When exploring PenguinRandomHouse.com, you might have spotted a few places where we request email addresses from readers, to send them book recommendations, alerts, and promos, and wondered how those programs work. PRH’s Email Marketing and Operations teams spearhead these newsletters, putting your books in front of readers who will love them!
Our experts:
Lynn Rickert is the Manager of Email Marketing Operations for Consumer Insights at Penguin Random House. Her team works with the technical aspects of marketing newsletters.
Emma Shafer is the Associate Director of Email Product Strategy for Consumer Insights. Her team focuses on marketing strategy for PRH’s newsletters.
What are the different types of email lists you manage (e.g., big brand newsletters, genre-specific lists, others), and what is the main goal of each?
Lynn: Our team mainly manages the Penguin Random House and Read Brightly newsletter programs, though we also assist divisional marketers with their newsletters. For our curated emails, we have a few regular newsletters we send to all subscribers we consider new or active, and we also use additional data points to find subscribers interested in a specific genre.
Emma: Our main focus is on direct sales to consumers and the goal of our email program is meeting our readers wherever they are in their purchase journey, using book discovery, brand affinity, data collection, and advertising to better connect with readers across channels. The more we know about our readers, the better we can reach each of them individually with the right book in the right place at the right time.
Can you go into detail about PRH’s automated programs, such as Recommended Reads, Author Alerts, and others? How do these programs reach readers and increase sales?
Lynn: Our automated campaigns use machine learning to connect the right book with the right reader at scale. These include campaigns initiated by a subscriber’s website behavior (for example, if you read an excerpt from a book but don’t make a purchase, you get an email the next day), mailings that use machine learning to select an audience and suggest titles to them (for example, our Recommended Reads email of personalized book recommendations is sent every Friday to an audience determined by our data science team’s model), and Author Alerts.
Author Alerts are sent at specific times to subscribers who sign up for an author’s list: eight weeks in advance of a title’s pub date, upon publication of a new title, and on the date of a paperback release. Our pub date email also has a Spanish language version, sent to subscribers to an author’s list who have engaged with Spanish language content on the site in the past. We also recently launched an invite email: subscribers who engage with an author’s titles on our website at least 5 times in a 120-day span will receive an invite to join that author’s alert list.
You see the data every day—what results in an effective email marketing campaign, and what actually makes a reader click the “buy” button? Are there any learnings that authors can use in their own newsletters?
Emma: Everybody hates hearing this because we are—above all else—writers, but if the main goal of a campaign is purchase, the more succinct the better! The best way to drive buy-button clicks is to know your audience and to put the click opportunity “above the fold” in the mobile version of the email. Generally, the more the user has to scroll, the more drop-off we see. That doesn’t mean there isn’t value in longer newsletters, but that approach works better for relationship building than for driving transactions.
What is the biggest misconception authors tend to have about how publisher email marketing works, and what’s the reality?
Emma: A common misconception I see is that people buy books from the publishers directly. They mostly click through from our site to retailers like Amazon and B&N. This means my team tends to have less robust revenue data than we’d like.
Lynn: We also often hear the misconception that only the biggest books get promoted. In fact, through our automated campaigns, most new books and many backlist titles are featured in our emails.
Looking ahead, what is an emerging trend or new technology in email marketing (like AI personalization or interactivity) that you’re excited about and that authors should be aware of?
Lynn: Email code is strictly ’90s style HTML and CSS, with limited possibilities for interactivity. While some cool effects can be seen on iPhones and Outlook for Mac, most email clients don’t let us do fun stuff. We’re proud of being featured on Really Good Emails for our creative use of hide/show and z-index scrolling, but the level of effort to send a cool campaign doesn’t quite measure up to the revenue results.
To be honest, many emerging trends in the world of email have been helpful to consumers but a bit of a headache on our end. In the past few years, Apple began preopening all emails (which means we can’t tell who actually opens our emails, although it is great that consumers have more privacy); Gmail added a one-click unsubscribe button (making it easier for consumers to achieve inbox zero but potentially affecting list sizes—although we haven’t seen a big drop, thankfully); Yahoo and Gmail got more serious about spam (making us more cautious about sending to less engaged subscribers, but keeping consumers’ inboxes cleaner); and Apple and Yahoo introduced AI summaries (which may save consumers time in their inbox, but can be frustrating to marketers who spend time on copy only to have it rewritten by a bot).
One trend we’ve noticed for authors (which many of you are probably already aware of!) is the rise of platforms like Substack, which have revolutionized the email newsletter and the blog into one social-friendly hybrid. While that’s not something we work with, we suspect that it may impact the style of marketing emails as consumers grow more accustomed to plain text emails with a few scattered images, versus the highly stylized approach of most marketing emails.