How much money do you think can be made sending a single email?
The answer of course depends upon who you are sending to, what the email is about and how well received the email is. Successful email marketers who’ve built up lists can easily make thousands (And more) from a single email marketing campaign. But how do they get into this position? How can you build your own list and become a successful email marketer?
Email marketing is surprisingly easy for the average person to do. It’s something that can take a while to build up to start to make big money from but it’s something that you can get started doing with only five main parts to be set up and/or maintained. Here are the five steps;
Get an autoresponder.
Create/find free offer.
Design your landing page.
Write follow up emails / build trust.
Send out recommendations for quality products.
There are different nuances that need to be tackled (And will be discussed later) in stages of this, but this is the template for establishing an email marketing income.
How Does an Email List Benefit You?
First let’s explore the benefits of a list so you can understand why it’s worth investing the effort into to get it going.
Email marketing has been around since the start of the internet and even through all the innovation and “ad blindness” email marketing has remained an effective method of online selling. It’s something that if you do it well it becomes more and more effective over time. The more time people are on your list the more likely they are to buy things. If you only ever promote quality things they’ll have good experiences and be more likely to buy from you in the future. If people sincerely enjoy the emails you’re sending them they’ll give you one of their “Good email“ addresses, and people keep these email addresses for decades. It’s a long serving tool that gets better as you go on and something once people begin to do they wish they’d started sooner..
Getting Started.
The first thing any email marketer needs is an autoresponder. This is an email tool that will help you to collect subscribers and automatically add them to an email list (Or choice of different email lists) and automatically send them emails (Or manually send emails to a list when you want to). Email marketing can not be done without an autoresponder, so that’s step one.
I use Get Response and think it is great value. It includes a lot of ready made templates and many advanced features. You can get a free 30 trial (Without needing a credit card) here.
Why You Need a Free Product.
For your email marketing campaign to be successful you really need some to entice people to join your email list in the first place. You have to be able to give them something they want in return for their email address and the best thing for this is some sort of free product you offer to give them in exchange for their email address.
You’re going to be giving out a lot of whatever the free product is and therefore it needs to be free for you also and something you can deliver at scale in a timely manner. Realistically this means we’re typically looking at digital products. Things we can create or buy once and then give away 1,000s of times to people joining our list.
The free product that you give away is going to be an important factor in driving the growth of your email list. If you’re able to give people something that helps them free up-front, they are going to be keen readers of your follow up content and much more likely to be buyers when you send out promotional content.
It is worth investing some time and effort into creating your free product and for a lot of people getting a free product is going to have to mean creating one for themselves. If you’ve never done this before the idea of creating a product may seem daunting, but it’s a manageable thing to do, you only have to do it once to use it for years and does not have to be as complicated as you may think.
Making Your Own Products.
The first step to product creation is research. You have to learn everything you can about the wants and needs of your target market. Understand problems they face and questions they have and then identify where you can solve their problems. Find out what the most common questions/problems are, this is what you want to find solutions for.
If you’re not already extremely knowledgeable in the niche you’re working, you’re going to have to do research on that. You might not know how to answer all the questions now, but if you read three to five good books, you’ll probably know a lot more than the average person. Then collect together the most important parts into an easily digestible digital product.
You have three mediums in which you can present your free product. You can do it in written form, you can do it in video form or you can do it in audio form. Some may be better than others for certain niches but as a general rule, just go with whatever you feel you’re strongest with and can do the best job of conveying the message.
A Written Product
Written products should be short reports,usually under 20 pages long. The template to use for this is;
Identify the problem you’re aiming to solve.
Breakdown the problem into manageable steps.
Explain things simply following a step by step structure.
Consolidate lessons in a conclusion.
As long as you’ve done your research this should be easily enough. This very report you’re reading is an example of this. I opened up talking about how email marketing can be lucrative but chances are you do not know how to do it. Then I made it less of a mountain by breaking it down into only five steps. Now I’m giving a blueprint on how to execute these steps.
A Video Product
Video products are going to follow the same sort of structure. Make sure the opening seconds are attention grabbing and concisely get to the point of what the video will be about it.
“You probably know you should be using email to build your business, but you don’t know how. In the next X minutes, I’ll share with you the 5 things you need to do to become an email pro!”.
Audio Products
Again you can just follow the same basic format. A way to make audio products more engaging can be to have more than one person in the audio and structuring it as a question and answer session.
Just make sure you deliver!
However you present your product, just make sure it is high quality and it really addresses the need you’ve got the person to opt in for. Your long-term success is directly linked to how well you provide your opt ins with the results they are looking for. Satisfy their needs, and they will later satisfy your wants.
Setting Up Your Site.
