All right. Hi, I'm Tammy, Newsletter Ninja. You might have heard of me.
I want to announce just real quick, this talk is about migrating your list from one service to another. If you're not doing that or planning to do that or interested in that, you should go see Becca Seim or someone else. in one of the other rooms. Totally fine, no hard feelings, but it's very niche-y and specific. You're very, very welcome.
So for the rest of you, assuming any of you are left, we're gonna talk about migrating your email list, or how to survive the list. migration wilderness because it's a process it's not hard but it's a little bit fussy right so we got to be sure to do it properly that might sound crazy but there is actually a process so first we should probably say what is list migration that is taking your current subscriber list usually downloading a CSV obviously and you're going to take that list of people and you're going to move them over to a different service you're on MailChimp I'm so sorry to hear that and we're going to move over to mailer light thumbs up so So, if you're out there saying, well I hope you just download the thing and import them and then you start sending emails, I'm afraid that's not the case. So, what are we gonna do?
You do not want this to happen. You download that CSV, you move everybody over, you send them a campaign, right? You get a flood of unsubscribes, because one thing that happens when you move servers is you get a little bit of a shake up in deliverability, and that's awesome. It can mean some people who were regularly getting your emails actually might see a little drop, you're gonna try to get them to come back, try to want to compensate for, you're going to want to try to compensate for that, but it also means some people haven't seen you in a while, and that kind of jolt means you drop into their inbox for the first time in forever. That's awesome, unless they don't remember you, right?
Or they're just like, I haven't heard from her in like eight months, and I didn't care, so I'm going to unsubscribe. So you send your camera, you get a flood of unsubscribes, your new EMS emails you, and they're like, you sent an email to a thousand people and 150 unsubscribed, what the hell, they do not like that kind of ratio, you start crying. probably realize you're still getting subs on your own service because you didn't swap the forms out properly there's a bunch of dead links in the backs of your books right none of that that's not good and then you come to me and you say please Tammy help me fix it because nobody ever comes to me when it went well I just only hear the horror stories of course so we we don't want this this is not the path we want so we're going to do first things first you got to pick your new EMS lots to think about here mainly you want to think about how much does it cost and what can I do with it right so there's a whole bunch of random ones on here and they're actually not even all ones that i recommend but here's what we've got so you're gonna look around at the various email services you're gonna figure out what the pricing is like can i afford that um the answer is probably yes please don't cheap out on your email service i get a lot of people who are like mailerlite wants to charge me ten dollars a month well if you're from a thousand subscribers and you're not making ten dollars a month come and talk to me because we got to figure out what's going on like you can afford your mailing list you should be able able to afford your mailing.
It was particularly on an inexpensive provider like, say, MailerLite. So you're going to figure out, this is what I can afford, these are the features I need, and find the place where that converges, right? Then we're going to get ready. There's a lot of prep here. The first thing you've got to do is get the new ones set up in the sense of verifying your email, authenticating your domain.
In MailerLite, they have what's called domain alignment, which will make your links look as though they're running through your own server instead of MailerLite. It can all be very complicated, and I definitely don't want to get into that. into a bunch of tech here, but you need to do those things. You also need to, if you have any, duplicate your automations or just rewrite them.
Like I'm going to do my automations from scratch because I want them to be better than the old ones. And you're going to need to recreate any tags or groups or lists or whatever your current EMS calls it in the new EMS. You also have to make all new forms. So if you've got a signup form on your website and you've got a couple of other signup forms here or there. You've got book funnel dripping into the old service, all of that.
You've got to reroute all of that so that people who are signing up via any of your entry points are going to go into the new list, right? So once you've got all of that stuff, oh, I forgot to say this, your automations. It's very tempting to say I'm going to write all new automations and they're going to be perfect, I'm not going to move until I've got that all set up and then if you're me, it's six months later and you still haven't written them and you still haven't moved and maybe you've been. been paying for both this whole time?
Like, perfect is the enemy of done. So if what you have the time and the bandwidth for is to just copy the emails that exist in your current automations and just keep using that, make that rewrite a project for later on down the road. Like, please don't, like, put this off because you don't have time to do all of that work. Okay, so the first thing you're gonna do We're not moving anyone yet. Let me stress that.
The first thing you're going to do once you've got all of your forms and everything's all ready is you're going to set up a little automation for the people who are coming from the old service. This isn't like your welcome sequence. This is for the people who are existing subscribers that you are moving.
