Is it worth the time and trouble to use Amazon ads to build a newsletter email list?
I have done the math and I think I know the answer buying your email list.
Where are My Super Fans
Since Mia and I finished co-authoring our book – The Giant Forest – Chapter Book for Parents and Grandparents of Preteens Who Love to Read, I have been furiously gobbling up as much information from online sources as possible about how to get the book into the hands of readers.
The general wisdom is to have a huge list of avid fans to send the book to and watch them buy it. But if you don’t have a list … well, you have to build one. So … how to build that list?
I came across a fascinating blog post from 2017 – Book Marketing: Using Amazon Ads to Grow a Newsletter List. The step-by-step process is articulate. The best part, imho, however is the transparency of the results. Numbers. Real numbers.
“That’s a cost of $1.60 per subscriber, which I’m very happy with.”
Hmmm. Here’s where I know something. For a newsletter email list to work, she’s going to need a 1,000 subscribers. (More actually). But I’ll go with a 1,000.
When she emails those 1,000 people she *might* get 10% to open the email. (Much less unless she has been emailing those folks regularly and giving them information they have been looking forward to reading). But I’ll be generous and give her 20% = 200 people have opened the email. That does NOT mean they read the email.
Next step is that she has to get those people who opened the email to click on the link to buy the book either at her site or at Amazon or …
She *might* get 1-2% (much less actually) of those who actually opened the email to click through but they still have NOT bought the book yet.
Lets be very generous and say 10% went to take a look and *maybe* buy the book. That’s 20 people went to think about buying the book.
Being quite generous again (I am in a good mood) perhaps 10% of those will actually buy the book = 2 people.
She paid $1600 and countless hours – ad creation, maintenance, email creation, maintenance, and so on to sell 2 books.
Is it worth using Amazon Ads to build a list for your newsletter?
What do you think?
To sell 20 books she’d have to spend $16,000! And she’d have to pay a Constant Contact or Sendgrid or Mailchimp to manage that email list.
Yah … there’s got to be a better way than spending to get people on your list. As Yoda would say, “There is another.”
Let me ask you first – “What do you think is the best way to get people to become your fans?”
