Last year, I hit a major benchmark — surpassing 500 newsletter subscribers!!
A regular newsletter is one of the most basic (and potentially impactful) marketing tools an entrepreneur has in their arsenal. It’s also an underestimated, underutilized asset for creative solopreneurs.
When I published my first novel back in 2018 and started doing book signing events, I hadn’t considered the importance of a newsletter. I had a blog and social media pages, but I was still figuring out the best ways to communicate with my early audience.
I made a habit of talking to other authors at events and paying attention to the creative ways they displayed their books, merchandise, and promotional materials. Having a newsletter sign-up sheet at events was one of the first lessons I picked up.
However, even after starting my newsletter, it took me a while to start understanding the true value and opportunities… and even longer to realize how to set reasonable goals for my newsletter. In this article, I’ll discuss some ways your newsletter can benefit your business beyond simply trying to sell products to customers.
**If you like the “Books are Magic Portals” button in the featured image, that’s one of my graphic designs! The buttons are available for purchase on my website.
Related post: read why I switched from MailChimp to Substack for my monthly newsletter.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Measure Your Newsletter’s Impact
One of my recent blog posts discussed the importance of prioritizing quality over quantity when it comes to blogging.
Writing meaningful content targeting a specific audience pays off. Don’t just take my word for it; look at the change in traffic from the first four years of my blog serving as more of a personal portfolio vs. the next four years when I became much more strategic with my posts.
It took me a few years to realize that this strategy applies to newsletter marketing, too. For a long time, I was focused on the wrong key performance indicator (KPI). I was preoccupied with trying to get as many signups as I could… without paying attention to whether the people signing up were genuinely interested in the content I was producing.
I knew other authors had thousands of newsletter subscribers. My numbers were pathetically small in comparison.
So, I tried to entice new subscribers by promoting that each new email signup would be entered into a prize drawing. It did seem to work, and I was pleased by that success at first… until I started to become frustrated with other performance metrics. Primarily, the unsubscribes and low open rates.
Naturally, I assumed that something must be wrong with the content. Was I emailing too frequently (even though it was only once a month)? Did people not enjoy my newsletter? Did they think it was spam? Were my headings weak and uninteresting?
I finally realized that my performance metrics were at odds, and I couldn’t have it both ways. Did I care more about how many subscribers I had, or the percentage of those subscribers who were genuinely interested in reading my newsletters? If people were signing up JUST for the chance of winning prize and then unsubscribing right away because they didn’t actually care about my content, that was negatively impacting my other KPIs.
I decided to eliminate the prize enticement. Then, if people signed up for my newsletter, it was because they wanted to be on my mailing list.
This move allowed me to stop focusing so much on the number of my subscribers and pay more attention to the quality of my audience. That meant I had subscribers who were much more likely to:
- Take advantage of sales and promotions
- Make a small donation by buying me a drink
In all honesty, I went for quite a while without really seeing many benefits of having a newsletter other than sharing periodic updates with my audience outside of social media. And that, of course, can make you start to doubt yourself and wonder if you’re wasting your time.
But lately, after faithfully publishing my newsletter every single month since June of 2018, the benefits have become apparent.
6 Ways I Leverage My Monthly Newsletter
You can see the clipboard for newsletter signups in the middle of my display (I covered the email addresses with a postcard to protect personal information).
1. Sales
Of course, the first benefit of a newsletter most people think of is the opportunity to sell products to customers. This is why businesses pour a lot of money into their email marketing campaigns. While this definitely isn’t the primary focus of my newsletter, it’s worth putting at the top of the list since many entrepreneurs DO use their newsletter for this purpose.
A year ago, I finally got my ecommerce website up and running, which meant I could sell a lot of my art products that had previously been event-exclusive. I could also sell autographed copies of my books instead of having to redirect people to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. (which meant I lost a good chunk of revenue from those third-party retailers). Prioritizing direct sales was a major step forward in generating revenue that I could then reinvest in my business.
I had a slow rollout, adding a few products here and there to slowly build up the website over time, and I made sure to feature the new additions in each newsletter. That did result in some sales that came through just hours after the newsletter was published each month. I wasn’t getting flooded with orders, but there was definitely a correlation between the newsletter feature and the online sales.
With a list of email subscribers, you also have an online audience open to sales, exclusive online deals, and other promotional opportunities… although you’ll want to be careful not to spam them! Make the expectations clear when people sign up. If they’re expecting your emails to be primarily informative, then you’ll risk losing subscribers if they feel you’re taking advantage and bombarding them with marketing emails instead.
2. Information & Upcoming Events
In my case (and for many other authors as well), my newsletter is the best place to keep my audience informed about works in progress, recent accomplishments, upcoming events, and more. This is the primary reason people subscribe to my newsletter — they want to be kept in the loop so they know what I’m currently working on and where/when they can find me at a local event in their area.
My event schedule is listed on the homepage of my main website, and I make sure to post reminders about the next event(s) on Facebook and Patreon, but not all of my fans are on social media. The newsletter is a good way to actively send my schedule out to my followers rather than rely on them to seek out the information on their own or hope that the social media algorithms are putting my posts in their feed.