Because remember I said some of them are going to get an email from you for the first time in a while Because you had that little server shake up So I want you to have just an automation one quick email and it's gonna say something like You know, you'll notice things look a little different around here. Your emails will probably look a little different none of them are designed exactly the same or even if it doesn't look a little different lie like that guy I talked to in the last session just things might look a little different around here we've moved to a different service but nothing will change you'll still keep getting the emails of course if you want to unsubscribe there's a link right here and just let them do that good idea to include in there maybe a link to your Amazon author page or the books page on your website in case they have forgotten who you are which is a thing that happens so hey can't quite remember who I am I have mom brain too. It's totally fine click here, and you'll probably recognize a book and that's where you found me this is Coupled with the second tactic about it This is so super powerful because it makes sure that first of all at least they're not going to report you as spam They might unsubscribe for sure but at least they're not going to report you as spam because you've said remember and they're like oh Yeah, I remember, but I don't care anymore That's totally fine if you do this We're going to begin the move, so I'm just going to get this I'm going to talk about something that's going to be a slide in a minute. If you do this, if you move them over and you move them in the way that we'll talk about, which is from most engaged to least engaged, what will happen is you will have these amazing engagement rates in the beginning and that looks really good to those receiving inboxes like Gmail, Hotmail, et cetera. I'll go into it a little more in depth.
Should have paid better attention to my slide order. Okay. So, we've got everything set up.
We've got the hello, welcome to the people that are existing. you set up or duplicated your welcome sequences, any other sequences that you have, like if they click something, it tags them in a certain way or list hygiene or whatever it is that you do, got all that set up, swapped the new forms so people have started coming in. That's really, really important.
Make sure, remember the map back there where we were screwing up, make sure you've got every entry point moved to the new place because there's nothing more frustrating than starting to export people and... put them in the new spot and then people are coming back around and joining up for some reason or just even new people joining up very frustrating and it makes it hard to track as you move in batches because we are gonna move in batches unless your list is very small but we'll worry about that in a second so time to begin first step swap those forms go to book funnel or story origin or prolific works or wherever you are and change the drop down so that instead of going to your old service they're going to your new service right replace every single possible entry point there's a potential problem here and that problem is if you have links in the back of your book that go directly to a third party landing page like if your links went directly to a constant contact landing page or a mailer light landing page or a MailChimp landing page not a page on your website with an embed but a third party site because when you shut that account down those links no longer work they go to a dead link and that's not what we love it is not the biggest tragedy in the world if it's a back of book link because people don't generally pick up a book they read like eight months ago and then they have to go to that link. People are also smart enough to type your name into a search engine if they really want to get that reader magnet that you promised or whatever.
It's not the end of the world but it's not great either. If you are in a position where you can continue to have that service maybe at the very lowest tier or if there's a way to downgrade to a free tier or something like that you can keep an eye out for stragglers and we'll talk about that in a minute or you may even be able to do a redirect of some kind or put the new link on that page not that they love that obviously but it is a problem so at least going forward if you haven't been please have your signups be either on your site or it's a URL that redirects somewhere so that if you move or you need to change something you just change it on your end and you don't have to worry about the books not everybody is aware of this but you really can't change existing books books that have already been downloaded ten years ago Amazon would push an update for you. They will not do that anymore.
So if a bad link is in the back of your book, it's pretty well in there forever. Occasionally you can get them to allow an update, but then people have to go to the site and intentionally update and they're not going to. So replace all of those forms, do your whole book funnel thing, make sure that all of those signups, if someone signs up on your website or they sign up via a book funnel link or whatever it is that you're doing, make sure they work. You need to test them.
Sign yourself up. And watch how you go through the various automations. Make sure you're picking up the tags or getting moved to the groups you're supposed to be.
You've got to test everything. Be meticulous here. You will thank me later, as it says on the slide. Like, seriously test. everything the thing you don't bother to test because it's the same as the other three and they were fine is the one that will break this is how it is so now you're ready we're gonna export your subscribers export I can't or what syllable.
It's a good time to validate your list, like through an email validation service. MailerLite has one that's associated with them. I think it's called MailerCheck or MailChecker or something like that.
There are standalone ones. We use one called, I think it's just called email list validation. Caveat here is that sometimes they're weird.
Email list validation for the last many months just says every Yahoo address isn't valid. Sometimes they're just wonky, and so you kind of have to use your brain. You got to look at the list and see what's going on. But it's not It's not a bad idea to run people through that because it will tell you bad emails.
