You can gather names for your e-mail newsletter mailings through your Web site. Adding interactive capabilities to your Web site, such as an e-mail contact link, links to book sales portals, and reader subscription lists is an absolute must if you want to draw repeat visitors and gain the most marketing value possible from your site. By providing readers with the ability to sign up for e-mail newsletters and other informational mailings, you can build a valuable e-mail contact list, and you can avoid regulatory issues that govern the use of e-mail and faxes for communicating promotional information without the express consent of the recipient.
E-mail newsletters and e-zines reach hundreds of thousands of readers every day. Like their print counterparts, most electronic newsletters and e-zines carry advertising for products of special interest to their readers. Some e-mail newsletters and e-zines enjoy large subscription lists, so they offer a powerful vehicle for getting your advertising message in front of a targeted readership. These venues can be useful for marketing both fiction and nonfiction books.
Again, check out the newsletter or e-zine carefully before committing to an advertising program. You want to be certain that the online publication is crafted to appeal to your targeted audience and that your book’s advertisement will be a good “fit.” Typically, you can buy advertising packages or pay for one-time-only advertisements.
You also might want to consider starting your own e-mail newsletter or e-zine to market your book. As with blogs, these electronic publications can offer a number of marketing opportunities. You can use your e-zine or newsletter to distribute press releases, announce upcoming appearances, highlight favorable reviews of your book, and to issue other alerts about your book. And you can carry your own advertisements free of charge within your newsletter or ezine.
Running an E-mail Campaign
You can distribute your own e-mail newsletter and advertise your Web site—and your book—through your own e-mail marketing campaign. By compiling a contact list of potential readers, book buyers, journalists, organizations, and others who have a shared interest in your book’s topic area or genre, you create a target group for periodic e-mail distributions. Your e-mail campaign might involve distributing press releases, announcing upcoming speaking engagements, highlighting or linking to current events or articles on topics associated with your book. You might also use e-mail to distribute information about special promotions for your book, contests, seminars, and other marketing events. You can distribute e-mail newsletter and marketing messages yourself, or you can hire an e-mail marketing business to take care of the distributions for you. But don’t simply put together a list of e-mail addresses and start blasting them with advertisements for your book—that’s spamming, and it’s annoying, counter-productive, and against the law.
Spamming is the term used to describe bulk-distributions of electronic sales information. Most federal, state, and local anti-spamming laws (many ISPs have anti-spamming rules) prohibit the use of fax machines and ISP addresses in the bulk distribution of advertising messages. When you send out messages that contain sales information—pricing information, links to purchase portals, and any other information that is designed solely to promote the sale of your book—you need to take care to avoid violating state and local anti-spamming laws.
Read this and other marketing ideas in Your Voice in Demand (AuthorHouse, 2005). Order your copy today!