Email marketing has been around for decades and those who are saying it’s no longer alive are definitely wrong. Today you can make big money by working from home and automatically sending messages to your email list.
You must understand that email marketing can be a business, and it can be a huge business, especially if we scale it up to the next level. Let’s have a look, how you can run a successful email marketing campaign and turn your small business into a profitable empire.
Also, remember like any other business, email marketing requires some work and effort to be put in. It can be a difficult process at the start, but become easy as you grow and automate your email marketing campaigns.
It requires no investment in the beginning and has almost no financial risks. So if you are wondering how you could build up a profitable online business without having to put your money on a table – email marketing is a perfect solution.
Why sending emails is a good idea to make money online?
Probably one of the most important reasons why you should start doing email marketing is its instant effectiveness.
It can be called as real-time marketing as your audience can instantly receive the message you want to pass. Your message can be an offer, product, or service, which can potentially drive profits to your business just in minutes.
Today, email marketing can be an easy and exciting way to make money online, and sending emails does not require as much manual work as you may think.
There are plenty of free and paid email marketing platforms, which can automatically send a sequence of your prepared emails to either single or millions of people just by a single mouse click.
As you build a targeted email list, you can also deliver targeted and even personalized messages, this increases the engagement between you and your customer.
Also, having and running an email marketing business does not cost a lot, especially in the beginning. All you need to start is a website and the hosting (which together can cost around from 60$ a year).
1. Find what to promote in your email marketing campaigns.
You are willing to send bulks of emails to people for a reason. Either you already have a product or you want to offer someone else’s product and get a commission of the sale (that’s called affiliate marketing).
Affiliate Marketing can be a very profitable way to make money online. Indeed, in 2018 affiliate marketing was considered one of the most profitable business online.
If you don’t have your own product that you could promote, the best option is to find a profitable niche and promote affiliate products within that niche. There are many niches with thousands of affiliate products that you can start promoting now.
Here are the most popular marketplaces to find different niches and products where you can become an affiliate and promote their products:
– Amazon
Once you find the perfect niche and a product to promote, you will have to focus on creating an email list based on the audience interested in your product/products. And the main core of your email address generation will be your website.
2. Create a website to collect email addresses.
If you already have a website and know how to drive traffic to it, you can skip ahead to step 3.
If you don’t have yet, you must create a website – a place where you will be sending your visitors (traffic) and collecting their email addresses. To run a website you firstly need to set up your website with domain provider and run it with the hosting provider.
Luckily, with the Bluehost, you can have your domain registered and hosted at one place. The best thing about Bluehost is that it offers FREE domain, so the only thing you will have to pay for is the hosting.
It also has really affordable pricing (starting at $3.95/month) and extremely fast website loading speed (which is very important for user experience and rankings on Google today).
Once it’s set and ready we will need to build and design your new website. Don’t freak out, you don’t necessarily need to have any knowledge and experience in coding or design.
Everything is super simple with a free WordPress website building platform. WordPress is widely used by big businesses, in fact, 35% of the whole Internet is run by WordPress.
It is a simple yet powerful website building platform, perfectly suitable for your email marketing business.
How To Create A WordPress Site – Step By Step Guide
3. Drive visitors (traffic) to your website
There can be two types of traffic sources – free and paid. If you are just starting out, we definitely recommend starting with the free traffic methods. There are many ways of getting people to come to visit your website without paying a cent.
You can get free traffic from:
- Search Engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
- Social Media – Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
- Forums & blogs
You can build your subscribers list on social media platforms, be active on relevant forums and blogs. Whatever you chose to do, remember don’t spam – you have to give people some value and a reason to click the link leading to your website where you are going to collect their email address.
If you are not using Google as your traffic source – you are missing out. You can also use free Google organic traffic by writing blog posts and targeting the right keywords.
Nowadays it can be hard to start ranking on Google due to high competition and it’s high-standards, however, that is still considered the most powerful and profitable traffic source.
In order to get visitors from Google, you need to focus on ranking your website in the top 10 places according to your chosen search phrase (keyword). You will need to regularly write and publish relevant content in your niche for your specific audience in order to answer their queries.
To get organic traffic from Google, you will need to build an authority in your field – that means, if your website is new and has no published content – don’t expect quick results.
Consider adding at least 10 articles before expecting any traffic at all. Those articles must be related to each other in order to attract visitors who ask for different questions in your niche on Google.
Make your content an answer to what your audience is looking for. These days Google takes more time to start ranking websites (especially new ones), so don’t get discouraged if it’s taking time and keep publishing your content regularly. Trust me, it’s worth it, and Google will later reward you.
If you have a budget to invest in you can also try different paid advertising methods – Google ads, Facebook ads, Bing ads, and etc.
On Google ads, you need to bid on advertising auctions according to your selected keywords and determinate the lowest cost per click you pay every time when someone clicks your ad.
