Email Marketing is Dead, Long Live Email Marketing
Tom Morkes
I heard recently that Apple (and soon to follow: Google, Microsoft, and all the tech oligarchs) will be phasing out your ability to track whether someone has opened your emails or not.
Some people are freaking out:
Companies like Apple claim it's for privacy.
Obviously, it's for money (""He who controls the spice data controls the universe" - Dune" - Tom).
As someone who relies on email marketing to make a living, this would normally concern me too.
But:
#1. I tend not to get too worried about things (I missed that lesson at mouse school)
#2. I don't think it matters in the long run
Here's why:
If you're measuring your "success" by number of people who open your emails, you're already losing.
That's because "open rates" can be inaccurate for a number of reasons I won't get into here...
But more importantly, it's essentially a "vanity metric" -- aka, it doesn't pay the bills.
Things like "likes", "hearts", "opens", and "pats on the back" are all vanity metrics. You can't trade them for bread or even crypto.
What you should look for (and measure) is engagement.
Here are a few tips to help you measure engagement so you can get the most out of your email marketing.
I hope they help you like they've helped me in the last few years.
This is something that will be harder for the tech oligarchs to squash because there are a few ways to track actions.
For example, you can track clicks inside your EMS (email marketing system) for the time being (e.g. inside ConvertKit, I can apply a TAG to anyone who clicks a specific link in my emails):
This helps me gauge how interested readers are about a given idea (e.g. tracking interest based on the tag you apply to a given blog post), "call to action" or offer.
If you want to add redundancy, you can create a REDIRECT link on your site using something like Pretty Link or RankMath. Then use THAT url inside your emails, and measure engagement that way.
It might look something like this:
Another benefit to this "redirect" solution - while most likely not tracked inside your EMS, you can track this in Google Analytics (or equivalent analytics software), so you can still get useful / actionable information.
I believe we live in a time where people are drowning in information (not to mention: noise + distraction).
A way to make your email marketing the most effective it can be is to send emails with intention.
And that "intention" shouldn't be to 'inform.'
Instead, your "intention" should be concrete, e.g.:
There's simply no reason to send emails that stricly "inform" these days.
And yes, this is the basic premise or ethos behind direct response marketing, and yes, I think it's as true today as it's ever been (and only going to be more useful in the weeks, months, and years to come).
If there's one thing that's clear, the tech oligarchs want more control:
They want control of your data (they can charge platforms and companies more to rent or use it that way), and of the means of communication and distribution (this is the real spice/gold).
While these are significant changes coming to email marketing...the only real danger is missing the email/newsletter marketing game altogether.
Bottom line:
If you don't have an email list, start one TODAY...and do what you can to build relationships with your first 100 subscribers.
My first 100 subscribers helped support my online business and early publishing endeavors.
I spent a LOT of time replying to their emails, sending personal follow-ups, and engaging with them.
If you break it down to sales/profit vs. time investment, I was basically working for free.
(In fact, I document my sweatshop wages here)
Measured strictly from a return-on-investment standpoint, probably not worth it.
However, it was CRITICAL to get me to where I wanted to go, because these first few subscribers supported my work financially in the early days, and they ended up being some of my biggest champions as I grew.
(and several of these first 100 subscribers are STILL subscribed to my newsletter 7+ years later...thanks ladies and gents, you're the best)
That's it for today.
Keep on, keep trucking.
Tom "Mas Emails" Morkes
Started, finished, and shipped from 7,000 feet elevation | Writing time: 1.5 hrs | Soundtrack: silence
I think it's pretty common knowledge at this point that if you’re an author who wants to make more than $500 per year, you need a website and an email list.
A website is important because it’s the place where your biggest fans can come to find out about your books.
More importantly, it’s the place where your biggest fans can send other people to see your work.
But a website isn’t enough.
You also need an email list so you can connect and engage with these readers.
For the past couple weeks, I’ve written about why you need a website and why you need an email list.