It will tell you if the email is not an actual domain. It will tell you if it's a spam trap, which is awful and they're a lot to talk about, but they are a thing. Don't want that to happen. So if you want to do that, you can run your list through an email validator.
And it's not terribly expensive. It's per email address, obviously, so you should price that out. But if you want to do that first and then just discard anybody that seems real bad, you can do that.
And now we're gonna import. I do this in batches unless the list is very very small and then there's not really a point in doing that But if you're even over 500 people split them into five batches of a hundred or whatever like I do this in batches And I do it in reverse order from most engaged Like the people who opened and read the last email the most recent one that you sent to less engaged and less engaged I'll go back in time is usually how I do it This doesn't matter how big how small the reason that we do this is because those people who opened your last email We can can assume that most of them are pretty well engaged. I mean, maybe they opened your last email and they didn't open the seven before that.
That's a bummer. But generally speaking, those are going to be your people who are most engaged. If we take just those people, so there's 2,000 of them, and we grab them and we run them in, I don't know, four batches of 500 people, right?
And we import them into that welcome sequence that I talked about that just says, hey, we moved new servers. Things might look a little different, whatever. Great place to give them something really clicky.
But if you If you don't remember who I am, here's the link to my books. If you didn't pick up all your reader magnets, they're collected on this page. Give them something to click. And what will happen is you're going to send out that email. They're coming through the automation and those emails are firing out, right?
So now you've sent, I forgot what I said, 2000 emails, like an 85% open rate. And MailerLite's like, whoa. And Gmail's like, everyone loves this girl. That's awesome. That does amazing, amazing things for your deliverability and your reputation.
There are actually people who will offer you this as a service, warming up your server, but generally they're scammy and probably will get you shut down. So warm up your own servers, totally fine. But definitely start with the most engaged people.
Now you've got this amazing open rate and you can grab that group of people that isn't quite as engaged and you can move them over, which is awesome. Their open rates probably be a little bit lower, but it's going to be higher than it would have been if you hadn't given yourself that massive deliverability boost. So it's going to be a little bit lower and it will bring bring down your overall open rates a little bit. So you're like, oh, now it's 79. That's fine. And then you're going to grab the next batch and so on.
I don't have to go through them all, right? At some point, and I think, yeah, at some point, this is a little bit of a balancing act. At some point, you start to notice, like, I am getting less and less opens here on these batches as I go.
It is kind of pulling my overall open rate down, and now I'm getting near 60, 55, 50, whatever your tolerance is, 50. 50 is fine, 50 is a lovely open rate. I always want 100, but 50 is a fine open rate. And you kind of do this balancing act in your head. This is where it becomes maybe a little bit more art than science.
Should I continue to import people, and maybe it's gonna drag this stuff down, or do I stop now? Like you kind of figure that out, and when you hit that spot, just send an email to everybody who's left on the old server, MailChimp or whatever, and tell them we're moving. Here's a new signup form.
You can sign up. up here if you want to come with me. You won't get very many, but that's fine.
They haven't opened an email in a year or whatever, so it's totally fine. Send them an email and then just consider yourself done. This is how you wound up.
I really can't stress enough that that cutoff point is completely up to you. I have imported lists of, you know, 20, 30,000 people and we cut off halfway through because it just starts to get real dismal. I imported a very, very big name author from MailChimp to MailerLite this past spring.
She had a hundred... 150,000 people, and we never cut anyone off. It was very strange.
It just, it was fine. It just kept being fine. Even people that MailChimp said hadn't opened in like two years opened the welcome email and clicked to get their new freebie or whatever.
So. It's an art and just figure it out and figure out what your tolerance is and don't worry about cutting people off There's plenty more where they came from. Okay, so that's what we're gonna do most engaged to least engaged Make sure you keep that open rate something normal and then we're going to pack away the boxes.
So you've got to go back to your old EMS and you have to clean up. If you're in MailChimp for example, you're going to need to archive everybody that you've moved. Because just unsubscribing them doesn't do the trick. MailChimp still charges you for people who have unsubscribed. subscribed, you got to archive them specifically.
Archive all your people. See if there's a way to downgrade that plan to a freebie if you need to keep track of stragglers, right? If you're afraid there might still be some book links out there or a form you don't know about or it's always a Facebook ad, man.