3. Subscriptions & Donations
The newsletter is an opportunity to let people know what kind of premium content they’re missing on other platforms. It’s one thing to say, “Please subscribe! You’ll get all these perks!” But it’s another to share a list of your recent posts so potential subscribers can see firsthand exactly what kind of content you’ve been publishing. It also offers proof that you are posting consistently.
My newsletter provides a way to introduce new fans to my Patreon community and show sneak peeks at the exclusive content I share there, including timelapse videos of my art, Q&As with fans, early book cover reveals, behind-the-scenes posts, and more. The newsletter can be a way to easily share samples and teasers without feeling spammy. For example, my newsletter subscribers can see the latest monthly artwork I drew, but my Patreon subscribers get to actually watch me draw it in a timelapse video that I link in the newsletter. The finished art is still a valuable part of the free newsletter, of course, but fans can go even deeper if they want to invest in Patreon and get a sort of backstage pass behind the process.
In addition to subscriptions, there are also opportunities to collect donations as well. I don’t often get many donations on Buy Me a Coffee, but I do include a simple callout at the bottom of each newsletter (and a variation of this graphic at the end of each blog post as well):
Asking people for money/donations isn’t something I’m very comfortable doing, so this is a passive way for me to make the option available without being obnoxious about it. And this invitation does bring in occasional donations from people who read my content and appreciate the hard work that goes into everything.
(Are you thinking about using Buy Me a Coffee for donations for your own business? Use my referral code to sign up!)
4. Website Traffic
Any reputable platform for your newsletter should let you see a record of outbound clicks, even if you’re using a free service. My newsletter always includes several links to my website, including my recent blog posts, the landing page for my book series, and any other relevant links. It might be a small blip, but it’s still extra traffic back to your site, and you can track this data to see which links are being clicked.
This interconnectivity is great for search engine optimization (SEO). My websites “talk” to each other quite a bit by cross-linking. Visitors on my regular website can easily navigate to Substack to subscribe to my newsletter and read past issues, while my emails are full of links that circle back to both my primary website, ecommerce shop, Patreon, etc.
5. Project Updates & Preorders
Not all of my followers are on social media. And I’m seeing more and more people drastically scaling back their social media time, which means I can’t expect them to be getting all of the updates when I post announcements there.
Hence, the importance of the newsletter, which has also proven to be a good way to encourage preorders for books before they’re released. If the majority of your audience has subscribed because they care about what you’re doing and want to be at the forefront of your next project, then you can take advantage of that engagement by sending updates straight to their inbox.
(By the way, did you know that you can preorder my fourth book?)
6. Goal Accountability
Perhaps one of the best advantages of publishing my newsletter on a regular schedule is the accountability it forces on me.
I am a notorious procrastinator, which means it would be VERY easy for my projects to fall by the wayside. The newsletter creates a self-imposed series of deadlines for me. It goes out on the first Monday of each month (unless there’s a holiday, in which case it’s delayed by a week).
For each newsletter, I make sure to have at least two blog posts published and a new featured art piece for the month. That often means I’m very busy during the last week of the month trying to make sure I have all of that done in time for the newsletter. Without that deadline, my blog would likely have long stretches of inactivity.
The artwork is also important because watching timelapse videos of me drawing new art is a Patreon perk for my Level 2 and 3 subscribers. Between the newsletter and Patreon, I have deadlines and incentives to make a new art piece every month, which has also helped instill a sense of accountability.
(The biggest challenge for me is actively setting aside time to draw… and it’s so easy to keep putting that off! My art is a secondary branch of my business after the books, but doing a new drawing every month keeps me practicing to improve my skills, generates new art that I can incorporate into my inventory and my upcoming art/photography/poetry book that’s in progress, and provides content for both Patreon and my newsletter.)
There are a lot of benefits to having a monthly newsletter beyond simply trying to get more sales. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a race. It might take a while to start noticing some of these benefits.
It’s okay if building your audience ends up being a slow process. Trust me — it’s better to have a small, highly engaged audience than a big group that can’t be bothered to open your emails. If you’re going to measure KPIs, I recommend focusing on the quality of your content rather than the number of subscribers or frequency of your emails.
I'm an award-winning fantasy author, artist, and photographer from La Porte, Indiana. My poetry, short fiction, and memoir works have been featured in various anthologies and journals since 2005, and several of my poems are available in the Indiana Poetry Archives. The first three novels in my Chronicles of Avilésor: War of the Realms series have received awards from Literary Titan.
After some time working as a freelance writer, I was shocked by how many website articles are actually written by paid "ghost writers" but published under the byline of a different author. It was a jolt seeing my articles presented as if they were written by a high-profile CEO or an industry expert with decades of experience. I'll be honest; it felt slimy and dishonest. I had none of the credentials readers assumed the author of the article actually had. Ghost writing is a perfectly legal, astonishingly common practice, and now, AI has entered the playing field to further muddy the waters. It's hard to trust who (or what) actually wrote the content you'll read online these days.
That's not the case here at On The Cobblestone Road. I do not and never will pay a ghost writer, then slap my name on their work as if I'd written it. This website is 100% authentic. No outsourcing. No ghost writing. No AI-generated content. It's just me... as it should be.
If you would like to support my work, check out the Support The Creator page for more information. Thank you for finding my website! 🖤