I’ve gotten an overwhelmingly positive response to both articles with hundreds of shares and thousands of views (if you were one of the people who shared, thank you so much).
The positive reception to this idea also led to an equivalent number of questions asking about the how. Specifically:
“what tools / tech / software do you recommend for authors and self-publishers to build a lucrative platform?”
(which is only the second most commonly asked question I get after “how are you so really, really, ridiculously good looking?)
So today, I’m going to take you behind the scenes and show you how I use ConvertKit for myself (as both a publisher and author) and for the authors I work with through Insurgent Publishing.
If you find this article helpful, please share!
10 reasons you should use @convertkit to grow your email list: http://bit.ly/1M5R1r8 via tmorkes #selfpublishing #emailmarketing (click to tweet)
If you’re not familiar with ConvertKit, it’s an Email Marketing Service (EMS) that lets you build an email list and engage with your readers, subscribers, and customers easily.
And today I’m going to share with you 10 reasons you should be using it for your publishing projects.
But first, let’s start at the beginning…
Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. – Wikipedia
So if email marketing is sending messages to a group of people using email, an Email Marketing Service (EMS) is software that allows you to do just that (versus, say, sending an email with 10,000 people cc’d).
You do, if you plan to sell products or services (sorry, social media is not a replacement).
For a more detailed answer why, check out my free, in-depth resource: The Author’s Guide to Building an Email List (and selling more books)
There are a lot out there. Search Email Marketing Service and you’ll find dozens if not hundreds of competitors. I’ve been doing this stuff for the past few years and have had the chance to work with many EMS’s through consulting work with various clients. They all have their pros and cons. Below, I’ve listed just a few of the more well-known EMS’s for authors, bloggers, and product creators:
A favorite of affiliate marketers (it has a great affiliate program), Aweber provides a simple platform to connect with people in mass (who have opted into your list, of course). I have dabbled with Aweber, but found it no better than Mailchimp, and Mailchimp is free to start, which made it the no-brainer solution a few years back when I was debating between the two.
This is the EMS I used for over two years. It was great at first because it was free…then after a few months, I realized I needed more advanced features like the ability to create email autoresponders, which was NOT free with Mailchimp. So I upgraded and continued using the platform…unfortunately, it’s mind-boggling how unituitive it is for the most simple tasks, like sending out an email broadcast or creating online courses (more on this below). Bottom line: I really wouldn’t recommend Mailchimp to anyone who is serious about starting or growing a business online.
This is the big boy in town. A lot of the biggest names in blogging use Infusionsoft with good reason: it’s an all-in-one solution (email marketing, ecommerce tool, etc.). Infusionsoft has been around long enough that it integrates with just about every piece of relevant software and can do some pretty advanced stuff…but it also costs an arm and a leg (starting at $199/month for only 2,500 contacts). I’ve also been told that to do anything with the software, you need to hire a consultant. Bottom line: not worth the investment until you’re making $100k / year (and even then, may not be worth the investment unless you need an all-in-one solution).
This is the new EMS in town, started by Nathan Barry, a professional designer and published author, to scratch his own itch as a blogger, author, and product creator. There are a lot of reasons to consider ConvertKit if you’re working online, 10 of which I’ll point out in today’s article.
ConvertKit is intuitive.
Hands down, it’s one of the simplest, easiest to understand email marketing service out there.
With Mailchimp, I have to struggle with the simplest actions. Even sending a routine email (known as a campaign in MailChimp and a broadcast in ConvertKit), is painfully counter-intuitive. There are about 6 different pages I have to go through and 12 buttons I need to click before I can send an email. With ConvertKit, sending a Broadcast can be completed in 3 pages and 4 clicks.
Here’s the process you need to go through to send an email with Mailchimp:
Here’s the process to send an email with Convertkit:
This may sound minor. but when you’re sending emails weekly, and when the same complexity spills into everything else (see segmenting below), it quickly becomes a time suck (and therefore a drain on your wallet, because time is money – am I right or am I right?).
