Newsletters – an experiment on their effectiveness

Regular forumites know that from time to time I share results of data based experiments I run to evaluate strategies for getting my books out to a broader audience, Recently I finished a one year evaluation of newsletters to test their benefit in bringing potential visits into my web site. The metric I use is the number of deep hits and ratio of hits to those that exit my site via a buy link. Both have been affective in analyzing prior experiments.

The test – The newsletter was roughly two pages long and contained nice graphics of five star reviews, awards, new releases, etc, and was sent to 1200 participants from prior sign up events and contests.

Results – After one year (four quarterly newsletters) the end result was a surprise. The increase to deep hits and buy page visits was in the noise (few percentage points). I had heard so many authors using this technique and figured I’d try it, but my experience indicates, least for me, not worth the major effort. I realize others may have had different results and that’s great for them, but I can only report what I recorded so don’t be offended if your experience has been different. Good for you. Go ahead and report it here because I won’t be offended and the more we share the more we all learn and benefit.

I have a list of 24 strategies I’ve tested to increase my visibility to potential readers and a detailed write up that reports stat based results of each. I put the article on my website for a workshop I give so feel free to download. Go to Davisstories.com and on bottom row of the home page click the cover art “So you want to write a novel?” and it will take ya to a new screen. The article, along with others, is near the lower left side, hope ya find it helpful.

Susan

Tried the bookmark route. Not effective for me at all. My best promo methods out of 2 dozen tried so far have been top reviews, awards and freebie stories/cookbooks I've uploaded to free ebook sites that lure readers over. Bottom techniques have been contests, ads, and SN, but thats just based on my recorded stats. Others may be different.

Reviews are becoming more difficult to get because the people that review have had to take up jobs given the economy and the number of submissions have tripled (according to websites I've contacted). Still get 4 to 5 stars but instead of 5 or 6 in 3 months, I now get 1 or 2 in 8 months. Getting rough.

Sorry. Been tardy getting back on. Had some junk going on in personal life. Ref lister sites, I use it as a general category of places you can list blurbs, excerpts, reviews, chapters of a book/story and the public is allowed to search via keywords to view your material. File upload sites is another category. Some specialize, like with Pdf formatted, tech material, etc but I don't use them. If you want to upload an entire free eBook, that would be a different category of sites.

Examples of lister sites I've used are Docstoc, Worthyofpublishing, publisher.com, Scribd, Forshared.com, MediaFire, etc. About a dozen I've uploaded to using the free option which means you can't embed hypertext (so you'd know through tracker programs like statcounter where the hit came from). Thus its impossible to explicitly say how many weekly hits are from the lister sites. However, I do know the following:

- In three years of uploading promo materiel like excerpts. 5 star reviews, etc, on just one of thee sites, I've had about 7000 reads with the average being over three minutes duration reads of the material
- I also note that the week I upload a new promo file my deep site hits climb 20 to 40 percent roughly. After about two months the blimp smooths out.

I was not implying that your entire promo campaign is accomplished through this sole avenue, just that its one I continue to do out of 24 I've tried because, based on my experience, the ROI on this one is worth the time, least for me.

The reason I stated its a high Return on Investment is because of the small amount of time I have to spend for something that continues to keep giving each month, and I already have the excerpts, blurbs, reviews, cover art to just paste in the promo file, takes maybe 10 to 30 minutes depending on how many sites I upload to. Nice thing is once uploaded the effort keeps giving back for years. The stats do settle down but they haven't stopped yet even for the files I uploaded 3 years ago.

Heres an example of just one lister site I checked for ya. I uploaded a promo package 3 years ago for my novel BLIND CONSENT. Fisrt three mths it averaged about 16 views/wk averaging 3 minutes each. last two months this year its averaged 4 views/week for that one book of which I have 14 releases. Not as much as initially but the effort is still providing return and thats one site for one promo avenue.

Not all releases are the same either. On one lister site one book has accumulated 2235 reads in 3 years while another has recorded 1008. Could be the titles that make the difference or maybe genre, don't know.

That would be compared to a low ROI activities like newsletters where I was spending a ton of time yet saw very little return.

Any further question refer to my email at bottom of my home page and I'll try to get to when my vision improves. Having some difficulty lately with my eyes and the AWC print is so darn small.

Hope that helps.

Guys

What ever you think is a waste of time, don't do it. In the last 30 months my sales have increase 240%, yet I have decreased the number of promo activities I do. How's that possible? Cause I spent the time to collect and analyze hit data correlated to specific promo actions. Other words, if you think just writing without promo sales books then thats want you should do. I tried that for 2 years and sold zip. Its why I started experimenting with various promo methods I read about that people "thought" worked. All I can do is share what I've learned from data I've collected. If you don't agree with the results by all means run your own experiements.