How to Make Money with Email Marketing: Your Ultimate Guide to Success

Are you thinking about beginning a career as an email marketer? Or, you are own a business but want to increase your sales through email marketing? Whether you are a trying to increase your customer base or you're an affiliate marketer looking into new ways of earning commissions, it's easier than you think to get started with email marketing. 

Most companies can get started with a verified email list from an email contacts platform. For instance, Bookyourdata offers a way to dive into email marketing fast with tailored email list creation and verification services backed by a 97% verified guarantee.

So read on because we’ll dive into the fundamentals of email marketing - the cornerstone of any business with an online presence.

We’ll cover:

It’s time to devise effective email marketing tactics to generate income. Let’s jump into it and make some cash!

What is Email Marketing?

Sending out emails to a curated list of potential customers is the core of email marketing. This direct marketing approach allows businesses to advertise their services and 3rd party services through email newsletters. It's a great technique for letting customers know about your latest products and services, informing clients through thought leadership pieces, and building an audience interested in informational content.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

Getting started with email marketing isn't as difficult as it may seem. The process is fairly straightforward. Companies build a subscriber list or purchase an email contacts list for their targeted audience. A few different emails are created to send out to potential customers. Analytics tools are used to monitor the effectiveness of emails, marketers then continually refine email campaigns with the gathered information.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Businesses enjoy many benefits from email marketing strategies. Used in conjunction with other techniques, email marketing is an inexpensive tool that can round out an ongoing marketing campaign. It's also a good opportunity to maintain awareness of your business in customers' minds, and to get people excited about new products.

Cost-Effective Campaigns

Rather than spending all of your marketing budget on some of the pricier outreach methods, email marketing allows your business to save while directly targeting a desired customer base.

You can easily begin with a skilled email newsletter copywriter and a segmented email contacts list. You can also find affordable email contacts databases through companies, like Bookyourdata, which offers verified and accurate email lists with a 97% guarantee.

Bookyourdata has robust prospects who are ready to buy today

Where can you find these affordable copywriters? Consider checking out sites like Upwork and Fiverr. With one of these experts on your team, it's easy to send out a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter to your targeted audience.

Targeted Audience Engagement

Using email marketing allows you to directly reach out to people who might be interested in your services. This increases the chances of a conversion with a modest investment of money. Plus, a tailored and verified email marketing database will have hundreds or thousands of email addresses owned by people who fit your target market.

Using a targeted email list also reduces the potential impact to your reputation. Sending out bulk emails to contact lists can irritate people because no one wants to receive a lot of irrelevant or spammy emails. If your email contacts get upset enough by your unwanted emails, they may mark your business email as spam or file a complaint. Both of which impact your ability to reach out to potential clients in the future.

Learning how to send bulk marketing emails that are targeted and relevant prevents you being labeled as a spammer.

Real-Time Performance Metrics

Sending marketing emails isn't like putting your advertisements out into the void either. There are many real-time performance metrics that you can monitor to see how well your emails are doing, like:

  • Open Rate: It's possible to see when the email address owner clicks on your email to open it.
  • Click-through Rate: You can also monitor the number of email users who click on a link in an email. This also helps you see how much of your website traffic comes from emails.
  • Conversion Rate: This popular metric tracks how often an email user performs a desired task, such as clicking a link.
  • Email Sharing Rate: It's also possible to monitor how often someone forwards your emails to another person.

Direct Customer Interaction

You'll be able to speak directly to your customers through email newsletters and marketing emails too. Let your words show them you are a skilled and knowledgeable expert in your chosen field. Or, show off your best products to your customers through ad copy and beautiful photography.

Plus, you can build up a strong reputation and keep your business in the minds of your customers with consistent, high-quality emails. Emphasis on 'consistent.'

Personalized Content Delivery

It's also possible to personalize the emails you send to different customers, which brings the benefits of increased conversions and creating better relationships with those customers. Segmenting your email marketing lists into different groups of people by personal interest, purchase history, demographics, and behavioral data help with tailoring your emails.

Prefilled email list databases are a great way to get the information you need for market segmentation. Email databases include much more than just contact information about potential customers.

