Author Marketing Funnel

Author Marketing Funnel [What It Is And How to Build a Great One]

Want to increase online sales for your books? A digital marketing funnel can do that. In this article, I show you what a marketing funnel for authors is, and provide steps on how to build a great one. Once you do, you'll be bringing in a lot of relevant readers, and your sales should start rising.

What is an author digital marketing funnel?

An author digital marketing funnel is a sequence of marketing tactics that introduces a reader to what an author writes, gets the reader interested in the author's books, then encourages the reader to purchase books and tell other people about what the author writes. 

What are the stages of an author digital marketing funnel?

​The four major stages of the digital marketing funnel are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty 

What is an example of an author digital marketing funnel?

• A person clicks a Facebook ad an author is running to promote a free book, known as a reader magnet (Awareness)

 

• The person arrives at the author's landing page, where the free book can be downloaded in exchange for an email address (Awareness)

 

• After the person submits an email address, a download link to the free book is sent and the email address is added to the author's email list (Awareness)

 

• The reader receives a series of emails from the author, building excitement around one of the author's paid books (Consideration)

 

• The author soon sends an email announcing a limited-time discount on this paid book, encouraging the reader to purchase it that day (Conversion)

   

• Over time, the author tells the reader about other books, and the reader not only buys them, but tells other people about them (Loyalty)​

How do you create an author digital marketing funnel?

​Follow these 7 steps:

1.) Create a reader magnet

A reader magnet is a free digital item an author gives out in exchange for an email address. Often, these are books. They can also be short stories, or anything else that readers of the author's genre may have interest in.

2.) Build a landing page for your reader magnet

A reader-magnet landing page is a web page that showcases your reader magnet, urging people to submit their email address to get it.

The tool you use to build your author website may have the capability to add landing pages. If not, you can use another service to build this page.   

3.) Automatically deliver your reader magnet

You don't want to manually send your reader magnet to everyone who claims your offer. Instead, you want to set up an a​utomated system that'll deliver it for you.

An email-marketing platform can automatically send pre-written emails to new subscribers (known as "welcome messages"). In them, you can include a download link for your reader magnet. You can simply add a link to the file on Google Drive, which is free.

An email-marketing software I recommend is MailerLite.

4.) Send traffic to your reader-magnet landing page

Once you have a reader magnet, an email-delivery system, and a landing page, your next step is sending traffic to the landing page so readers can find out about your offer and claim it.

A free way to drive traffic to this page is with your author social-media profiles.

However, to drive even more traffic, you may want to consider online ads. Though these come with a cost, they can be very effective.

5.) Set up an onboarding email sequence for readers

Once you deliver your reader magnet, you want to move from the first stage of the funnel, awareness, to the second, consideration. An onboarding email sequence is a facilitator of consideration. Here's how to set one up:

• In your email-marketing system, create an automation for all new subscribers to begin X days after they join your email list. The value of X is up to you, however, I suggest it should be 1-5 days.

 

• Create a series of emails, each to go out X days apart. I recommend this series have a total of 3-5 emails.

 

• Don't directly try to sell your paid books in these emails. Try to give readers some background on yourself. Ideally, you can offer them more for free. Even just links to website pages, which can be accessed at no cost, would be good.  

6.) Promote your paid books

After your onboarding sequence, you can move into the conversion stage of your funnel. By now, your email subscribers should already know quite a bit about what you write. If they've read and enjoyed your reader magnet, they should be ready to read more by you.

Try to get readers excited about your books. For example, email them a link to a page on your author website with a book trailer.

To encourage purchases the day these emails are sent, limited-time deals work well. For instance, the promoted book can be discounted, but only for a bit longer. Or, the promoted book can be part of a 2-for-1 deal that ends soon.

7.) Have readers follow you on social media

Once a reader purchases a book from you, the person buying more books and telling others about what you write, would be great.

Social media is an excellent way to connect with readers. Once people are on your email list, send them a message with links to follow you on social networks.  

Seeing social-media posts about your books can encourage readers to make additional purchases, plus share the posts, which can get your books in front of a lot more people.  

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Want help with your marketing funnel?

My author-promotion company Galdi Media can help you with various stages of your marketing funnel

Learn More

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