When it comes to making money online, getting traffic is the most important. It determines how many people visit your site and how many people will eventually buy from you. Email marketing is a good marketing strategy to make more money online.
There are a few ways to traffic generation like social media traffic, SEO traffic, and paid ads. But there is also another one that most business owners miss out on Email marketing.
When business owners are constantly directing new traffic to their landing pages or sales pages, they forgot about the lead generation and lead nurturing process. We called this MTL(market to teach) and LTC(lead to cash).
It’s email.
Email marketing is one of the traffic methods which has the highest conversion rates. In fact, if done right, email marketing can be one of the most profitable marketing methods that every business needs to adopt. An email list is a group of people that you can tap into anytime and send your message.
And transactions from email are three times more profitable than those made on social media.
Today we will be sharing eight proven ways to make money with email marketing.
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How To Monetize Your Email List with Email Marketing?
When we build an email list, there is only one target we want. To make money with it.
There are many ways to do it, but today we will be sharing eight different proven effective ways to do it.
1. To Sell a product or service
The best way to earn money is to sell something. Whether it is a product or service, as long as you can sell it, you will get paid.
So, first of all, find a physical or digital product or service to sell. Without a product, there is almost impossible to make money.
Here is some product idea that is fast and low-cost to start with :
- eBooks
- Training guides
- Online courses
- Private virtual coaching sessions
- Classes or workshops
- Memberships
When you want to invest in creating a new product, there is a huge risk as you are not sure whether the product sells well or not. Hence, you may start with other’s products to build your reputation and list first before creating your own.
2. To Promote Other’s Products
We called this business model affiliate marketing. Instead of creating your own product, you are promoting other’s product which is proven to sell. All you need to do is to get the right audience, provide additional value and persuade them to purchase it.
And as an affiliate, you get commissions from the sales that you refer to the company.
Here’s an example of a great affiliate:
A business owner launches a new product and since the product is new in the market, it will need more persuasion for people to buy. Here affiliates come in and promote the product to their audiences.
A coach offers a free course for his/her clients. And in the course, he will share the techniques or tools required to get the same result. And those tools that they recommend will be the affiliate products they are promoting. At the same time, he is building his reputation, list, and also income with affiliate marketing.
Before you begin affiliate marketing, make sure you have a strong relationship with your subscribers and that you only recommend products and services that make sense for them. Otherwise, they may unsubscribe.
People don’t like to be sold, instead, they should be the one that makes the buying decision. And most people will buy from someone or some brand they know. This is why you want to build a relationship with them before selling.
Always remember this. Give, give, give, sell. Always provide values before selling.
If you are not sure which program to start with, platforms like GetResponse provide great affiliate programs for anyone to start with.
3. To Provide Upsell & Subscription Service
To make more money, the best way is to increase the average cart value (ACV). By doing this, instead of getting more customers, you are selling more to the same customer.
We do this with a technique called upselling. Upselling happens after someone completed the purchase from you and you offer them something more. The second upsell offer normally complements the first item purchased. Just like when you are buying a McDonald’s meal. They will always ask to make it a meal set, upsell to a large set, or even upsell to a dessert or snacks during your checkout.
This is a typical upsell method.
Another way to increase revenue is called subscription.
You can offer a subscription service for someone that had purchased your service or product. And is charged monthly to access the content or sent a monthly supply with the subscription.
4. Cross-sell or Upsell
After they make a purchase, you now have their contact details in your mailing list. You may now run email automation to send a 5 days email sequence to build your reputation and promote other items they might be interested in.
Your email can read “Because you bought this, you might be interested in this.” Since you know what he purchased and might be interested in this, you can have personalized email messages for the different user groups.
Here’s an example of a great cross-sell: A nutrition coach becomes certified through an online course. Once they complete the course, they’re automatically sent an email that cross-sells to other courses — this time about yoga certifications or strength and conditioning certifications.
There is no perfect answer for how often to send out emails. You can test your audience to see which email is having the highest email open rate. To do this, you can set up automated email sequences in GetResponse and create your automation workflow.
