How Our First Ebook Launch Landed Us 746 Subscribers in 1 Day [+ Free 14-Step Checklist Guide]

An ebook launch is a coordinated campaign that turns a finished book into subscribers, downloads, and shares. Our first ebook launch landed us 746 subscribers in one day by combining pre-launch feedback, segmented outreach, email, Product Hunt, and Reddit. It also produced a free step-by-step checklist for recreating the sequence.

Published in July 2016, this case study explains the ebook launch strategy the Process Street team used for The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation with Zapier. The book showed readers the business process automation benefits they could unlock, and the campaign below records the exact preparation, templates, channels, and results from that launch.

80% of the work is your pre-launch strategy

Before the ebook had even seen the light of day, we gathered a list of contacts and sent them a variation of an email template which essentially asked for feedback and sent them a .pdf file of the final draft. Here’s a quick look at that email, but I’ll show you all the templates later:

Anyone who offered feedback would see their update added, which gives them more of a connection to the book, and it gave me valuable insight into how to edit the product so it’s more appealing. Read on for the exact templates I used.

Build a list of everyone you mentioned in your ebook

The companies and individuals you’ve mentioned in your book are going to be your best shot for promotion. They have a vested interest in it, after all. They’re flattered, and could get something out of promoting material that shows them in a good light. For this launch, we created the list and maintained our contact database in Airtable. To get a list of everyone mentioned, there are a few options. A) If, like us, your ebook is collated from a number of blog posts, use the Chrome extension Link Klipper to save all URLs of each post to a .csv file. B) If you’ve written it straight to PDF, it will have to be a bit more manual. That shouldn’t be a problem if your ebook isn’t very long and isn’t saturated with links, but if it is you could consider hiring a VA for the project. Using Airtable, give the contacts you have mentioned a unique tag so you can differentiate your email templates later. I used ‘zapier ebook launch’ for the mentioned contacts, then formatted them into their respective groups (by relationship level) later.

Create the columns:

• Company name
• Contact name
• Contact email
• Tag

For mentioned contacts you already have a good relationship with, you probably don’t want to blast out your usual automated spiel. I tagged these with ‘Zapier-friendly-outreach’. And, if you’re some sort of machine, find all the emails yourself. If you’re not, again, time to outsource this part.

Find relevant influencers with BuzzSumo

In 2016, BuzzSumo let us build a list of relevant influencers for outreach. For our business process automation ebook, I used it to find more than 100 influencers in these niches:

• Productivity
• Time/task management
• SaaS
• Business processes
• Process management

Our workflow was to search, save the relevant profiles to a list, and export the results.

Once you’ve exported as a .csv, tidy up the contacts and format them into the columns in Airtable. Assign a VA to find the company/contact names and emails (seriously). Give all of these a unique tag so you can send them a different email template. I used ‘Zapier-cold-outreach’. NOTE: Since this ebook was primarily about Zapier, I also contacted apps that integrate with Zapier, giving me a list of over 600 companies to contact. I used a different tag and template for this super-cold outreach, and suggested that they could use the ebook as a way to teach their customers about Zapier. Think about whether you have any obvious choices like that for your launch.

Armed with your list of contacts, it’s time to start emailing

Now you’ve got your structured database (saved in Airtable so it’s easily cross-referenced in the future with other launches/contacts), it’s time to load these leads into a CRM. For this launch, we loaded the leads into Close, which was then called Close.io. We used Bulk Import, mapped each column to the matching field, and mapped the ‘tag’ column to the Close.io field ‘Note’. After importing the leads, we filtered them by note and sent a different template to each segment. The idea behind emailing contacts a draft PDF before the launch has happened is so you can make them aware of the ebook and get a few exchanges under your belt before asking them to do something So, with that in mind, your first emails will look something like these lot:

Email the contacts mentioned in the ebook

Hey [Name], Benjamin again from the Process Street blog. I’m getting in touch to let you know [Company] is mentioned in our new ebook about business process automation. It’s not strictly out yet, there’s nowhere you can get it on the internet, but I thought you’d get a lot out of it so I’m giving you a private link and hoping you’ll offer your feedback. 🙂 [link to your PDF] If you like it, do you mind if I send you the official page when it’s out next week? Cheers!  

Email influencers who were not mentioned

Hey [name], I’m Benjamin from the Process Street blog. I’m getting in touch to get feedback from you an ebook about business process automation we’ve been working hard on. It’s not strictly out yet, there’s nowhere you can get it on the internet, but I thought you’d get a lot out of it so I’m giving you a private link and hoping you’ll offer your feedback. 🙂 [link to your PDF] If you like it, do you mind if I send you the official page when it’s out next week? Cheers!

Email relevant companies that were not mentioned

Hey [name], Since [your company] is integrated with Zapier, I thought you’d get something out of this ebook we’ve just written. It’s a complete guide to using Zapier, and could even be helpful for your customers to show them what they can do with Zapier (we’re using it as support documentation, too) It’s not officially launched at the moment, but I thought you’d like to see it before launch so you can maybe offer feedback before it goes live. Here you go: [link to your PDF] Let me know what you think! Do you want me to send you the final page when it’s launched?  

