Mailing List Growth With Group Promos
What Doesn’t BookFunnel Do?
Welcome back to my series documenting the start of my self publishing career. This month my focus is on building my newsletter through group promos on BookFunnel.
BookFunnel, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is an awesome site that will host and deliver your books for you. You can use it for everything from giving away your reader magnet, delivering advance reader copies, to actually selling your book!
I currently use it to host my reader magnet, Regent. Once someone signs up to my newsletter, they get a link to my landing page on BookFunnel and can download the book onto whatever device they prefer. BookFunnel can also collect the email addresses for you and even integrates with a bunch of mail service providers so that when someone signs up over on BookFunnel, their email address is added to your list with your provider without you having to do a thing!
Group Promos
This month, I’m using the group promo feature to try and build my email list. On the promotions board, authors can set up a promo for other authors to join. You can specify whatever parameters you want, such as genre, sub-genre, length (is full book, novella, short-story), and who is eligible to join. The cool thing about the promos for someone like me is that there are heaps who are friendly for newbie authors with little to no list. So even though the ‘value’ of the audience that I bring to the promotion is small, I can join in, grow my list, and then hopefully bring a larger group of people to the next promo I join.
I joined two promos for September — ‘FREE Fantasy eBooks’ and ‘New Worlds — Fantasy Prequels’ (these links will take you away from Medium and to the BookFunnel promotions pages).
Both were friendly to new authors and allowed novella-length free books. Both giveaways are massive — FREE Fantasy eBooks has 88 books available and New Worlds has 56.
I set up a separate landing page on BookFunnel for Regent because my current one is set to not collect email addresses (since they have to have signed up already on my website to get the link). This new one collects email addresses and sends them straight over to MailerLite.
Whoops! My Bad…
The first mistake I made was simply adding them to the same group that I put other new signups on. On MailerLite, you can create your automatic welcome sequence of emails to onboard people to your list, however my current one was aimed at people who had gone to my website and joined, not people who were clicking on my book in amongst dozens of others.
It’s not a huge difference but they do need a slightly different set of emails. And I know better — Tammi Labrecque told me to set up separate email sequences in Newsletter Ninja (sorry Tammi).
So, my apologies to the two people who signed up before I realised and got the welcome email that makes heaps more sense if you found my website or clicked on a Facebook ad. I did quickly build the new automation (based on a duplicate I made of the original sequence) and then duplicated that sequence and cut the first email and added the two people to their very own, custom welcome sequence.
So you’re saying there’s a chance…
But the good news is — people signed up! It’s day two of the promotion and so far six people have signed up for my book from FREE Fantasy eBooks and three from New Worlds. That’s pretty good considering how new I am as an author. Not to mention I signed up for BookFunnel for the book delivery aspect and had no idea about the promos, so it’s a feature I didn’t even realise I was getting.
From what I’ve read, subscribers from free promos can be a bit hit and miss. Some people will hit download on most of the books, since they’re free (why not!) and then might not even read the books, or will unsubscribe immediately. And that’s ok. Some might stick with me, and in the end, it’s all about getting my book out there so I can try to find my people.
The promos run until the end of September 2023, so feel free to click through and have a look at what’s on offer. And if you’re an author (or a wannabe author) it’s a good idea to head over and have a look at how the promo works from the other side.
I’ll keep you posted on how the promos progress, but for now, I really should get back to writing that next book!
Cheers, K.T.
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This article contains my affiliate link to MailerLite. If you use the link and sign up for a paid plan, I will receive a commission at no additional charge to you.