5. Repeated Sales
Email can be a good newsletter to remind people to keep buying from you. For those people who do not accept subscription services, you can still email them every month to promote the same item.
Along the same lines as cross-selling, you may have a product or service that calls for repeat purchases. Sometimes a friendly reminder email is an effective way to keep bringing in a steady stream of sales.
A good example will be a supplement or a shaver where people will need to get a replacement each month. But for some reason, they don’t want a fixed monthly subscription. So, you can send a reminder email to them every month to get a new supply.
Or if you have a service-based business like a cleaning or maintenance-based company, you may always send out emails to remind your past customers to get another service.
And in order to incentivize your past customers, you may offer them a discount or coupon for their next order. This works very well and benefits your business as the discount might seem to be huge for the buyers and your cost might be minimal.
To do this, just set up an automation for the customers that already purchase your order and to be sent out bi-weekly or monthly.
6. Abandoned Cart Recovery
People are easily distracted and are always busy with other things. They might be very interested to complete the purchase. But for some reason, they would need to do another thing first. They might be catching for bus, the kids calling or friend’s visiting them. But no matter what’s the reason, it’s a loss for your business.
Hence, you should have the abandoned cart recovery feature in place to follow up and close these customers on time. To do this, you can have an email automation campaign that sends out emails based on customer behaviour. For those who already completed their contact details, but did not complete the payment. These are the group of people you want to follow up with and close.
But don’t only send one and stop. You can send them a series of email sequences and try to persuade them to complete the purchase. And in your email, you can offer them some incentives like vouchers or coupons to get them to buy from you.
With the email, you can also address the rejections or concerns people might have about your product/service and even create a sense of urgency with the limited-time offer.
When you send out abandonment emails, remember it should only do one thing. To recover the abandoned cart. Keep your emails short, with some humour to keep them interesting. But nothing else as it might distract them.
You may try this sequence :
- The first email in 24 hours
- Second email in 48 hours
- The third email in 3-4 days later
7. Word of Mouth
People will trust who they know. Your customers will be the best referral for your business. If they can be your ambassador and promote your items to their family, colleagues, and friends, it’s the best marketing you can do.
So if you have a loyal customer base, by serving them well and providing them with some incentive so they will be able to share your product. You may send emails encouraging them to recommend your products and services to their friends.
Also, you can ask them to give reviews for your product. Customer testimonials work well as people will trust users more than the business owner.
Another common way would be through affiliate marketing. You create the affiliate link for people to share and earn commissions when they referred a successful sale. The uniqueness of the affiliate link is it’s trackable and can include cookies. So, as long as the cookies are valid, you will be accountable for the sales as well.
Email Marketing Campaigns Automation
Now, we talked about different ways to monetize your email list with email marketing. For a small list like 50 or 100 subscribers, in the beginning, you may still be able to send out emails manually.
However, if you are using the email providers like Gmail or Hotmail, you might be labelled as a spammer.
This is where email marketing tools, aka autoresponders, fit in the gap. With tools like GetResponse, you can set up automated email campaigns to make money with email marketing easily.
With an autoresponder, you can create different campaigns for different subscriber groups. For example, when a new subscriber subscribed to your list, they will be going through the 5 days Epiphany Bridge Email Sequence to build the stage for you and your business.
Then, you can send a regular email once a week or once every 3 days to provide value and build relationships with your subscribers. To do this, you may use the email sequence we called The Daily Seinfeld Email Sequence.
The Daily Seinfeld Email Sequence is the email to send to your audience regularly. This email will be like a comedy series where you make the email interesting to read and like a series so the readers will look forward to the next email.
Then, at the end of the email, you can share the solution which is your product/service offered.
How To Close Sales With Email Marketing
Now I had shared all the techniques to make money with email marketing, it’s the most important part.
What to write and how to write a compelling email to close the sale?
For this, you may read about copywriting where the author teaches the formulas to write good sales copy to close more sales.
Now, to start, you may sign up for the 30-day free trial for GetResponse to start your email marketing campaign and landing page building. Even after 30 days, you may still be able to enjoy the always-free plan to start building your email marketing.
Only when your business grows and you need to handle more subscribers and more features then you upgrade to a paid package.