Attracting Readers to Our Newsletters

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I may have been slow to the email newsletter party. I believe, in fact, that I was the last guest to show up.  I’m finally making up for lost time.

I mentioned recently that I’d actually decided to subtly promote my reader newsletter.  This may not really qualify as promotion since it actually means I’m helping readers just locate the newsletter signup. It was almost secret before. If readers somehow found their way to my website, perhaps they could miraculously locate my newsletter signup in my crowded sidebar.

Realizing that this was (however accidentally) rather anti-reader in approach, I thought the whole thing through a bit more.  I started putting my newsletter signup in my email signatures, on my profile at Wattpad, on Goodreads, on Facebook, and other places that readers were likely to congregate or look me up. I also pitched my newsletter on this site on the reader-oriented pages (books, buy my books, etc.) This has resulted in over 30 signups since I started this drive in mid-March.

I’ve been reading noticing on writer sites/blogs that many writers have a visual prompt, sort of an ad, for their newsletter. I decided that I’d like to come up with a visual that would hopefully stand out to readers.  Designs that I create myself tend to be hideous.  This is why I hire professionals for covers, websites, etc. But for something small like this, I decided I could do it myself with Canva.

I wrote about Canva here.  It’s a free tool that helps me handle small projects that I would rather not pay for. No design skills?  No worries! The ability to drag and drop is all that’s really needed for Canva.

Now…don’t judge.  But with minimal work (ten minutes?), I was able to come up with this:

So, pretty simple elements here, nothing fancy. Book cover, call to action that sort of looks like a button, a bit of text, and a picture of me.

While I was on Canva, I made the whole image hyperlinked to the signup page for my newsletter. So readers can click anywhere on the image and it will take them to my newsletter signup page.  I use Mail Chimp (free for up to 2,000 subscribers) for my newsletters.  Here is a link to Mail Chimp’s directions for generating a link to your signup form.  You scroll about a quarter of the way down the page.  Basically, you’re going through the ‘Lists’ tab on your account and then clicking ‘signup forms’ to get Mail Chimp to generate a link.

But the big thing here is the incentive to sign up…a free book. I recently watched a very informative free video series from author Nick Stephenson on, among other things, the importance of incentives for newsletter signups. What’s more, the incentive is not my perma-free book, it’s a book that, while inexpensive to begin with, would cost readers several dollars if they were to pay for it online.  So a fairly decent incentive…a free full-length novel.  But then I do have 8 books in this series, so I can afford to give this one away.  I put it on my reader-oriented pages on this site.

I also had this newsletter ad placed in the back of one of my books.  I had my formatter (thanks, Rik Hall) stick it at the end of the perma-free book. So the readers who are being introduced to the series via the freebie get another freebie for signing up. The perma-free book acts, as Nick Stephenson put it, as a funnel that draws in new readers and the incentive encourages them to sign up for the newsletter. Works for me.

What if you don’t have 8 books in a series?  What if you don’t want to give away an entire book?  There are other incentives for signups out there.  I’ve seen things like “sign up for my newsletter and automatically be entered in a drawing for a $25 Amazon gift card.”  I’ve seen short stories and novellas as giveaways.  You can give away swag like notepads, tee shirts, coffee mugs. Putting your cover image on these things is easy and cheap(ish) through VistaPrint or CaféPress or Zazzle. The sky is really the limit.

Obviously, the cooler the giveaway, the more likely it serves as encouragement for readers to sign up.

My reader newsletters are fairly chatty updates.  I know my readers pretty well and I create the newsletter with them in mind. I give a (somewhat) personal update, I include Southern recipes, I tell them what I’m working on, and lately I’ve given book recommendations based on what I’ve been reading.

How do you encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter?  What types of things go into your newsletter?  If you haven’t started up a newsletter, it’s never too late…I promise.

Image: Death to the Stock Photo