Hey,

It’s already August, somehow, which means the Great Email Change being wrought by our betters at Apple Inc. is nearly upon us.

As a quick reminder, the reason we are focusing so much on email marketing this summer is that Apple announced in June that it will be taking the axe to open tracking, and it is doing so in a way that will really futz with your data: it will register all emails as being opened by a generic IP address… regardless of whether the subscriber on your list actually does so – and this will affect a huge chunk of the market (and Google is talking about following Apple’s lead as well).

No one outside of Apple know when iOS 15 will be released, exactly, although some time in September is widely expected. As in this September. As in next month. Eek.

Here’s a crucial point though: this won’t be an overnight change.

Not everyone will download iOS 15 right away, and not everyone who does will follow Apple’s prompting to switch on its new privacy features right away (i.e. the features which kill email open tracking). Instead, it will be an initial surge of early adopters, followed by a slow creep – if history is any guide.

In other words, from some point next month, your email open rates will start becoming more and more unreliable, and I suspect that will gather pace over time. Let me stress something else that has been widely misunderstood: it doesn’t take a big percentage of your subscriber base adopting iOS 15 to pollute the overall data, so this really is going to be a problem that we all have to deal with rather soon.

There is no official word yet from the mailing list companies as to what metrics will replace open rates, but I’ve heard various things mooted.

One potential solution is estimated open rates – which might work well initially but will surely become more and more unreliable over time as a bigger and bigger chunk of everyone’s lists go “dark” and you are extrapolating from a smaller/older/less relevant data set.

Another possible fix is to simply rely on click rates – which will not be blocked by Apple’s new privacy features – but clicks only measure one type of engagement, of course. An important one, but only part of the engagement picture, so not ideal.

Finally, there has been some speculation that certain providers are looking at new, yet-to-be announced metrics, possibly involving some kind of overall subscriber engagement score – which could potentially combine some version of the above two methods, and possibly loop in other metrics like how many replies your emails are generating from subscribers. (I’m not sure how technically possible the latter is but I have heard it suggested.)

So… everything is all quite up in the air at the moment. That said, I think we can make one prediction: whatever is coming probably won’t be better.

Open rates are not perfect – there’s always going to be, I dunno, 10-15% of your list which you can’t track because they read in the preview pane, or have HTML/images blocked, or have a firewall at work, or whatever. But open rates are exceedingly useful for determining engagement and it would be a huge surprise if whatever replaces it is anywhere near as good at doing that job.

As a result, I’ve been busy this summer taking care of a few things I had been putting off:

· trimming my lists

· optimizing my automations

· moving this here newsletter to ConvertKit

· keeping my historical fiction list at MailerLite, and,

· tackling problems around some welcome emails dropping into Promotions.

With all that crossed off the to-do list, I’m ready now to move towards a more aggressive list-building phase, confident that all the systems under the hood are performing as intended.

Doing all that stuff is going to get harder soon – or at the very least will involve a lot more guesswork on our part. So, I rather suspect that a lot of people who lean heavily on email marketing are engaging in similar overhauls this summer, i.e. while we can still get reliable open rates to measure our progress in such endeavors.

One of the trickiest things to get right is your onboarder – which is the focus of this week’s email.

How to roll out the red carpet

A few weeks back I talked about The Subscriber Journey, and we have already covered the first couple of stages in more detail. Now it’s time to look at onboarding.

Onboarding – often referred to as a welcome sequence – is the name for a series of automatic emails which trigger as soon as someone joins your mailing list.

Indeed, we have already looked at the very first email in your welcome sequence – when you deliver that all-important reader magnet. And in fact the reader magnet gives you a built-in second email in your sequence too, as it is always a good idea to check in with your readers after a day or two to ensure they got their freebie.

What else should be in your welcome sequence? How should you orientate readers when it comes to the World of You?

Well, what you should definitely avoid is peppering your emails with too many Asks. This is so easy to get wrong that we all mess it up at some point, in different ways. There’s a panoply of potential pitfalls, and a whole list of things that you either need to do… or might like to do. (But it’s also crucial to remember what our Ideal Reader needs and likes too – we will return to that momentarily.)