You're just like, oh, I forgot that Facebook ad was sending people there. Go ahead and downgrade to a freebie or to the very lowest tier if you can afford it so that you can just keep an eye on it for a little bit. That's a thing you probably only...
have to do for three, four months. Not a huge deal, but you're gonna want to do that in case there are stragglers. If you're a hundred percent sure, you've always been super clean with your thing and people only sign up via embeds or book funnel and you know that's the case, just shut the whole shebang down.
I want you to, and I didn't put it on the slide, so jot it down I guess, at the very beginning of this process, take your entire list as an export and just put it somewhere safe. That's your, oh crap, like I deleted a bunch of people or I forgot to add a tag or whatever that's you're like this is my list as it existed the instant before I moved it and then just before you shut down the old server export that list again make sure you get everybody even if they're unsubscribed or archived or whatever that's gonna show the status of the list as you left that service because if someone comes to you down the line and says I didn't sign up or I want to know this or how did you use my info or anything like that you can access those spreadsheets and you can give them that information that they need which is actually I believe legally required like under GDPR and so forth. So you need to be able to do that. They also have to be stored in a super safe place.
That is a GDPR requirement. They can't just be like on your hard drive, which frankly is probably my safest place, but you need to like put them somewhere cloud-based that's password protected, that kind of thing. Google Drive's a great place.
So do that, and then you downgrade or cancel the old EMS, and you call it good. There's a checklist right there. NewsletterNinja.net. Migrate 2023. No hyphens for a change.
You go there. It'll walk you through the steps that I just said so you can make sure that you did everything. And of course, there's also a sequence in there somewhere.
and the whole welcome shebang that we'll talk to you about list migration again as well. There's like four emails, and they go a little bit more in-depth and are a little bit more levers and buttons. I can't really do levers and buttons on a slide, you know what I mean?
So if you sign up there, you'll learn more about list migration. bunch of other cool stuff. And I left a bunch of them for questions. So I could also talk slower, as this lovely man told me. But it is what it is.
So there's a mic there. There's a mic there. Head on over.
And I am happy to talk about buttons and levers as best I can. We'll just have to envision it in our heads. Go ahead. What do you think about migrating to Substack?
How did I know that somebody was going to ask me that? So, a lot of people are very anti-substack. Email marketers can be like, no, because you can't tag who bought something and you can't segment according to interest. There's a lot of things you can't do on substack, obviously, right?
basically Substack is a broadcast platform. I think you get one welcome email. I do not, I have not used it as a broadcaster but I subscribe to a ton of them.
I think you get one welcome email and then it's basically just broadcasting to people so and your posts show up. up on your Substack site and they also get emailed to people and they can be free or paid. And Substack is very appealing because it is free, so that's a big thumbs up.
I am not anti-Substack, but it's definitely not right for everybody. If you write in a single genre and you're not going to do a bunch of complicated automations, you don't need a whole workflow that walks them through your catalog and you don't care who clicked on what. I was like, oh, God, I hit the mic. If you don't care who clicked on what, if you don't.
need to do a bunch of segmenting yada yada yada right it is a magnificent broadcast platform if you just want to talk to somebody once a month until your next book is out and then tell them the book is out it works a treat it's fantastic i don't have any objections and i will say this and i don't think substack works for authors that are at all complicated so please don't take this as me saying run over there but man the emails land in my inbox don't they every time just right in the inbox they never go to promotions they don't go to spam i don't know why i belong to like six or seven. I'm subscribed to like six or seven sub stacks and I get them. So that's kind of appealing, right?
Maybe there's some kind of hybrid solution. I'll have to think about that. So if it's right for you, I think you'll know. And you can certainly at least just give it a try.
And then if you feel like, man, I wish I had more information about X or I wish I knew Y, you have access to your list of emails, subsects. doesn't keep them from you. So you could always say, I'm actually going to go over to MailerLite or whatever so I can do some more fancy stuff. Does that help?
Awesome. You. How many emails do you send between imports?
So I don't send any during the import process. I'm really glad you asked that because if the import process is going to be lengthy, that's going to mean that people don't get the regular campaign, right? So normally I kind of do the math in my head, and if somebody emails once a month, I'm going to make sure that that list gets moved within that month so that when it's time to send the next campaign, the process is already finished.