High Return on Investment (ROI)

If you are looking for a marketing service that brings a high return on investment, you've found it. Per Litmus, the ROI of email marketing is around $36 per every dollar spent. Considering the costs of digital marketing in general, that's an amazing return. All it takes to succeed is creating the right email messages and content for your customers' interests.

Is It Possible to Make Money from Email Marketing?

Yes, email marketing can earn you money though it does take a little work. With the right focus, companies often see a big return on investment in their email marketing campaigns. Email marketing is also great for diversification of income streams. There are many ways to earn money via emails, like promoting your products and services, affiliate marketing of another company's products, and selling paid email newsletters.

Building an Email List

Building an email list is where your marketing efforts really begin. You just need a good foundation to get started.

Defining Your Target Audience

Knowing more about your products and what type of person would want to buy them is the best way to define your target audience. Put yourself in a potential customer's shoes by creating a 'buyer persona.' These personas can help you identify the demographics of your potential audience, such as age, gender, income range, and profession.

Still not sure how to find your target audience? You might want to research lead generation. There are a number of books on lead generation that go over how to identify potential customers and build strong relationships with them.

Collecting Email Addresses

Another key part of the marketing process is building an email list. You can build your list in multiple ways, with opt-in forms and pop-ups offering an email subscription on your website, via contests and giveaways, and through social media.

Email list marketers can also provide you with a vetted, verified email list for your target market. Bookyourdata's 97% verified email lists are guaranteed to be filled with accurate and live emails.

[CTA1]

Growing Your Subscriber Base

It's also important to consider the maintenance of your subscriber base and how to grow it over time for increased earnings. Naturally, some subscribers will cancel their subscriptions. So, you'll want to continually bring in new subs to offset those losses. Generally, you can do this through providing quality products, deals, and content. Do these things and your subscribers will come. Many people also forward interesting emails to their friends and family, which can help you gain a new subscriber from time-to-time.

Learning how to start a lead generation business can also go a long way towards figuring out how to grow your subscriber base.

You might also want to set up an ongoing email collection strategy. You can regularly pull in emails from people who sign up willingly without much effort. Just make sure people who sign up know that they are subscribing to your emails. Some ideas for ongoing email collections include:

  • Contests and giveaways are great for getting emails addresses. 
  • You can request the customer's email at checkout and add it to your email contacts list.
  • Use Facebook ads and social media to bring in subscribers.
  • Purchase an email list and send out email invites to potential subscribers.

Crafting Valuable Content

Identifying what your customers want and are interested in goes a long ways towards creating valuable content for your emails. Here are a couple of examples of the type of content to push out to different audiences:

  • If your customers are painters, and you operate an ecommerce store that sells painting supplies, you'll have a good idea of what to include in your emails. Information about the latest paint colors and articles about caring for your art supplies work well. 
  • If you are a business consultant, it will take a little more thinking and research to figure out what your potential clients find valuable. They may prefer articles about the latest trends in their fields, interviews with thought leaders, and business related products and services.
  • If you want to make money selling online courses, you can either identify the areas you know the most about and identify your target audience. Or you can pick your target audience and do a little research on them to determine what type of course they might want to buy.

Many companies use A/B testing to gauge interest in different types of email content. One or more emails with unique content and ads are sent out to different segments of the subscriber list to see which gets a better response. This data is used to further refine the email topic choices until they get a satisfactory result.

Writing Great Subject Lines

The subject line of your email is just as important as its content. Often, subscribers will decide whether to click on an email based on the subject line. 

Keep your subject line short to catch people's attention, around 30 characters long, and focused on the content benefits. You can also incorporate 'power words' which are words shown to consistently encourage audience engagement. These things include, using the email owner's first name or last name, using pronouns, and using the word, 'invitation.'

Structuring the Content in Your Emails

Most marketing emails are highly structured to elicit engagement from the reader. A brief overview of how to design the layout of your emails follows:

  • Intro paragraph: The first sentence or two should be personalized to the customer, and let them know why your email is important to read.
  • Benefits: Don't forget to include a few benefits of your product or service for the customer in your email. It can be as simple as a bulleted list.
  • Call-to-Action (CTA): Wrap up your email with a CTA that shows the customer how to proceed. This can be a few sentences asking readers to contact you for a free consultation or a button link to your shop's latest discounts.

