11 Effective Strategies To Make Money From Email Marketing

How to make money from email marketing after you’ve got your business online? Whether you are selling your products or someone else’s as an affiliate. You’ve set up your website and have your SEO keywords set up properly.

But it still takes time for people to notice the new things you post online. You on the other hand would like to get traffic and people noticing your new updates on demand. That’s one scenario.

The other scenario is that you have an affiliate product and you would like to send traffic to it. However, you don’t want to pay every time you need to send traffic to every new product you market, via pay-per-click ads and the like.

So what do you do?

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that it’s better to pay for a click once…

Then keep that person somewhere where you can send them promotions and products you are trying to sell for free from that moment onwards. There are a few ways you can do that.

You could have them follow or subscribe to a social media profile, page, or channel. The other way to do this is through email marketing. Many prefer the latter to the former because a list of emails is yours to keep no matter which domain you are sending from or which autoresponder you use.

On the other hand social media accounts they own the list…

If you lose your account or have it banned for some reason, all your effort is gone. Alright, so now that you understand how useful having an email list is, let’s look at where the money is in all this, that is why you are here after all isn’t it? So how to make money from email marketing?

First, we need to understand how to go about email marketing.

(Affiliate Notice: some of the links in this article are affiliate links. I may be compensated, at no additional cost to you, if you purchase using these links)

How To Start & Make Money From Email Marketing?

To make money from email marketing you can take one of many paths. Here we’ll talk about a few briefly to get you started on the right track.

The first option is through using one of the many email marketing firms to handle your email marketing for you. These are marketing firms that offer this service. The same way some marketing agencies offer bulk SMS services. You tell them what you want to tell the audience and they send an SMS message on your behalf, except this time it’s in the form of an email.

The second option is to use web-based software. They are called autoresponders to send emails to a list that you build yourself and send them emails whenever you choose.

For the first option you will either pay for every email that is sent out and the cost varies per agency…

Or you will keep them on a monthly/yearly retainer where you pay them a set amount of money for a specific number of emails per week, month, or even year. The second option offers you a great deal of flexibility because you can send as many emails as you want per day, week, or month for no extra charge.

It is not recommended that you send more than one email per day to each person though. There are multiple reasons for that…

We will not get into here but you do not want your emails to be considered spam because they won’t get read. To pay per email sent is not a practical way to make money from email marketing. It’s not cheap because with an agency you don’t just pay for the cost of a professionally written email.

You also pay for the service of sending it out, and for the brand name of the agency. So the bigger the name the more expensive that cost is. Most people who want to make money from email marketing will choose the second (autoresponder) option, for that reason.

This is because it is the more practical route and costs less over the long run. This is also the exact reason why I would recommend going that route rather than getting an agency to do it for you. So how do you get started then?

Picking The Right Autoresponder To Make Money From Email Marketing…

It can be extremely overwhelming to pick an autoresponder when you are just starting. There are so many options to choose from, and not knowing what you need could further complicate the choice.

So let’s help you understand what you need, to make money from email marketing, first. We’ll do this by proposing a few questions that you need to ask yourself:

• How many email addresses do I currently have in my list?
• Will I create my own landing pages (to collect emails) or do I need a tool that can create these for me?
• How often do I intend to send out emails?
• Will I need to create automations? As in, the system will automatically send people to different lists after certain actions?

Once you have answered these main questions, you are already well on your way to picking a tool that’s right for your needs. There are two questions that I feel need more elaboration though before we move forward.

Landing pages are crucial for maximizing the number of people that sign up or subscribe to your email list.

You can create a landing page yourself. It’s not impossible and most autoresponders will give you a code that you just stick on your page. This allows you to link the boxes where people put in their details to the autoresponder’s email database. There are even plenty of free as well as paid plugins that offer that function with ease.

However, that still doesn’t solve the problem of creating a landing page that converts your visitor from a passerby to a subscriber. Unless you already know how it’s done and the best practices. Or are ready to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on learning how it’s done. You will need an autoresponder that creates them on your behalf within their packages.

Think of it this way, if you don’t have the expertise to create them yourself, one of three things will happen.

You will either have to invest in the knowledge. Or get a 3rd party tool that makes them. Maybe even try your luck and waste time on creating a page that doesn’t convert the traffic you send to it. Thus losing the time and potential earnings as well as the cost of the lost traffic.