So how do you know if the engagement on the new server is going up or down? Because you're seeing the figures. from that welcome email the email that says hey we've moved yeah so that's what you're getting you're looking at those numbers it's like yeah no that's a great question actually because i was not clear so yeah the welcome email that little hey we've moved that will have open and click rates and all of that that you can look at and so you're watching there i will say though if you had such a big list and i mean it can happen when i moved the author i was talking about this spring that was 150 000 people if she was a person who sent every month i would have had to figure something out you just like the people who have moved get one here and we still gotta send to the last to the old place just one time i would have had to figure out a process for that but she was a quarterly sender so it worked out fine but yeah that is actually a really good question you would have to work out and you might have to send in two places if that were the case okay thank you you're welcome how about you I'm in a bit of a weird position because I have three different manuals for different types of customers.
Everything's set up, the automations are ready, the lead magnets are ready, everything's been meticulously tested, but I have 180 subscribers. That's okay. Can you give a general...
general advice on just how to start getting more people on the list? Yes, I can. You said you have a reader magnet.
I already forgot what you said. Yes. ADHD, it's amazing. So you're going to want to get the reader magnet out there is probably one of the best ways.
way to build your list is to sell a million books but because we can't there's not an easy button for that you're probably gonna want to get the reader magnet out there so that's gonna mean doing like cross promotions maybe even Facebook ads which people will tell you you can't do for a reader magnet but I have clients and students who are doing it I like cross promotions book funnel story origin that kind of thing where you get together with another group of authors and you share your reader magnet you can also do I actually don't know about story origin but probably and on book funnel you can do direct sales cross promotion. So if somebody doesn't want to give anything away right now, you might say to five people in your genre, let's all just do a 99 cent sale. And you get that set up and then everybody sends it to their list and then everyone hopefully buys all five of the books or whatever. That's a good cross promotion method.
And then you've got that reader magnet in the back of the book, which hopefully they sign right up for. The main problem I find after visibility, which is obviously the main one, getting people's eyeballs on the reader magnet is a lot of times people pick up a reader magnet, particularly in a cross promotion, and they kind of don't get right to it. Or if they read it, they're like, well, that was nice, and then they put it down, and it's all over. So not to be salesy, which I wicked hate, but I do have a book about reader magnets.
If you don't have it, you can find it on my site. It's called If You Give a Reader a Cookie, which I think is adorable. So you can find it on all the retailers.
And in that, my sort of philosophy of reader magnets is that I want them to be super. tightly aligned with your books proper. So if you're writing a sci-fi series about some specific, you know, group of ragtag, you know, whatever's on a derelict ship, right?
That's what sci-fi people do, Stacy. I'm so bad at sci-fi, why do I pick that? Then maybe you do a prequel about like what happened that made everything go to hell for them and all of that kind of thing.
So when people read the book and you're like, do you want to find out how they wound up in this predicament? Yeah, I do, of course I do. And if people read the magnet...
and you say, do you want to hear about their further adventures, particularly if you put the first few chapters of book one in the back of that reader magnet, total no-brainer for them to move through. So work on that in meshing because then people really want to grab that reader magnet after they read the book. It's a visibility game.
It's a numbers game. And I wish I had a better answer because if we could all just get all the subscribers we wanted and then they could just filter themselves out if they didn't want to be there, we'd be fine, but just even getting them. them can be really hard.
The other reader magnet tip is make it exclusive to your list. So you do not want to also have it for sale on Amazon because people will buy it rather than give out their email address. They're all getting too much email. You want them to sign up for that book and then you wow them with how amazing you are so they stick around. Thanks.
There's no magic bullet about it which kind of blows. I also went to your last presentation, so my question may be more beginner. That's okay. I'll answer anything.
But I went and got my free MailChimp account. And so that's why I'm thinking sooner or later I'm going to have to migrate it somewhere because you can only have, I think, up to 1,500 subscribers. And I actually did an ad. campaign which got me lists of subscribers, technology challenged here.
That's okay. I have spreadsheets full of emails, addresses, and the only way I would know how to get them to MailChimp is to manually enter each one. There's a button. There is an easy button. Is there anything that newsletters can do?
letter ninja does that would help me learn how to transfer those yes I mean not formally because I don't need I don't even actually I don't like have a course for that because it is so simple when you see it you're gonna be like how did I not see this shoot um shoot me an email there's a contact form on my website okay use the contact form on my website say I asked you at 20 bucks how do I get these emails into my MailChimp and I will I will do a little walk through for you thank you It's literally an easy button. I just got done telling someone there's no easy button. Guess what?
There totally is. Can you please explain the significance of open rate, especially in view of how many people open, don't open an email because they're doing it, they're reading it in their reader pane? Yes, I can.