ConverKit also excels at auto responders (what MailChimp calls automation and what ConvertKit refers to as Courses). Once again, the process of building an auto responder in MailChimp is a huge pain that is needlessly convoluted. With Converkit it just makes sense:
“Drip email is so powerful, but for some reason it’s incredibly complicated in other software. The way ConvertKit allows bloggers to organize their drip emails is just logical.” – Andrew Warner
Here’s a brief video to walk you through the user interface and dashboard of ConvertKit:
What can I say, I’m a sucker for good design.
Not in the “hey, everyone look at my [place name of status-symbol device here]” kind of way, but in the functional kind of way. This is one of the reasons Apple can charge exorbitant prices for their products – because people will pay money for looks that improve function.
ConverKit’s interface is clean, clear, and tells me everything I need to know at a glance. Compared to competitors, it’s the Model X of Email Marketing Services. (if Nathan reads this, yes he can use this as a testimonial)
Because of ConvertKit’s design, it’s a tool I don’t need to spend much time with, but when I do, I don’t mind.
One of the fastest ways to build an email list is to offer an incentive for people to subscribe.
For more on how to build your email list with free gifts, check out: The Author’s Guide to Building an Email List
Say you’re an author and you want to get people to sign up for your email list. A simple way to do this is to offer a free chapter of your book.
With MailChimp (or Aweber), it’s impossible to do this out of the box (not if you want different optin gifts for different forms).
Alternatively, you can pay $40 / month for Leadpages and use their lead magnet delivery tool. I’ve used this solution for the past year or so and have had great success with it, growing my list several thousand people in the process. However, Leadpages is a bit pricey if you’re just getting started, and is more of an add-on than a core piece of software for most authors, self-publishers, and product creators.
With ConvertKit, on the other hand, you can create an unlimited number of form-specific optin incentives which can be automatically delivered when someone subscribes.
This is made even more powerful within ConvertKit because you can tag users based on what what form they opted into, what gift they downloaded, or dozens of other variables that can help with segmenting your list.
Now, with the help of ConvertKit, you can figure out what form is resulting in the most subscribers, which free gift is most enticing (and leads to the most downloads), and which type of form placement is the most effective.
Convertkit comes with powerful and easy-to-understand analytics baked into the software.
With Mailchimp I can see how many people receive my email, open my email, and click through a link in my email. This is a good start, but there is absolutely no way to measure exactly where these people signed up for my list, or which form is working the best (not without additional software, at least).
ConvertKit does all of the above, but does one even better – it tracks how many people see and sign up for my various forms or signup pages.
A few months ago, I spent the better part of 30 hours and hundreds of dollars on education to figure out how to track Mailchimp conversion rates on signup pages throughout my website via Google Analytics. While I’m not the most technically inclined person, I can usually figure out a hack with enough time and effort. I simply couldn’t do it with Mailchimp and Google Analytics.
Luckily, ConverKit tracks these conversion rates right out of the box.
Tracking conversion is important for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it lets me know what is working and what isn’t working on my website. For example, if one of my forms only converts at 5%, and a similar form but with different sales copy and a different image, converts at 55%, which do you think I should replace?
Without ConvertKit, I would still be in the dark about what is working or not, and therefore would have no idea how to fix it to improve my overall results.
ConvertKit has similar pricing to Mailchimp, but with features that are closer to (and some that are on par with) Infusionsoft.
One of these features is subscriber tagging.
Tagging is the process of applying a specific description or keyword to a user / subscriber. Tagging is powerful because you can tag a single user with multiple tags, and then filter your list before sending an email (so you send the right emails to the right people). Tagging users is usually reserved for higher end EMS’s like Infusionsoft.
Another really cool feature is the “resend to unopens.” Basically, what this feature lets you do is resend an email to all of the people who did not open your last email (and automatically removes anyone who opened it, so you don’t hit someone with the same email twice).