Right, now bulk email that stuff out depending on your tags. 🙂 For the friendly-outreach tags, you’ll want to write custom emails.

Keep track of all contacts who reply saying they would like to be sent the final copy

For this launch, I tagged every contact who agreed with a Close.io note that said #sendzapierebook. That made it possible to search the tag, bring up the matching leads, and bulk email the link.

Use a ‘Click to Tweet’ in your launch email

There’s nothing like reducing friction to boost conversions. Since your contacts have already read the ebook, it’s reasonable to think that they’d be up for tweeting it right off the bat as soon as the official landing page is live. Click to Tweet is a free tool which generates pre-made tweets, accessible with custom links.

Launch day: Time for the big ask

On launch day, searching the tag in Close.io pulled up everyone who wanted the final link so I could email them together. Here’s the template I used:

Hey [first name], Thanks so much for the interest in our ebook, The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation with Zapier. Here’s a link to the landing page for the final copy, where you can direct people to get the PDF, ePub, or a .zip of both files: https://www.process.st/business-process-automation-guide/ And click here for a quick ‘click to tweet’ link if you fancy sharing it. 🙂 Have a fantastic day!

Email your existing email subscribers the direct download link

There’s no point in pushing your existing subscribers through an email wall, so it’s best to send them the raw download link (along with ‘click to tweet’ link, of course). The contents of this email can draw on segments of your landing page copy, making it a quick and easy job. (I’ll tell you about the results of the launch strategy a little further down the page)

Segment the contacts that didn’t ask for the ebook into two parts

Once you’ve sent out your email to your warm outreach contacts, you’ll be left with a sizeable chunk that didn’t reply, replied and didn’t ask for it, or didn’t open it. Since these could be people that are too busy to reply, or missed the email in their overflowing inboxes, it’s worth sending a follow-up email on launch day. I segmented the contacts into two groups:

• Didn’t open
• Opened, didn’t ask

To find these segments, again, I used the power of Close.io’s search. The queries were like this: Didn’t open: (email_template:[cold-email-template] OR email_template:[influencer-email-template] OR email_template:[mentioned-email-template]) (last_email_opened:no) (NOT note:#sendzapierebook) (NOT emailed:today) Opened, didn’t ask: (email_template:[cold-email-template] OR email_template:[influencer-email-template] OR email_template:[mentioned-email-template]) (last_email_opened:yes) (NOT note:#sendzapierebook) (NOT emailed:today) And here were the respective templates used, with their differences in italics. Didn’t open:

Hey [first name], You might have missed this, but I feel like it’d be interesting for you so I thought I’d send you the official announcement. 🙂 A few hours ago we launched our first ebook, “The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation with Zapier”. You can check out the book here. I feel like it’d be useful for you for a couple of reasons. 1. It’s always good to educate your audience about Zapier, since it’s such an amazing productivity tool. 2. If you or your audience aren’t optimizing for business process automation yet, this will be really useful. We’d love it if you could share it. (Here’s a link to tweet if you want to save some time). Cheers!

Opened, didn’t ask:

Hey [first name], I didn’t hear back from you earlier this week, but thought I’d send you the official announcement. 🙂 A few hours ago we launched our first ebook, “The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation with Zapier”. You can check out the book here. I feel like it’d be useful for you for a couple of reasons. 1. It’s always good to educate your audience about Zapier, since it’s such an amazing productivity tool. 2. If you or your audience aren’t optimizing for business process automation yet, this will be really useful. We’d love it if you could share it. (Here’s a link to tweet if you want to save some time). Cheers!

Submit your ebook to Product Hunt

Product Hunt has a ‘books’ section. On launch day, we sat at the top of that category with 160 upvotes, and floated around the top 5 area on the front page of the site.

At the time, Product Hunt submissions depended heavily on who submitted the product and the audience they had built. Jack Smith was kind enough to submit our book, which gave it a strong initial boost. Product Hunt’s submission and notification mechanics have changed since this 2016 launch. Product Hunt alone brought in over 400 downloads on launch day.

Submit your ebook to reddit

Because we had already seen traffic from Reddit’s startups community, I wrote a short description of the book and posted the link there. I did not expect it to be so well received. Anyone using this channel today should check the community’s current rules before posting:

3 days later, that post is still on the first page of /r/startups, and all throughout launch day it held the top spots.

So, how did the launch go? Here are the results

As I said, we got 746 subscribers from launch day. Where did the majority of the traffic come from? The graph answers that question: The short answer: Product Hunt. Product Hunt brought 928 visitors to the landing page on launch day, making it the largest source of referral traffic by far. Emails directed 443 visitors to our landing page, including existing subscribers and cold/warm outreach. Reddit brought us 158 visits, and Inbound.org, a marketing community that has since closed, brought in 72. The other sources were too small to be meaningful here. In total, the CTA generated 567 popup views and 385 subscribers at a 69% conversion rate. Outreach emails added another 361 subscribers. Including the users we sent the direct download link to, it works out as a running total of 1,281 downloads at the time of writing.

And as for the Click to Tweet campaign, that’s an extra 134 tweets we’d otherwise not have gotten.