I actually. complained about this a little bit less in the last talk so open rates are extraordinarily unreliable however when they're the only metric you have sometimes that's what you got to do right so I said for example move the people who opened your last email well I mean, they didn't all open. And some people who did aren't in that group because you didn't see it.
The good news, bad news? The good news is the number of people who open that you can't see is actually so much smaller than people think it is. I get this a ton from people.
One guy once said to me, I think it's probably like about 25% of my list is opening and I don't know. And I was like, oh, it is not. I'm sorry.
I have to tell you. I have done a ton of list hygiene for people, you know, where you reach out and say it doesn't look like. like you're opening. If you are actually here, just click and you'll stay and all of that yada yada.
Between one and three percent almost every time of the people who don't open. So if you've got 100 people who don't open, it's gonna be one, two, or three people that you can capture in that way. However, we have the opposite problem with Apple.
We have the people who look like they have opened and they have not, which means that when you're relying on open rates, you are gonna pull over some folks that are not actually necessarily engaged. And the sad thing is. there's just nothing to be done about it. Apple, very smartly, go figure, Apple's programmers are smart. Rather than try to hide from you whether somebody had opened or not, when they implemented their privacy changes with iOS 15, they did the opposite, which is to obfuscate with bad information. So when an email is delivered to somebody who opens their emails on an Apple app, which if they're on an iPhone, they are almost certainly using the Apple app, and if they're on their desktop Mac, they might be.
What happens is that the server loads all of the images and stuff before, like immediately, the minute that your email lands, and that means it registers as an open with your service, even though they haven't even had a second to open it. And then maybe they come back later and open it, who knows? But so that makes that information unreliable as well. In the absence of any better metric, we're still kind of tied down to using it. Why is open rate important?
Why is Why is it important? Because if your open rates are low enough, if you send out 1,000 emails and only 14 people open them, the receiving inbox, Gmail, Hotmail, whoever, they go, they see that you sent a mass email, and they say, she sent 1,000 emails and only 14 people opened them. That's, let's say, let's say 400. I'm being very, that's sassy. Only 400 people opened them.
Maybe people aren't all that interested in these emails and then the next time you send your emails are that much more likely to go to promotions or god forbid spam or someone came up to me and asked me after the last session maybe just the oubliette like they just never arrive at all and you don't know why. So as your open rates decline, this has demonstrable effects on your reputation and your deliverability as a sender. This, of course, is all automated. This is just robots making these choices, so you can't reason with them.
You want to be really careful. and guard those open rates and make sure that they stay up people ask me what's a good open rate go ahead and volunteer so you don't have to ask that question if you were to google it they will say that for like arts and entertainment i guess that's what we are um the average open rate is 20 i don't want you at 20 that's not great um i'd like to see you pushing 40 maybe if that sounds crazy aim for 30 30 is not bad but if you can get up to say 40 that actually doesn't mean that 60% of people don't open because there's a number of people who just open every email you send because they love you. Bless those people. But then there's some people who kind of rotate in and out, right?
So if it says 40%, if you were to ask the opposite question, how many people never open my emails, it's not going to be 60. It's going to be more like 50 or even maybe 40. So. somewhere between 30 and 40 is where I want to see you. And then if you're there, you're real solid. You can take a hit if there's just one email that for some reason doesn't get opened well or some disaster happens.
But they are really important just because they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And they affect your open rates only ever go down. That's the sad news.
And then eventually they get to a point where you say, I need to do some list hygiene and clean out the people who never open. But that's a whole different talk. Does that help? Okay, good. All right.
Hi. I have a spam problem and I don't know whether it originated from my MailChimp or my domain at all. So I am going to navigate to MailerLite, but would you recommend in this kind of situation straight up getting a new domain? Is that going to kind of fix it or am I going to be going over with like a tainted email address? That's a really good question.
That's actually an excellent, excellent question. Switching domains is almost never the answer. Every once in a while. Like things are so bollocksed up that it kind of is the answer.
But it's almost never the answer. Are you using any kind of like test? Like do you send a test email to anything that like analyzes before you send send to your people? I do not.
That would be my first step. Go into your email provider and do whatever it is that you normally do. And then you know how you can send a test email like to yourself to test links.
Go to mailtester.com. There's a hyphen. Mail.
Dot. Ramble. mail-tester.com, mail like email, not like male-female.