It will be more professional to have a hosted website with a .com domain. If you do not already have hosting but have a bit of money to spend on your startup, you can get well priced hosting with companies such as NameCheap. If you can not afford this you can also use free blogs like blogger or website builders like Google sites or Wix.
Your opt in page should be very focused and goal driven. You want to achieve one specific outcome and want to filter out as many distractions as possible. Read a full report on lead opt in pages here.
There should only be four parts to this page.
What you have.
What it does.
Why that matters (To them).
What they should do now.”
Ebook teaching you the 5 steps to email marketing.
Teaching you how to win big with email .
You can grow your business faster using email marketing.
Enter your details below to find out how, right now.
Enter the code your autoresponder gives you for the opt in forms onto the page and you're ready to collect emails. Here’s an in depth walk through of setting up your first email funnel with Get Response (Free trial available).
Driving Traffic.
Once you have everything set up it’s time to start to send people to the opt in page. Here are the main ways in which this is done.
Forum / Social Media Marketing - Find communities related to your niche and then start to look for ways to add value. In forums you can use signatures linking to your pages and on social media you can post links on your profile. As you build up credibility in the communities you’ll start to see this turn into traffic and opt-ins.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - You can use ads from Google, Facebook, Youtube or wherever you’re able to best reach your target audience. All of these come with the ability to get hyper targeted clicks and high quality traffic. It can be worth taking some time to learn how to best use these to save money, or even hiring someone to do it for you if you struggle.
Rank in Searches (SEO) - This is one of the most powerful, passive and long-term forms of traffic. Successfully ranking your posts in Google searches. This can take a lot of time and effort to achieve. Often SEO (Done well) can take as much as a year to start showing positive results. It’s a slow-burner a lot of the time, but something to work in form the outset for lasting value.
Third Party Email List - This is similar to PPC. You find people in your niche who already have large email lists of the people you want to reach and then you pay them to blast out emails to them directing them to your list. This can be highly effective but make sure you agree with the vendor beforehand some metrics of success (So you don’t pay for dud campaigns).
Leveraging Other's Efforts to Build Your List.
Put people to work for you by putting a bit more effort into your free product and then give it a low price tag. Somewhere between $7 and $17 is a good pricing range. Then find places that let you recruit affiliates and post your offering paying out a huge percentage commission. I’m talking about something like 80 - 90% commission paid to the affiliate (Even 100%, if possible). This will attract affiliates and they’ll then work for you to build your list.
Gaining Trust with Your List Subscribers.
Once people have opted into your list, respect them. Take a sincere interest in sending out information to them that they are going to benefit from. Do not spam them with offers to make your money every single day and do not email them multiple times a day. Don’t be annoying, become someone they want to see in their inbox so they remain on your email list.
It’s best to find a balance between emailing regularly but not emailing too much. Once every 4 days to a week often works well. It’s good to make only a quarter of your posts promotional ones. So if you’re emailing out weekly, every month send out 3 emails packed with free useful information and then include offers in the fourth month.
You can pre-write these if you want. Breaking down a subject you want to sell something related to over four parts. In the first three parts you give a lot of up-front value and ask for nothing in return. In the fourth part you give some more value, round things up and then make your offer to buy something related to the content of the last few weeks.
Fully Monetizing Your List.
As time goes on you’ll start to be able to separate the buyers from the browsers in your list. Usually 20% of the people on the list will make 80% of the income for you. Once you’re able to identify the buyers you can look a tways to add in up-sells and cross-sells to improve your revenue. It can be worth finding the best buyers on your list and making special efforts to contact them directly and ask them if there’s anything you can do to bring them more value.
Make sure you always spend a lot of time researching the products you promote to your list. Do not sell them trashy gimmicky things, it will maybe make you money in the short term but it will cost you in the long run. Find / create products applicable to their needs and ensure they are always high quality and things you’d use yourself.
Always remember to add up-sells. There are people who will buy your stuff and may have a lot more money than you expect. They may as readily buy a $1,000 product as they do a $10 one. Do not miss out on this value by never asking them if they want something more expensive and higher quality.
Conclusion.
Email marketing is something that you can do. It’s accessible to (Virtually) everyone and something that you can play the long game with and consistently build and improve upon over the years. Once you’ve established a good list, it can generate income almost on demand by sending out offers to them.
You can hire people to write your emails for you and follow structures of three emails of value and then one asking for a sale. Once the email list is built it is a life-long asset for you. It can be used to build a brand or just sell a lot of products to a certain niche of people. After the work is done, $1,000s can be made in a single email that can take no extra work to send out.
The key to good email marketing is quality and consistently. Respect your list, give them what they need and they will give you what you want.
If you found this post useful, you can find more of my posts on Reddit at Earn passive income through various online sources. (reddit.com)
This would have been a very good article... if you only worked on the formatting styles a bit.