This is why you need to pick a service with a landing page builder. They know what converts.

In turn, they offer you templates that have a much better chance of converting than if you built it alone, even if you know how to do it. The other thing you need to consider is automation, the choice here is not as complex as the one with landing pages, it’s also completely optional. You can evaluate the stats of every email address on your list manually and move them to the list you choose accordingly, one by one.  

However, if like me and most other successful online entrepreneurs, you value your time…

A little automation could go a long way in increasing your productivity. As well as, improving results, growing your income, and saving time.

When you first start though and have less than 100 emails on your list, it’s not a big deal. So it’s totally up to you at this stage. You need to decide if the savings you will get, warrant the time you will have to invest as on your journey to make money from email marketing.

The Importance Of Deliverability I’ve put in this additional subsection because it is extremely important to success with email marketing, yet few people talk about it.

Let me ask you this…

imagine you have a list of 10,000 subscribers. You send out an email to all of them about a product that has earnings per click (EPC) of $4. That is a very good number by the way since it is an average from all clicks.  

$4 as EPC means that every single click you send will earn you $4, so if you send 100 clicks you will earn $400. Your commission per sale isn’t $4, and 100% conversions are extremely unlikely.

If a product is $40 and the EPC is $4, then you make one sale for every 10 clicks you send.

Now back to our example…

You send 10,000 subscribers an email about that product, and you know from your average read and click history that 10% of these will click through. Assuming that the email reached 10,000 people that means 1,000 of them will click through, earning you $4,000 in one go.

Notice how I said assuming?

This is where deliverability becomes of utmost importance. If you have a list of 10,000 subscribers but the email only reaches the inbox of 10, then 1 will read and click.   Unless you are very lucky and this 1 is the 1 out of 10 that buy, your chances are 9/10 that you will earn nothing from the email you sent.

Reputable autoresponders work hard and abide by very strict criteria to ensure that your email gets delivered. It’s not perfect but they try to maintain as high a percentage of delivery to your subscribers as possible. This is why free autoresponders, plugins, etc. will allow you to send.

But the chances of the sent emails being delivered to the spam box, let alone the inbox are very limited.  

What Reputable Autoresponders Are Out There?

There are hundreds if not thousands of autoresponders out there that you can try out. I’ve personally tried and tested at least 10 autoresponders throughout my online business career. My favorite was the most expensive one lol.

I mean I hated paying for it every month, but I loved the wide variety of options and functions it offered me! Anyhow here are 5 autoresponders that I know deliver at a great rate and will give you what you need:

• Sendlane
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• Get Response
• Keap (formerly infusionsoft)

(note: this list is in no particular order of preference. I’d like you to check them out one by one and see which one suits your needs and financial budget best. Afterward, I will tell you which ones I liked most and why)

The deliverability is not very different between them.

But, from my personal experience infusionsoft, now rebranded as keap, has the best inbox deliverability.

I also like Get Response, because of its automation system. They are not the cheapest on the list but they are worth every penny. So if you are looking for value for money as opposed to just the cheapest you can get it would be one of these two.  

I didn’t enjoy using constant contact too much, I felt the platform was a little primitive for my taste.

Aweber is one of the most popular autoresponders, and the interface was not bad. I just missed a lot of functionality while using it, that was the only reason I left them. The newest of the ones on this list is Sendlane.

Its customer service is great, and they are constantly improving it. However, it still has some ways to go before it can be the top in terms of deliverability and functionality.

To be fair to them though, they are growing quickly and rapidly developing their system and I expect that soon they will get to the top of the list.

If you ask me, my favorite of them all is infusionsoft (KEAP) by far, it has everything you would ever need!

It even has an inbox so when people reply to your emails you can see them right off their platform and respond too. It’s the only one in the list I’ve found this option in!   Their reporting is by far, and according to my needs the most detailed.

However, it is the most costly, so it all depends on whether you can or cannot afford its subscription price at the current stage. If you can I must recommend it, because it will take your email marketing to a new level that you didn’t even imagine possible with the others.

It is so next level that they even offer you one on one free coaching when you first join to be able to use the system effectively to improve results.   Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way, let’s get to the part you have all been waiting for…  

“Show me the money” as they say!

How To Make Money From Email Marketing?

I’ve put together a list of 8 tips that are likely to skyrocket your results if you apply them properly in all your email marketing efforts. As you have probably heard on multiple occasions the term “The money is in the list” and continues to be true to this day and time.