And what you'll see is just it's a page and there's like a little gobbledygook email address, right? Copy that email address and send the test to that email address, go back to Mail Tester and click check your score or whatever it says. It does a whole bunch of stuff that's super useful. It is not 1 million percent reliable, like don't live or die by any tool, frankly, but it is really helpful to ascertain things like if you are on any black. blacklists, which is a thing that you can often fix.
If you're blacklisted with SpamHouse, you can reach out to SpamHouse, you can figure out what the problem is, you can fix it, and they'll take you off the list. If you're blacklisted by Sorbs, ignore it. Nope, it's stupid.
So you can check that. It will also tell you if there are any problems with your email. If you're not authenticated properly, you don't have your SPF, your DKIM, maybe your alignment.
DMARC is another one. These are all gobbledygook words that I genuinely don't understand either, so it's OK. It will tell you that and then you know that if you fix that, your deliverability goes up.
But moving servers actually has an opportunity of kind of helping you a little bit because of that like, that jolt that I told you about. Like all of a sudden you're not coming from the bad server, you're coming from the good server. And while your domain might be the same, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, they can see the numbers. They can see the IP address and you're sending from somewhere different now and that's going to shake things up a bit. It's not a cure-all by any means but it...
I see it be beneficial more often than not. And I do strongly recommend MailerLite. We have an affiliate link, obviously, newsletterninja.net slash MailerLite.
And if you sign up there next month when the little mini course on this migration stuff comes out, I'm just going to give it to all the affiliates for free because obviously I'm getting a kickback. So that might help you as well. But my best tip, I think, is a mail tester of some kind. Thank you. You're welcome.
Actually, I think you just answered my question. So your recommendation is MailerLite. It really is. I mean, I get annoyed by them. Join the Facebook group and you can see me.
I was going to say a swear word, complain about them all day long, because I complain about everything. That's not true. It's a very positive group.
I'm not complaining all the time, I promise. But you can see me definitely say, oh, MailerLite customer service. They're still going to be where you get the best intersection of... price and functionality you're going to get the most for the least amount of money there and for all of their, shall we call them quirks. Mailer like customer service is unfailingly polite, they try very hard to be helpful, they do not always succeed, not convinced they understand their software as well as I do, which is alarming.
But they're wonderful and they really do try. So I like them a lot, even as I'm like, why are they doing this and why didn't they do that? I definitely don't recommend MailChimp, too expensive, not a big enough free plan.
They got bought out by Intuit a few years ago and everything kind of went in the toilet, so that's a bummer. Things that are really appealing like SendFox, Flowdesk, I'm trying to think, there's a couple of other ones. that are just, they're real cheap or they're...
Send in blue. There you go, author.email. I actually have not used author.email, although if you're in our Facebook group, Nick Thacker, who I think made author.email, he's in there, so you can yell at him or praise him, whatever you choose.
The ones that feel like, oh, that's super expensive, I'm going to get a good bargain, sometimes you do get what you pay for, you know what I mean? And they're not as robust, they all have little quirks. SendFox will just stop sending to some of your people because they say they're not engaged anymore and you're like, I'll... I'll make that choice.
I'd like to make that choice. Flowdesk, I think everything is images. Like even though you type them out when the email arrives, Flowdesk is always images for me. And I have images turned off.
So I can't read your email. Like just there's weird things about the cheapo ones. So I just always say MailerLite.
And like I said, if you use the affiliate link, ah, that's me again, you'll get the little mini course for free when it comes out. So is that the affiliate link? Yes.
If you want to sign up for me, for MailerLite, it's newsletterninja.net slash MailerLite. But if you get into my ecosystem anyway, there's no trouble finding that link, I assure you. It's also on our website. If you go to newsletterninja.net, down at the bottom, there's a link that says Resources, and there's all kinds of stuff I recommend, and some of it's affiliate.
I think I identify them all because I'm kind of super ethical. So there's some affiliate links there, too, and MailerLite is in there. Outstanding. Thank you. Okay.
Hi, I have an online question. Sure. And I thought this was interesting. What advice do you have for middle grade authors whose audience tends to age out of our books? Yeah.
Should we be working harder to get new subs to keep an active audience? Or change genres? Or change genres.
Oh, no. Not if you love middle grade. No, no, no, no. I'm just throwing that out there.
This is, I hate this question. I don't have great answers for this for precisely that reason. because when you're selling middle grade, they're going to grow up.
I mean, they have to grow up. It beats the alternative. So, yeah, you're constantly having people, like, cycle in and cycle out. If you're lucky, someone's got six or seven kids, and all their kids will cycle through, so that's awesome.
