20 May 2017

3 #InstaFreebie Promos and Automated Newsletters

At the beginning of April [see HERE] I mentioned I’d joined Instafreebie in an attempt to increase my Newsletter subscribers prior to the launch of Pilgrims of the Pool, the final book in the Torc of Moonlight trilogy.

So how has it gone? Better than expected. I joined various group promotions – I am involved with three this month (see below for links) - and they’ve given the best results. To date I’ve accrued 796 new subscribers and had only 74 unsubscribe or give a blocked e-address. That’s just less than 10%, which is far fewer than I anticipated.

Keeping new subscribers engaged is the key, and it soon became apparent that a set of chatty Welcome emails was needed to introduce my work, especially as I write in such disparate genres. Up to this week I did these manually, with multiple segments receiving a different newsletter every few days. Needless to say, the work involved was taking over my editing time.

However, those manual emails proved a worthwhile drafting system: what did I actually want to say?; how did I truly want to interact with my new subscribers? Various versions were tried while I came to accept that I needed an automated system. Automated? Yes, it goes against the interaction grain, but as I’ve found, it needn’t.

Thankfully my Newsletter provider, Mailchimp, recently opened its automated system to free accounts. Mailchimp allows people like me to run a list for up to 2,000 subscribers for free, so I’ve spent a couple of days this week learning the ropes and setting up two sets of automated Welcome emails. Two sets? One of the group promotions, A Taste Of Darkness, would only consider novel extracts. So as well as the original short story collection I extracted 25% of Torc of Moonlight – Book 1, and this is what is offered free in all three promotions below.

I’ll update this post again in a few weeks after Pilgrims of the Pool has launched. In the meantime, click on the links below the group promo images to see the sort of sub-genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy available. You might be pleasantly surprised.

http://sffbookbonanza.com/freebooks/
http://tasteofdarkness.blogspot.co.uk/

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