Some gurus will try to sell you on the concept that email marketing is dead just to sell you their next fad or alternative. Nothing could be further from the truth, email marketing is here to stay whether we like it or not.

If you’ve read some of my other articles, you will know I am personally not a big fan of email marketing.

It’s not because it’s bad that I don’t like it, I just don’t like all the restrictions I need to abide by when writing an email. I like to write the way I speak, transparently, and flow without thinking of “alternative” words to use. Just to avoid annoying the “spam” algorithms of google, yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc.

Frankly that is the only reason I don’t try to make money from email marketing as much as I should.

There is another reason if I am being honest, and this is more of a personal perspective thing…

On a blog, everyone here is reading what I am writing because they are curious about something that I’m converting here. The reader came to my article out of their own will, in email, I feel like I am going to them and inviting them to read what I have to offer…

The difference is subtle and as I said it’s more of a personal preference thing rather than a major issue.

That being said, my email list is in the thousands and I do send them emails because no business’ online presence is ever complete… without an email marketing branch. It’s just not my primary focus! Let’s talk about the tips…

1. Avoiding Spam

Have you ever gotten one of these cheap viagra emails?

The first time you probably thought “interesting” maybe even checked the link out. With time getting these emails probably got annoying to the extent where you are like “I don’t need any viagra, leave me alone dammit!”.

Believe me, I know the feeling, and this is the exact feeling you don’t want your email recipients to feel. The average person receives hundreds if not thousands of emails a week, of which over 60% are spam.

That’s 6 or more out of every 10 emails you receive! Is it any surprise that people feel so strongly against the people who make money from email marketing today?

This has led email service providers (ESPs) to take serious measures to fight spam.

Today even free email services like Gmail and the like are offering spam filters. They have invested in really expensive algorithms and tools to fight it! So how do you avoid falling into the whole dilemma of spam traps, domain black lists, and subscribers reporting you? There are a few things you need to do:

1. Do not send emails without permission:
   I know you are wiser than going off and buying email addresses of people who didn’t request to join your list. So I’m not going to be discussing why that is wrong here. What I will advise you, even though it will lower the number of email subscribers in your list…
   
   Is to choose the double opt-in function in your autoresponder. This is where once someone signs up to be on your list, they get an email confirming that they would really like to receive emails from you. Just by clicking a link in the body of the email. By doing this you minimize the risk of them reporting you. They already had a second chance to reconsider if they want you appearing in their email inbox or not. I don’t think I need to explain in great detail why this is a good thing.
   
   I’ll just suffice by saying if they confirm the second time they are more likely to open and read your future emails. You also, ensure they didn’t give you a fake email address that they never log into.
   
   This, in turn, means a higher chance of them seeing your emails, clicking the links you send them to and buying whatever you are selling.  
   
2. Safe Senders List:
   Always remind your readers to put you in the safe senders list. This minimizes the chances of your email ending up in the spam box if you put in a frowned upon spammy word by accident in your email.
   
3. Autoresponder Anti-Spam Policies:
   A reputable autoresponder will always strive to maintain a good relationship with the ESPs and ISPs. Such companies will comply with the guidelines of “Can-Spam’ in how they format the emails going out from their system.
   
   Some will even go as far as monitor each senders email sending behavior. just to ensure that no spammy behavior is taking place using their sending domains. This is not an invasion of privacy, and the monitoring practices do not invade privacy in any way.
   
   However it protects you because if they get flagged as a platform for spam, your emails will get junked and spam-boxed too. Even if you are an honest email marketer just for sending from the same place spammers do. So in a way this is for your protection first.
   
4. Email Blacklist Testers:
   Get on blacklist notification service. These are companies that check your status on all the web and see if anyone has black listed your domain as a spam domain and notify you if that happens. Some services will even remove the “flagging” for you free of charge.
   
   There are companies that check a limited number of your domains for free.
   
5. Trusted Sender:
   We earlier discussed how the ESP algorithms have become so sophisticated and how you can get black listed.
   
   There is another crucial point that rarely gets spoken about but could make a world of difference in whether your email delivers or not. Using an email address to send emails that is related to a domain you own is great. Sending from free emails is against the “Can-Spam’ policies and regulations.
   
   Any person who knows about email marketing will tell you that. However, what most don’t tell you for some reason is that a domain that has no website or a website with no content is less trusted by ESPs than one that does.
   
