I’ve been creating some new automated sequences in my mailing list.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means. Two months ago, I didn’t know either. This is a pretty cool thing. An automated sequence is a series of emails that are set up to be delivered in order, and are triggered by some action. My first automations were added in November and are “onboarding” sequences. These two automations welcome new subscribers to my newsletter with a series of four emails. The emails talk about my books and series, tell where to find me on social media, etc. An onboarding sequence familiarizes new subscribers to bring them onboard. It’s an “automation” because once it’s set up, it just rolls. It doesn’t matter when someone subscribes to the list, their email is added to the onboarding sequence whenever they do subscribe. Twenty-four hours later, they’ll get the first email. The second, third and fourth are delivered at seven day intervals, then those new subscribers are added to my main newsletter list. There are two different sequences which are slightly different based upon what link the new subscriber uses to sign up for the list.

How cool is that?

Well, it gets even better. Once I had my feet wet, so to speak, I decided to add some sequences for people who shop in my online store, to follow up on their purchases. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this work for a while – the store has the ability to follow up, but allows a single follow-up for all purchases and products. I wanted the follow-up to be specific to whatever the customer downloaded. If, for example, you download the sample of Wyvern’s Warrior, it makes sense that you’ll be most interested in the full book of Wyvern’s Warrior. The Selz people helped me to figure out a way to do that, by using a new integration with a service called Zapier.

Now, I can set a specific sequence to trigger on any product. Ha! I’ve grouped the products into series and created new mailing lists for each series of books. The idea here is that you might not want to read all my news every month to learn what you want to know. You might not even want to read all my paranormal romance news. You might just want to know when the next Dragons of Incendium story is available—either for you to download a sample or for you to buy.

And here’s the super-cool bit—you might even be interested in getting it on sale. One of the wonderful things I can do in my online store is create a discount and offer it to specific people. The discount is targeted, rather than being available to everyone who shops at Amazon, for example. On these series lists, subscribers are being offered discounts on the books in the series, either in digital or in print editions. It stands to reason that the subscribers on the list might be interested, since the only way to get on one of the lists is to download a sample from that series or buy one of the books in my online store.

If you’ve downloaded samples for Flatiron Five or the Dragons of Incendium series, you’ve probably received at least the beginning of one of these automated sequences already. I’ll be adding more series lists in the new year – next will be the Champions of St. Euphemia.

If you want to be added to the series newsletter lists, all you need to do is download a free sample of one of the included books. You can find all the book samples in my online store right here.

If you have any troubles with the sequence, suggestions for improvement or comments about it, please let me know!