Imagine this: you’re an indie author trying to build your audience through your newsletter. But you have 20 subscribers and you personally know 17 of them. So you see a company that helps you build your newsletter subscribers through giveaways you “buy into” geared toward readers in your genre.
You think, that sounds reasonable. The buy-in is $25 (or a little more depending) and all you have to do is share the link for the giveaway in your newsletter and you’ll get 1000-2000 new subscribers? Potential readers that will buy your book and bring in income? And you’ve checked, right? The builder is run by a fellow indie author that boasts “USA Today Bestselling Author” before her name. What could go wrong?
Well, a month later the builder runs. You submit your proof of sharing and wait for the giveaway to end so you can collect your list of new subscribers to import into your email list.
1700 new subscribers! Score! So you send your welcome email (as advised) then 3 successive emails spread over 3 months about your upcoming release. Your campaign stats come in as follows:
- 50-100 unsubscribes per email
- 5+ abuse complaints claiming they never signed up for your newsletter even though when they entered the giveaway they clicked that they understood they were signing up for all the participating authors’ email lists
- And a staggering 400 bounces (undeliverable emails due to there being no such email address)
How can this be, you wonder? The host of the giveaway specifically said she vetted the entries to make sure they weren’t spam or bots and yet you’re looking at 400 fake accounts with strange domain emails like us1-gmail.com, yahoobox.com, autohotmail.com, and mailmie.com to name a few. Just the time alone to archive, delete, and sort through these fake accounts is exhausting.
By the time you’re done you’re down to maybe 1200 real, live subscribers and the unsubscribes keep coming in with each month you send out a newsletter. And of the ones that actually open and read the email 80% are only interested in what they can get for free. They don’t want to buy your book. They want it handed to them free!
So what are you gaining? Nothing. Before you spend part of your small marketing budget on one of these builders weigh the costs and decide if it is really worth it. For me, it definitely wasn’t.
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