Marketing Advice: Use It Or Lose It!

I’ve made a major marketing failure. Yes, me, the Haas School Of Business UC Berkeley alumnus, the man who prides himself on utilizing marketing strategies like few in the business. If there’s one thing I understand and have experience in, it’s marketing. But I’m here to tell you about a mistake I made, a very big one, where you can avoid making the mistake in the future.

The e-mail list is an author’s bread and butter. It can be used for announcements, updates, checking in, just making sure your audience remembers you–and of course direct selling of books. The rates of conversion from email are far higher than most others.

Over the course of the year, I’ve built up a list that has close to 4,000 subscribers.

“Wow,” you may think. “That’s impressive, so how did you fail?”

I never used it.

This morning, in an attempt to promote Brian Niemeier’s new book, I used my list for the first time. A lot of people signed up in June/July/August, but they never heard from me. I didn’t just want to spam Brian’s book — having never used it before, so I coupled it with a free giveaway of an ebook so it didn’t come across quite so spammy. But it was still a problem for me. Why? I never used it. The readers weren’t primed for receiving emails from me.

The result was I had 25 people unsubscribe right after my post (now from my social media posts I had another 15 subscribe today so the delta was only 10, but still, not good!).

Some may have forgotten why they signed up, some may have forgotten who I was, some may just be annoyed at the extra holiday spam email.  Regardless, the fault was mine in not making sure I utilized this powerful tool in marketing. Moreover, think about the times where I could have used the email list effectively: the Paragons Anthology, MAGA 2020, Gravity Of The Game, they all came out without a blast from me.

I won’t make that mistake again. Regular updates on everything are necessary for engagement for friends, family and audience. Without those, they go away.  Use it, or lose it. That goes for any of your marketing platforms, but your email list may be the most important.

Don’t forget to sign up for my list, and while you’re at it, sign up for my Patreon, which I’m using regularly to deliver so much content, including a new short story every month!