The Importance of Email Marketing for Publishers

The Importance of Email Marketing for Publishers

Aerio Staff

Amongst the hundreds of marketing channels at a publisher’s disposal—from tweets to pay-per-click campaigns—email remains one of your most effective ways to communicate with customers, promote your books, and keep readers informed.

Why Email Marketing?

Email is a constant part of our lives. According to a study done by The Relevancy Group, 66% of people who shop online check their email multiple times throughout the day.

Email goes with us everywhere. A collection of statistics on eMailMonday.com forecasted that mobile emails account for up to 70% of email openings.

These stats along with countless others prove that email marketing is still viable and still important. And if you are looking for a way to increase book sales, email marketing is something you should be doing.

Email Marketing for Customer Insight

Aside from being an easy way to communicate with a captivated audience, email marketing offers a good deal of customer analytics.

Most everything in an email is trackable. Sure, that sounds a bit Big Brother, but by looking at opens and clicks you can learn all sorts of things about your customer base and their behavior, such as:

  • What are they most interested in? Are they clicking on your social links, links to your website, or a custom call-to-action?
  • What are they NOT interested in? What links are they NOT clicking on? Are they even opening your emails?
  • Who are they? Are you collecting valuable info such as their company name, their title, etc. to better segment your list?
  • Any common trends that seem to appear across the board.

In some cases, customers may care more about new books, while others may want to hear about up-and-coming authors, and they all love to know about ebook giveaways.

Email marketing isn’t all about pandering your products, but a learning opportunity too. Use email marketing to get to know your customers, find common ground, and create a bigger conversation.

So how do you start conversing?

First you need to get an invitation. That begins with building an email list.

Building Your Email Marketing List

If you want to be a real go-getter, you can start building your email list before you even have an online bookstore.

  • Start in your own networks—friends, family, and other acquaintances
  • Expand into industry niches like book forums and online communities

Establish report with these these segments, by offering them valuable information. You may not have a store set up yet, but you can still give them value-add info like:

  • New supplements to existing books
  • Interesting author news & tidbits
  • Information on genres & subject matter
  • Upcoming events or promotions

The key is to be upfront and let them know you have valuable information you’d like to share.

Whatever you do, make sure you have permission and clearly express the value you offer.

An Email Marketing Recap

  1. Email marketing works
  2. Use email marketing to communicate
  3. Use email marketing to learn
  4. Start building an email list now
  5. Always get permission