Create a nice landing page on your website with an email field for the visitor to fill in and link it to your ad. Good page design and high overall content quality will increase the chances of people clicking on your ad and leaving their email addresses (converting).
Keep in mind that paid advertising is a skill that requires some advanced marketing knowledge.
If you are new to paid advertising and feel unconfident, we recommend sticking with the free/organic traffic sources until you get more knowledgeable.
4. Turn your website visitors into subscribers
Before you start sending emails and make money, you need to build your email list, in other words – generate the leads. There are plenty of WordPress plugins and platforms for you to build your landing page with nice high-converting opt-in forms, email lists, and auto-responders.
Don’t worry, the majority of them offer a free version or a free trial, so you don’t have to invest in the beginning at all. For example, a free Mailerlite plan allows you to collect up to 1,000 contacts and send 12,000 emails per month!
As your business will grow it will be reasonable for you to invest and upgrade to premium plans on email marketing platforms, but for the beginning, it isn’t really necessary.
As mentioned before, you will need to set up an opt-in form to capture visitors email addresses, but before that, you need to give them a reason why they should share their email addresses with you.
You have to offer something in exchange for the email address – that something is called a lead magnet. A lead magnet can be a free ebook, course, discount, tutorial, cheatsheet, free software, or digital tool.
If you are planning to combine email marketing with the affiliate marketing, often the vendors of the product offer their own free lead magnet tools that you can share with your audience to build up the email list.
There are plenty of vendors on Clickbank platform that will provide you anything you need to market their products, including free lead-magnet tools.
If you decide to create your own lead-magnet, it doesn’t mean that it has to be difficult. If you are creating an ebook or cheatsheet you can just fill a few pages with useful and valuable content about the product you are willing to promote.
If your lead magnet is good and valuable enough, your subscribers are more likely to keep their eyes on your next emails where you will be sending them offers.
Again, if you are an affiliate for some kind of product or services there is another way around of investing time in lead magnet creation.
Very often affiliate vendors offer discounts to their services or products, and you can take advantage by capturing email addresses for an exchange to a discount. So just a simple discount for a product you offering can be a good reason for the visitor to give you his email address.
5. Create your first email marketing campaign
As mentioned before, you don’t need to individually write and send emails when doing email marketing. There are plenty of platforms and tools online that can make your life easier.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) can send emails automatically to your audience once they subscribe to your list. Choosing your ESP is the first step you want to take at this stage.
What Email Service provider does?
ESP helps you manage your contacts, helps to build your email content, automatically sends emails and provides you analytics, where you can see whether your emails are performing well or not
How to write email marketing campaign content?
Make sure you introduce yourself in the Form section properly, so people don’t mark your email as spam. It can either be your personal name or brand’s name or the combination of two. It is recommended that you don’t use a person’s name on its own.
The subject line is super important in your email marketing campaign – it tells your audience what your email is about.
Often people won’t even open your emails at all, so getting creative while creating your subject line is important to maximize the open rate.
There can be a couple of subject line types. Some people get success with descriptive and some with secret subject lines. To find out which one works best for your audience, you must test and try different methods while monitoring data in your ESP’s analytics feature.
The most important email you send to your audience is the first one. Pitching your final offer in your first email is definitely not the best idea. The good idea is to go through the “warm-up” process with the subscriber – introduce and tell a story about yourself or your brand.
Ideally, you would like to strike your final offer on your 4th or 5th email for the best conversions. If you don’t get your email offer successful, there is always a second chance to take (see the infographics below).
Check out the best email writing services
So what should be inside your email?
In every email, you send you must have a piece of content, call to action button, and unsubscribe button. Make sure your content is appealing and informative.
Try to tell as much as possible about yourself or your brand in short paragraphs. Storytelling is a very powerful way to attract and engage your audience.
Call to action is essential in every email you send. Even if you are not pitching your final offer, you don’t want to “waste” your email. It’s always a good idea to leave a link to your site in the email for the subscriber to visit it. There he can still generate you profit or just get to know more about you or your brand.
Unsubscribe button is a legal requirement from GDPR (General Data Protection) law and everyone must comply with it. Don’t worry too much about it as your email service provider will have easy options for you to add it.
Final Words:
Email marketing is still a very powerful business tool and you can make tons of money by sending emails. It’s all about finding the right audience and providing the most relevant content.
Today’s technology makes email marketing simple easy and super-efficient. Numbers of email service providers will allow you to craft your content, design your email templates and increase conversions by their analytics and reports feature.
Email marketing doesn’t need to cost at all when you start, but as you progress, like every business it might require a little investment.
It might take a bit of time and effort to create a targeted email list along with an effective email marketing campaign. The most important thing – don’t get discouraged and keep moving on. Keep building, monitoring, and testing – eventually, you will take huge rewards, believe it.
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Howdy, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just curious if you get a lot of spam feedback? If so how do you stop it, any plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much lately it’s driving me insane so any assistance is very much appreciated.