not send them on Thursday morning. Maybe I'll change that.
But in the nurture sequence I write, "You're going to hear from me a lot at first and then you're just going to hear from me on Thursdays."
And do not stress about the weekly emails that you send out. You do not need to spend hours and hours creating them.
You just need to give them something that's relevant to them. Maybe you have a Google alert about what your topic is and you send them the best stories that you saw that week. I know that I don't want to read long emails or newsletters.
Your Open Rates Will Be Depressing
Here are some stats about my open rates from recent newsletters: I had a newsletter titled "The Reason I made three figures from one book and six from another" and that open rate was sixteen percent. If you are a newsletter subscriber, that means that sixteen percent of you were interested in that. Then I wrote one called "As I write this chaos reigns supreme" and that had a 26 percent open rate. That is really, really good for me. Then I wrote one I put so much effort into and it took so long and it was quite fun to write. And it was called "Quick Name Ten Good Things that happened in 2020," which I sent the last week of 2020 and that was seventeen percent open rate.
So Why Do This?
You do this because that twenty-six percent or seventeen percent or sixteen percent is gold.
These are your people; these aren't just your future readers, these are your future evangelists. So have fun with them. Don't try to sell them stuff all the time. And don't even think about it in terms of sales; you are offering them opportunities to do what they want to do—whatever it is that had them buy your book and then sign up for your list.
Consider Setting up a Funnel
Funnels were popularized by Russell Brunson and the idea is you give people something—a lead magnet, a cheat sheet, whatever it is—and then you sell them something very small...something that's nine dollars or fifteen dollars or whatever it is. And if they buy that, then you sell them something bigger, which is to say more expensive.
So you are slowly acclimating people to buying something from you, which is also to say up acclimating them to having you help them fulfill their dreams.
HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:
→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book
→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book
→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)
RELEVANT LINKS:
Will It Fly by Pat Flynn
The Millionaire Messenger by Brendon Burchard
CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!
QUOTE OF THE POD:
"With newsletters, you are offering readers opportunities to do what they want to do—whatever it is that had them buy your book and then sign up for your list."
