BookFunnel Certified Mail allows you to send a private download link to up to 500 members of your review team per month. You compose the outgoing message and BookFunnel will email each reviewer a unique link to download the book.
Certified Mail is available on all Mid-List plans and above. Learn how to send ARCs on the First-Time Author plan.
What is Certified Mail?
A Certified Mail campaign is crafted by you and sent out from help@bookfunnel.com. You write the body of the email and decide how long the book should be available to your reviewers.
You can optionally send a reminder email and an additional follow-up email on the day your book is released.
Customize the download page your reviewers will see and send yourself test emails to see exactly what the campaign, reminder, and follow-up emails will look like. When everything looks good, send the campaign. We’ll take care of the rest!
The email addresses you send Certified Mail campaigns to must be vetted and engaged readers. If they are not, our Certified Mail emails could be marked as spam, which could damage our ability to email everyone. We aren’t a mailing list service, so please don’t use Certified Mail for marketing or to send review copies to strangers on the internet (use this option or this option instead!).
Features of Certified Mail
- Each reviewer gets a unique link that can’t be shared online with others.
- Both the EPUB and MOBI are watermarked with the reviewer’s email address to discourage piracy.
- Customize the book download page with colors that complement your book cover and add headings or additional text to give your review team the information they need.
- Schedule a reminder email so that folks don’t forget to download the book.
- Schedule a follow-up email on release day to everyone that downloaded the book so that they can easily find it on their favorite store and review it.
- Certified Mail comes from our help desk, so reviewers can simply reply to request assistance.
- You receive a summary email after the campaign closes which details which reviewers downloaded the book.
How to Send a Certified Mail Campaign
Click here to learn how to send a campaign.
Reminder Email Text
If you check the box to send a reminder email, the body of the email will say one of two things:
If they HAVE downloaded the book:
“It looks like you downloaded your copy of {{title}}.”
The reminder email also offers help and includes any additional text you provided.
If they HAVE NOT downloaded the book yet:
“It looks like you haven’t downloaded your copy of {{title}}.”
The reminder email then includes the download link again, offers help, and includes any additional text you provided.
Follow-up Email Text
If you check the box to send a follow-up email, it will be sent to the readers that downloaded the book. The follow-up email will say:
“It’s time to review {{title}}! You’re receiving this email because you downloaded {{title}} by {{author}}, and now it’s time to review.”
The email then includes any additional text you provided, including the store link(s) where the reader can post a review.
Certified Mail for One: “Gift a Book”
If you just want one person to get a private link, you can use our Gifting feature.
Book Gifting includes the watermarking of Certified Mail without the hassle of building a campaign and reminder email. Most authors use this when they are awarding a reader a prize (“You won a copy of Book_Title in our raffle! Enjoy!”) or when they want to send the book to a single reviewer.
FAQ
In this knowledge base, ARC refers to Advance Review Copies or Advance Reader Copies.
BookFunnel is not a mailing list provider. We have limits to the number of emails we can send per hour just like you do. If we send 20,000 emails on your behalf (or 5000 for you, and 5000 for another author, etc.), we run the risk of our email provider throttling all of our emails, including emails with book attachments.
Readers get furious if their books don’t arrive within 30 seconds. Throttling can (and has) resulted in delays as long as 6 hours. We don’t want to repeat that experience ever again. 🙂
That depends. The email addresses you send Certified Mail campaigns to must be vetted and engaged readers. You can use it to send non-ARC books, but the readers you are sending to must know the email is coming and have opted-in already.
If Certified Mail is reported as spam by an irritated reader, our ability to email everyone can be jeopardized. We aren’t a mailing list service, so please don’t use Certified Mail for marketing.
We have other options for you that are much more flexible! Consider using a download page that collects email addresses, or even a restricted page.
Once a campaign has been sent out, you can’t add more emails to it. You can easily duplicate the campaign (without email addresses) and send the copy to any stragglers. Learn how to do this here.
You can use an email signup page and send it to new reviewers as you find them. If you have Integration on your account, you can use a restricted page. Compare Certified Mail and Restricted Pages.
If you would prefer to email your readers directly, we have ways to make that happen! You can still track who is downloading your book and trust that the files are watermarked if you use either:
- An email signup page that collects email addresses, or
- A restricted page that checks an email address against your mailing list before a reader can download the book.