   So create a simple corporate website that is not broken and has some content on it to raise your domain’s trust level. Better yet, turn it into a blog where you put meaningful and unique (not copied from anywhere) content to raise the domain trust.
   
   You’ll thank me later!
   

2. Say No To Broken Emails If You Want To Make Money From Email Marketing

Have you ever gotten one of these emails where the photo is broken or the email just looks crooked? What was your first impression? Was it one of trust and credibility? Highly doubtful!

Today most ESPs block graphics to protect their members from spam, especially if you are not put on the trusted senders’ list. This is where using a well-established autoresponder comes in handy in your pursuit to make money from email marketing. You don’t need to worry about how formatting and images arrive in the inbox, that’s their problem to deal with.

With that being said… it’s worth considering avoiding sending images in your emails unless necessary. Also, try to minimize the number of links embedded in your email content (not exceeding 3 and use 1 if possible).

3. Email Personalization & Content Relevance

The worst email marketing strategy is where you follow a one size fits all system.

You may have a list of 1000 emails who opted into your list to find out more about weight loss. At the time you were promoting such products. Today you have a new website talking about “do it yourself wood-working”.

It may seem like a good idea to send these 1000 emails about it. Rather than spend more money trying to get people to opt-in to your woodworking email list, right?

WRONG!

The 1000 emails you have indicated they are interested in weight loss, granted they may or may not be interested in woodworking…

Sending them unsolicited emails about it is not how you find out! I’ll tell you in a minute how to get around that but first, let’s talk personalization…

This is where a good autoresponder comes in handy. First, you need to use the user’s name when talking to them, people love to hear their names, good autoresponders will give you that option.

Secondly, with automation, you can track the interest of your subscribers based on the emails they open, read, and click. You can then move them to a more specialized list based on their interests. Having specialized lists is a great way to increase open, click, and buy rates from your email marketing efforts.

If you know what matters to each reader, you can send them more specific emails that cater to their needs.

Also please don’t leave the “from” section of the email just your email. Either use your real name, pen name or company name, it’s more personal and increases email open rates.

As you can imagine if emails don’t get opened you will not make money from email marketing!

So you’ve personalized the emails, now you want to take advantage of your 1000 subscribers in your DYI woodworking business, how do you do that?

Simple, you send them ONE email stating that you know they are interested in weight loss…

But you thought you would let them know that you’ve also created a website that can help them with DYI woodworking. If they are interested to know more they should click the link to check it out.  

You may be tempted to use automation here, and you technically could since they’ve shown interest. However, you are better off sending a confirmation email before finalizing the subscription. If you’d like to do this with automation, you can tell them to get more information in their inbox by clicking a link.

In KEAP’s autoresponder, one of their automation options allows you to add them to another list when they click a link.  

Other autoresponders offer this service too, but in my experience, it wasn’t as straightforward as KEAP’s workflow.

4. Use Thank You Pages (TYP) To Make Money From Email Marketing!

What on earth is a thank you page you may be wondering? How will it help you make money from email marketing?

So we’ve discussed landing pages earlier where a visitor is encouraged to give you their contact details and subscribe to your email list. Once they’ve subscribed they are sent to a page called a Thank You Page (TYP). You know the page where they are informed that they have been included in the email list and that you got their information.  

This is usually also the page where they can download or get their bonus if you didn’t choose to send it by email.

Anyhow, why is this page important? What is it that I expect you to miss that I felt it necessary to place it as one of the tips? You have a person waiting for a confirmation, or waiting for their signup bonus/gift. Why just put a page saying thank you and give them the gift and waste an opportunity to promote your product?

The TYP is an ideal place to expose your subscriber from the initial signup to your written or video sales letter.

They are waiting for confirmation. Use that to your advantage almost 100% of your subscribers will wait for a confirmation. Assuming they are serious about signing up and hearing what you have to say.

If you are giving a bonus don’t put it on the thank you page. Instead, put an intermediary step between the signup and the bonus, where they read or watch a video about the product you are marketing.  

Trust me, it makes your work easier moving forward towards a sale, that’s if they don’t already impulse buy from the moment they sign up to your list. You can thank me later! I’ve personally made a few sales from the TYP, otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend it so strongly.  

5. Pay Attention To CTR (Click-through) & Conversion Rates

Let me ask you a serious question here…

Your subscribers are opening your emails and even reading your content, but have they bought anything yet?

