May 2021 More on Lists and Social Media

Hello authors…. It’s a good idea to create a list of people you meet, to help them connect with you and ultimately buy your books, or learn about your cause. Here are a few more thoughts about gathering contact info for those precious people you call your readers.

And a bit more about the value of having full contact info, not only social media connections, which are also important.

Here are a couple of reasons I’ve learned from others far more expert than me.

First of all, if your connections, your list, all your fans, are only connected to you through social media, you don’t really have that contact info. All that data for connecting resides on a site you don’t own or control, and it’s not impossible that you could lose it someday. By all means use social media to connect with people, but as soon as you can, also get a phone number, email address, maybe even USPS mailing address.

It’s obvious when you see it, but a distinction easily missed. I learned it listening to training I received, much of it from the eWomen Network group to which I belong.

And then just this week, ironically, I am proving my own point. Old friends from out of state are coming into the town where we all used to live and trying to get a group together for an informal reunion. It’s been so long that the visiting friends didn’t have current contact info for the mutual friends. So it was great to have Facebook messenger to write them.

Only, they didn’t get a response. After trying to decide whether to just forget it, I dug around and found a phone number for one and an email address for the other…social media alone wasn’t enough.

And the second reason for capturing contact info, especially with regard to email addresses and sending email–is that it works.  

This I’ve learned from digital marketing experts. Digital marketing experts are the people that figure out the best ways to share marketing information online, ranging from websites to social media to email. They move fast, as befits those pursuing a moving target, and try new things and gather a lot of data about what works.

And what still works….is email.

One of the giants of the digital marketing world, HubSpot, gathers statistics and here are a couple they put out in 2020* about email and sales results:

• 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions
• marketers who use segmented campaigns, making them highly targeted, note as much as a 760% increase in revenue
• and, because it is so inexpensive to execute, email generates $38 for every $1 dollar spent

So the next time you are using a clipboard with a simple fill in sign in sheet attached to add people to your list, realize just how powerful that data could be in your author journey.