Encourage your people to have as many children as possible, I guess. To hell with the planet. But it's a really hard nut to crack.
I do get people who come through my courses every once in a while, and they're always a very special unicorn because we're over here, like, do a reader magnet, do this. have a Facebook group, and they're like, I can't do any of that. Your ability to even communicate with somebody who's in middle grade is rough, because there are internet rules about things like forums and social media that have age limits on them, and also you just don't want to be a creep, you know what I mean? So a lot of times with middle grade, it winds up that you're really honestly communicating with parents, teachers, librarians. That's kind of your audience.
Your readers are one remove from your subscribers in a way so what you're trying to do is to get these parents teachers librarians get them on your list but to also send them things that interests the kid as well right because you don't just want to mail email the parents you want to get the kids really invested so that they're asking for your books specifically well my daughter was a kid she read those warrior cat ones I don't remember what they're called but every you know birthday Christmas her grandmother was buying her these because she always saw her face in them and Caroline always wanted to have them you want that you want them to be like we got to get her more of those nancy drews or whatever i'm aging myself um so you want to keep in touch with those folks but maybe when you send them an email about you know you write i don't know about like his time travel some kids who are time traveling to solve crime maybe you send them a pdf or give them a link to a website that has like um some like a cool speech or some information about a historical event or whatever but something that is kid kid sized kid friendly so that they can share it with the kid oh I got this cool thing from that author you're like it's I don't know, Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech because they're in the civil rights era, something like that. Something that they can kind of share as a parent and a child and the kid will be interested in it, that to me seems like the best way to go. But it is hard. your audience, your reader audience, is going to age away from you eventually. So it's a never-ending...
You're not just going to get more and more and more and more and sit comfortably selling them contemporary romance. They're going to get older. But you know what? They're going to get older.
if they really loved your books, they're gonna read them to their kids too. So then you have a career forever, for decades. I read all my favorite books to my kids. Well, I did, they're old now. Does that help?
You didn't ask it, it was an online question. I hope that helped. And always feel free, hop in the Facebook group. The more middle grade type people that I get, the more you all can brainstorm together and kind of come up with the answers that I don't necessarily have.
And you know, I get a few every year. A few more of you show up. How about you? I think she was here first.
Okay, thank you. How about you? I have a hopefully simple question about the links. So how important is it to have sign-up links with, like, your author name?
Because sometimes if you have a... a couple of pen names or if you're doing different languages in those. How do you say?
So the link that they give you, they do not let you to change it to your author domain. So you're stuck with. with something like, I don't know, MailerLite and numbers. Right.
So what you're going to want to do there is you have one of two options. You don't have to use a MailerLite dot whatever landing page. You can get an embedded form at MailerLite, and then you put it on a page on your website. And that's where you send people. And that's my number one recommendation, because it's probably the easiest.
It's the most seamless for the people who are using it. You could also use redirects, though. I have a client right now that I'm going to have to do that with, because she has so many links out there that I'm going to have to.
So that you, it's usually a plug-in, like if you have a WordPress site, it's also possible to do it with HTML code. So somebody goes to yourdomain.com slash book one cookie, reader magnet, whatever, and that, you know, your site sees it and it goes, ooh, we have to send them somewhere else, and it redirects them over to that MailerLite page. So down the road, if you decide I want to move to constant contact, you just go into that plug-in and you tell it when people come here, over here instead.
You just always want a URL that you control or that you know you'll never, ever, ever move. But I will say MailerLite, for example, implemented a new platform, and everyone has to move. So even people who were like, I don't care.
I'll stay with MailerLite till I die. Well, guess what? You've got to make all new forms.
And it's awful. So try to future-proof yourself by making sure it's something you control. OK? If you have any trouble with it, again, hit the Facebook group. Everyone in there is so nice.
No one's going to be like, what kind of dummy are you that you don't know how to do an embed? Like,. never it would never happen so just come on in and ask how do I do this thing and someone will absolutely help you thank you you're welcome I got ten seconds let's do it do you know enough about Klaviyo to compare and contrast it so that was super easy I do not however I know someone who just moved to Klaviyo and he's super smart so of all the people of all the things you could have asked about that's the one come find me I'm gonna leave here in a second and I'll see if I can't get you guys hooked up thank you Thanks everyone.
I'm glad I left so much time. That was a lot of questions. Come around guys. Find me if you need me.
I'm here until Saturday.