Creating a Table of Contents for Your Series of Emails

Most customers will skim over emails looking for relevant information to their needs, which is easy enough with short content. If you send a long email, you might want to include a table of contents at the beginning for customers to click on.

Automated marketing platforms, like Mailchimp, allow users to insert 'merge tags' in email content that create links to subheaders. Be aware that merge tags don't work in all email clients. Test open your emails in multiple email providers and through a seed list of email contacts before sending them out en masse.

Promoting Affiliate Products & Services

Affiliate marketing is one popular method for making money through emails. Whether you send regular newsletters to your subscribers or promotional emails to a contacts list, carefully selecting the products you market is important to achieving success.

Linking to External Sources & Products

Affiliate email marketing may be a way to earn money on its own, or as a part of your overall affiliate marketing campaign. In any case, when advertising products within your emails, you'll want to link to the product on the affiliate's website. While this is acceptable for many affiliate programs, double-check the affiliate's terms and conditions to ensure that they allow email linking.

Choosing the Right Affiliate Program

Picking an affiliate program to sign up for depends on your interests and what features you are looking for specifically. Here are a few ideas to consider when looking into different programs:

  • Commissions: Affiliate programs pay marketers a commission per sale they make from referred customers. These commissions are usually a percentage of the total sale amount. Some programs pay as little as 1% commission up to 30% commission. 
  • Cookie Lifetime: Affiliate programs track sales through a cookie inserted in each marketer's unique affiliate link. These cookies are only valid for a short period of time, which means you only get paid if the customer purchases the affiliate's product within that time. Cookie duration is usually between 1 and 30 days.
  • Sales Tracking: Earning commissions means tracking sales, your chosen affiliate program should have software in place to record sales from customers for you. Bonus points if you can log into an affiliate site to view the sales data too.

Utilizing Powerful Tools to Track Conversions

As an affiliate marketer, you'll need to track your conversion rates so you can see how successful your emails are in pulling in customers. There are powerful tools available for tracking conversions, like MailChimp and Hubspot. Both are email automation platforms that offer multiple services including data analytics software. Marketers also use warm-up tools to help improve the deliverability of their emails to new customers.

How to Monetize Email Marketing

So, you're eager to start making money from your email marketing campaigns? Monetizing your emails through paid subscriptions and selling products is a viable income option. Why you can even bring in multiple income streams through the same email list.

Offer a Paid Newsletter

Building an audience for high-quality, valuable content can bring consistent monthly income via a paid newsletter. Stratechery Plus is a paid newsletter with over 40,000 paid subscribers, and is estimated to bring in $40 million+ per year, according to Blockbuster Blueprint with Michael Simmons. Your newsletters can also lead subscribers to a blog with both free and paid content.

Sell Other People's Products

Affiliate email marketing is a simple way to sell products without the overhead of sourcing materials or manufacturers. Nor will you have to pay for an ecommerce site. Some affiliate programs also offer high commissions on expensive products. For instance, Smartproxy offers up to 50% commissions and up to $2,500 per customer sale to their affiliates.

Upsell Premium or Exclusive Products

Businesses can use emails to invite previous customers to upgrade their services or buy a more exclusive product. Upselling premium products and services has a good conversion rate because existing customers are more likely to continue buying from you.

Cross-Sell Related Products

Similar to upselling products, cross-selling related products invites the customer to buy additional items that complement their existing purchase. For instance, a customer who orders a coffee maker may be interested in buying specialty coffee flavors too

Get Repeat Purchases

Repeat purchases and subscription orders also bring in regular income for businesses. You can use email marketing to promote a regular subscription service delivering orders of perishable or replacement items. Customers can sign up to get their favorite high-end shampoo and conditioner delivered every month. Or, you can remind customers to get their car oil changed every six months with your mechanic's shop.

Have a Cart Abandonment Plan

Per WiserNotify, cart abandonment by potential customers leads to $18 billion in lost sales each year. You can monitor how often customers abandon their shopping carts on your website. Using the email address those customers provide during registration, you can send a reminder email about their unpurchased items. Enticements like an added discount encourages customers to complete their purchases.

