At the beginning of 2015 my wife’s email list was at 20 people. She wasn’t getting much exposure and no one really knew who she was or that she even wrote novels. At this point she had released two novels with her third due out in March. It was clear by the end of March that we needed a better marketing plan for her novels. Sales were flat and email sign-up were non-existent. Again at this point she only had 37 people on her list (it only grew by 17 people with her new release and several of those were friends and family, ugh). In April of 2015 we started marketing with Facebook ads. In one month her list grew from 37 people to 350, wow! We ran the ads for a week in May and pushed her list up to 460 people. Now we’re feeling pretty good about her list and our marketing efforts, so we stopped running ads for a couple of months and the sign-ups slowed considerably. In September we decided to fire up the ads again because in two in half months prior she had only increased her list by 24 people. By the end of October her list had grown to 1,130 people! She released her fourth novel on November 12, 2015 and she has seen a dramatic increase in engagement from her readers and a nice boost in sales.
With Facebook ads we were able to target her ideal audience and get people on her list that were excited to hear about what she was writing. The list we have cultivated is full of people who want to read her type of romance writing, sweet, clean romance. We could have almost certainly never connected with these people without the use of Facebook ads. It doesn’t end there though, we are about to fire up another go around of ads and see if we can get her list to over 1,500 by the end of the year.
Facebook ads work, there is no doubt about that!