Email marketing is a powerful method of producing both short and long term profits. Most serious online marketers have an email list and aggressively recruit new subscribers. The concept is nothing new – list marketing existed even before the internet (e.g. the registration card that comes with electronic goods). What has changed is that there are far fewer barriers to entry plus many tools at your disposal that you can use to earn the most money from your subscribers.
Benefits Of Email Marketing
When you analyse the bare facts, the main benefit of email marketing is that this technique will give you the best conversion rate possible out of any other marketing method. This is due to the highly targeted nature of your leads and the huge amount of trust they place in the list owner. It is also because you have multiple opportunities to market to them and not just a one-off, “make or break” opportunity as most others are.
Email marketing is also a great way to generate both short term and long term profits. In the short term, you can make money by redirecting new subscribers to an offer or by placing affiliate links in your freeline content offered as an enticement to subscribe. In the long term, you can repeatedly market to the same captive audience again and again.
An often quoted statistic is that each subscriber should earn you a minimum of 50 cents per month. This means that a list of 10,000 subscribers should theoretically make you $5,000 per month.
Email Marketing Advantages Over Other Online Marketing Methods
Email marketing is unique in that it allows you to develop high levels of trust with your subscribers. It is typical for each email to be personalised with the recipient’s name and such personal touches that are possible with email really do work to convert subscribers into buyers.
An email list will also continue to make you money, even if your opt-in website goes down. Traffic is only needed to add to a list but not to sustain it.
Another advantage of email marketing is that there are many methods that you can use to rapidly inflate your list such as ad swaps and other similar types of joint venture. Such an increase in your target audience is simply not possible with other forms of marketing unless you are prepared to pay good money.
Building A Responsive Mailing List
Email marketing can make you a lot of money if done properly. If not done correctly, then your conversion rate could be worse than other methods. To build a responsive mailing list, you must first ensure that your list is focussed on a specific set of people. A generic mailing list will not work, as I have discovered myself.
Secondly, you need to accurately target these people when building traffic to your opt-in page. The more closely matched your audience is to your email broadcasts, the better they will convert.
Finally, you need to build a high level of trust in your subscribers. You can do this by not trying to sell to them as soon as they join their list. Give them lots of quality advice and some free content. In the long term, carefully manage your ratio of selling to giving.
Required Tools
Email marketing generally does not require much in the way of necessary tools. You don’t need to install any scripts or build a huge website, for example.
What you do need is a good autoresponder platform i.e. one that has a high deliverability rate. If you try to send emails from your own server then there is a high chance that many of them will not get delivered, instantly negatively impacting your conversion rate.
Instead, I recommend that you use one of the big autoresponder platforms who have agreements with most of the large internet service providers (ISPs). Some of the best are AWeber, GetResponse and iContact.
You will also need to build a high converting landing page. This is where all your traffic will be driven to and your aim is to convert as much of the traffic into subscribers as possible. You can do this with an attention grabbing headline and a good incentive to subscribe such as a free pdf report.
That’s pretty much it.
All that remains is for you to drive traffic to your landing page via traditional methods such as article marketing and wait for the money to flow in!
Tags: conversion, email, ISP, landing page, list, mailing, marketing, profits, subscribers