Include Sponsored Content or Advertising in Your Emails

Adding sponsored content and advertising to your email newsletters is another way to earn money online. If your email subscriber list is large enough, and you have good user engagement, advertisers will pay for a banner or mention in your newsletters.

5 Tips for Making Money with Email Marketing

Still wondering how to get create an email marketing campaign? Here are a few more tips to help make the process of creating and sending emails easier.

Make a Targeted List

Find an audience for your emails a lot faster by building or paying for a targeted email list. Bookyourdata's pay-as-you-go plan makes it easy to create a quick, verified accurate email list without having to sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription.

Bookyourdata is the only provider with pay-as-you-go

Plan a SMART Email Campaign

A SMART email campaign is a way to measure the success of your marketing by establishing what metrics you look at before starting. Set goals for your email marketing campaign that are measurable and reasonable too. For instance, achieving an open rate for emails of 15%. You'd monitor which emails are getting opened more often, refine your email marketing plan based on that data, and monitor again. SMART email campaigns follow a logical, almost scientific method, approach.

Segment Your Email List

Segmenting your email lists by age, income, region, and other factors allows you to see which groups respond best to your marketing. It's easy to segment your email contacts in a prefilled database from a verified email list provider like Bookyourdata too. Their email lists can be segmented by company, job function, medical care providers, real estate, country, state, and more.

Personalize Your Emails

Research shows customers respond better to personalized emails. Use their first name in the signature line. Mention products purchased in the past and how they might also be interested in something related. Give your emails a human touch.

Automate Emails

No need to manually send out emails to customers. You can use email automation platforms, like Omnisend and Hubspot, to send out batches of emails at specific times.

How Much Money Can You Make with Email Marketing?

The amount of money you can make from email marketing varies depending on your niche market, experience, and even the time of year. Some email marketers make millions, while others earn less than a $1,000 a month.

How Many Email Subscribers Do You Need to Make Money?

About 1,000 engaged subscribers is the recommended goal for most marketers. However, earning money from your email subscribers depends on the type of emails you are sending out. It only takes one paid newsletter subscriber to start earning cash. It does take substantially more subscribers to make money on ecommerce and services as most websites average a 2% conversion rate.

Key Takeaways

Email marketing is much more in-depth than it seems at first glance. But, the rewards for those who persist in creating an email marketing plan are great. 

Start by identifying your target audience and what kinds of emails you want to send out. Build or purchase your email list. Create great content, and subject lines. Above all, monitor your email analytics and use it to refine your marketing process.

FAQs

Got more questions about email marketing or marketing in general? Use this FAQs section to find a few more email marketing tips for your small business.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Basically, affiliate marketing allows solopreneurs to earn a percentage of the sales they bring to a bigger brand. It's a profit-sharing program that just about anyone with a strong subscriber list, social media presence, or successful website/blog can use to earn money. Affiliates, or marketers, sign up for a unique link that they use in all of their promotional materials. These links are used in advertisements, on websites, and in emails. The affiliate's link will direct potential customers to a company's landing page when clicked. When someone buys a product on that website, the affiliate marketer gets the credit for the sale and a cut of the money.

How to Write a Professional Email?

Creating a professional email isn't hard. You just need to identify the right tone of voice and use concise language. After all, the recipients of these emails are usually very busy people who are short on time. So, it's important to get to the point with direct messaging.

Other to include in a professional email are the formal address of the recipient, a high-value subject line, multiple forms of contact information for your business, and a simple call-to-action.

How Many Emails Should I Send?

Marketing emails are usually sent out two to three times a week. This keeps the brand fresh in the customers' mind, and doesn't clog up people's inboxes with too many emails. If you have an informational blog or are a service provider, you might only need to send out emails once or twice a month.

Lastly, but most important, is whether you are targeting correct leads. (of course, if you don’t want to spend your time). Try Bookyourdata with 10 free credits if you're going to reach ready-to-buy laser-targeted leads.

[CTA1]

[CTA2]

Share with the community.
Back to Top