On your authorial side of the fence, your needs might include some or all of the following:

· Giving out your reader magnet

· Doing some whitelisting to ensure readers get future messages

· Getting a Like on Facebook

· Convincing readers to join your Facebook Group

· Asking for a Follow on BookBub

· Generating some form of website visit

· Selling some of those books of yours

· Upselling some other stuff like merch or audiobooks or hardcovers (or stuff like courses if you are a non-fiction author)

· Friending on Goodreads

· Checking out your stuff on Radish or Wattpad

· Connecting on LinkedIn (for certain types of non-fiction author)

· Ensuring they got their free book

· Doling out any other freebies/goodies you have on offer

· Pointing readers to a permafree

· Getting an Amazon Follow

· Joining your street team/ARC group

Yegads. I almost unsubscribed from my own mailing list just writing all that.

Needless to say, that’s a lot. Too much – obviously. These are mostly Asks too. As in, you are asking your subscribers for something. Some of these might feel like Gives to you, Miss Serious Author, but they are really Asks.

You need to slow the roll there, Cheech. You can do some of these things but you cannot do all of these things. Not right away.

Pick-and-choose. Remember, you don’t need to do everything all it once. Even the biggest superfan in the world would hesitate before signing up for the whole enchilada back there. Besides, we are trying to cultivate superfans here.

This is like suggesting baby names on the first date.

Everyone’s priorities will be different in places, but these are mine for my author newsletter:

1. Get/confirm the sign-up.

2. Give the book I promised

3. Do some whitelisting.

4. Dangle my free course.

5. Send people to my website

6. Get a follow on my social channels.

You will note I haven’t asked for a sale there. It’s not verboeten at all (but should be handled deftly if you do it). For me personally, I feel better just overloading new subscribers with freebies, and I find that naturally and organically generates more sales than trying to directly sell something. And it feels good doing things this way (do not underestimate the importance of that feeling long-term).

The way that translates into my welcome sequence is like this:

Email 1: give the freebie… and do little else. (I need to maximize deliverability here.)

Email 2: check they got the freebie and do some whitelisting. (I still don’t want to do too much here until at least some subscribers do some whitelisting and/or I build up a bit of a track record with the likes of Gmail with that individual subscriber.)

Email 3: roll out my asks – course sign-up, website visit, social follows. (I can include more links now without impacting deliverability so adversely, but I still keep the focus on what might be of most interest to new subscribers – i.e. the course – and mention the rest as an aside.)

And that’s it. My welcome sequence for my author newsletter is pretty lean and mean these days, and gets the job done. Subscribers start off with a high open rate, and exit the welcome sequence with a pretty high open rate (some degradation is unavoidable), but it took a fair bit of poking and prodding and tweaking and testing to get it that way.

On the fiction side of things, I handle all this quite differently in surface-level terms but the fundamental principles are the same. I want to tick off some of my key priorities, while also keeping readers engaged and giving them what I promised.

It’s a much slower and longer welcome sequence, but that’s what works for me and my historical fiction list. Keep in mind that I email weekly for my author newsletter, and monthly for my fiction list – so the way I warm those readers up will be different. (I do push them towards my Amazon listings though - horses for courses.)

Don’t focus on the particular details too much, what’s most important is that you (a) welcome readers properly, (b) give them what you promised, (c) don’t overload them with asks, and (d) keep them interested throughout.

We’ll talk more specifics (and highlight common pitfalls) in the next email on email, but I might switch lanes next Friday.

If you are eager to crack on with your own email overhaul, the #1 resource – as always – is Tammi Labrecque’s Newsletter Ninja which you really should download if you haven’t already. It is my Email Bible.

Tammi also has a couple of courses. I don’t often recommend courses. In fact, this might be the only one I have ever recommended. I took an early version of this course a few years ago and it completely rewired my brain when it comes to email marketing.

I’d say half of what I know about email directly came from Tammi, and the other half came from trying to implement the principles she teaches over the last few years. I can’t recommend her stuff highly enough.

Anyway, she has a couple of courses which have now re-opened for students, if you want more hands-on teaching. These aren’t affiliate links or anything like that – just recommendations from someone who helped me a lot (and since became my editor and friend too FYI).

Newsletter Ninja – Basic is $99 and runs in October. You can check that out here.

More experienced email wranglers might want to check out Newsletter Nina – Advanced which is $299 and runs in September. And you can check that out here.

And I’ll be sharing more help too as the summer continues so keep an eye out for that as well.

Laters.

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is Odetta with Hit or Miss.