I recently used this feature and went from a 35% open rate to a 45% open rate (a 28% increase!). That was an extra several hundred people I was able to share my recent blog post with, who would NOT have seen it had this feature not been available.
Very powerful stuff.
ConvertKit also comes with the ability to create unlimited autoresponders, unlimited forms, and digital product delivery. While not as robust as Infusionsoft (there is no built-in ecommerce solution, for example), ConvertKit strikes a great balance between cost and features (features that actually matter and that you will use).
Believe it or not, some Email Marketing Services restrict how many autoresponders and forms you can create.
Not ConvertKit.
This means you could create an automated book sales funnel for every book you’ve written, or create a free course to teach people about a really cool, unconventional pricing technique that actually works.
In this video, I’ll show you how to set up and deliver free courses to build your email list:
Believe it or not, adding a simple email signup to your website can be a nightmare depending on who you’re using for your EMS.
With Mailchimp, the process for embedding a form into a simple wordpress page is overly complicated and doesn’t loos right unless you hire a designer (or have a background in design and CSS). Creating an optin page is just as tiresome and often still looks sloppy (maybe it was just me, but I could never get the optin form to look the way I wanted it to, unless I was using a 3rd party plugin, which slows down your site and adds another layer of complexity to your sales funnel).
With ConvertKit the process is painless and intuitive. Even better, there are multiple types of forms you can embed. For example, you can make any of your forms inline (they sit at the bottom of a page), modal (popup when you press a button), or slide-in (an automated popup where the form slides in from the side of the screen).
These forms are also dynamic if you choose, so once someone subscribers, they won’t see the same form optin incentive. Insted, you could replace it with a link to a new product (“buy my new book”), new blog post, or whatever else you want.
This is really powerful because if you send subscribers to your site why would you want to keep asking them to subscribe? That’s amateur hour.
Before ConvertKit, I would have had no idea how to do this. It would have been expensive and probably wouldn’t have very much longevity (as I’d probably have to keep updating the software over time).
With ConvertKit, you can make any form responsive, which is incredibly powerful.
In this video I’ll show you how to create and embed forms throughout your website:
I remember when I first started writing two years ago, all I wanted was a simple way to email my blog posts to subscribers. Instead of the process being automated or simple, I’d have to copy and paste my work into MailChimp and reformat everything so it would look right. The process took at least an hour per email, on average. That’s several hundred hours I’ve wasted in the past few years just formatting emails. Absurd.
With ConvertKit, new blog posts can be turned into email broadcasts that are ready to send to your list automatically.
This means instead of spending hours of your life copying, pasting, and reformatting every blog post into your EMS, ConvertKit does the heavy lifting for you, so all you need to do is click send.
In this video, I’ll show you some of the more advanced features inside ConvertKit:
Here are just a few of the things ConvertKit does out of the box:
ConvertKit also seamlessly integrate with software relevant for authors and product creators, including:
Each integration only takes a few minutes to set up and then you can create some really powerful automation:
Nathan Barry is the creator of ConvertKit, and the author of several books including one of my personal favorites, Authority.
What’s important to note here is that Nathan built this software to solve his own problems as a blogger and author. He wanted a better solution to connect with and interact with his readers. He wanted a painless way to create automated emails sequences. He wanted a way to offer a gift (free book, free chapter, free course) in exchange for people signing up. He wanted software that just worked and didn’t require dozens of 3rd party apps or plugins to achieve the same endstate.
The result is a very simple, powerful piece of software that is great for authors, self-publishers, bloggers, and product creators (oh, and it’s constantly being improved with new features added every month).
As you can tell, I’m a big fan of ConvertKit.
It does everything I’ve wanted an EMS to do from the start, and it does it much cheaper than Infusionsoft.
Bottom line: if you’re a blogger, author, or product creator, you should look into ConvertKit – it could save you a lot of time, money, and frustration versus going with bigger, entrenched (but not necessarily better) competitors.