Industry averages indicate that you earn $1 per subscriber in your email list. The question here is where do you stand in comparison to that average? Are you on par with it? Are you below it? Over It? The general premise behind email marketing is that it takes on average 8 to 12 “touches” to make a sale.

What does that even mean though?

It means that your client will see your TYP, that’s the first touch. A touch is every time a member of your audience is exposed to the product you are selling. So don’t expect a sale from the first time you send an email. This is where CTR and conversion statistics become crucial if you are to make money from email marketing.

You want to keep track of how many people are clicking through from the people who opened/read your emails.

Open rates should be 15%-25% according to the across the board industry averages and your CTR should be 2.5% at least and you should aim for 4%.

Another overlooked statistic is the Click To Open Rate (CTOR). This is where you divide the unique clicks by the unique opens so if you get 50 clicks from 100 opens your CTOR would be 50%. The industry average ranges from 20% to 30% for CTOR.

CTOR indicates both how interesting your content is and how good you are at getting people to click, more so even than the CTR stats.

Conversions are where you make money from email marketing. It’s where you have successfully managed to convert a subscriber from just a reader to a buyer. Keep track of your statistics and monitor them closely. They will help determine if you need to tweak your content, subject (headlines)…

Or even change the product you are marketing all together for better results.

6. Understanding Your Audience – Give Them More Of What They Like!

When you are an email marketer, you’re not just someone sending emails to sell your products anymore. Your email marketing should become a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for your business.

This ties in well with the previous tip because it is based on the information to can figure out from analyzing your statistics. You want to find out what time they open their emails and send your emails to each user at the time they are more likely to open it and click on the links in it.

Here’s an example from my personal experience in my efforts to make money from email marketing. Some of my readers open emails during the 9 am to 5 pm work schedule but do not click.

Some of these people who opened but didn’t click at work went home, got about their business, etc.

Then later that evening between 8 pm and 10 pm they would open the email again and this time round click it. I always attributed this phenomenon to the fact that most of us have email on our phones.

We receive an email and think interesting, let me check it out when I have some peace of mind.

I’ve done that myself, I wait till I am comfortably sitting on my couch with my laptop in front of me. I then actually track down the email I skimmed through earlier to see what they have to say with more attention.

Knowing your stats will also help you with your content and your calls to action.

Which readers opened, read, and click-through emails about a specific topic? Who needs help with a particular aspect, but doesn’t check emails about other things? You then split them into different lists and send them more of what they like.

This, in turn, will improve your overall statistics and income from your email marketing efforts. Think of it like this, without statistics your emails are like a punch in the dark, the chances of missing are way higher than hitting your target. And if you miss you can’t make money from email marketing, can you? 

Remember how I said earlier that I love KEAP’s Autoresponder the most?

Remember the part where I said they offer amazing reports and functions?

Well, one of these functions is automatically tracking the best time to send an email to every single address on your list. Then sends it to them automatically at the time. All you have to do is write the email once as you would any other email. Once you click send you will be given the option to send to all now, send at the best time, or schedule to send later.

They also offer you this option with the email series. Meaning, if you’ve already created a 30 days email series they will send them an email every day in the order you set at the time they are most likely to open. All this, without you having to bother with anything after you’ve set up the series the first time.  

7. Email Marketing Is Not A Sales Gig – Ditch The Pitch!

The biggest and most common mistake new email marketers make when trying to make money from email marketing is…

Treat their list like an ever-ready crowd of people just thirsty to look at your link and click it. They assume that the more they tell their readers about a product and bombard them with sales pitches in every email the more sales they will make. This is a great strategy…

To get you unsubscribes and reported as spam.

Think of the subscriber as a mirror reflection of you.

Picture the last time you got on someone’s mailing list, why did you do it? What were you hoping to get from them? 9 out of 10 times you probably signed up because you needed to learn more about a topic. Or hoped they could help you get over an obstacle or sticking point you were faced with.

The last thing you needed from them was an avalanche of emails trying to sell you this and that and everything they come across that can be sold to you. This is not the way to make money from email marketing!

We call this “Value” and you may have read or heard this term being thrown around liberally.

When I first started with an online business and tried to make money from email marketing, that term drove me crazy. I understood what the word meant, just no one gave me concrete explanations of how to go about giving said value. It is different for every niche.

All you need to understand is that value is in information, not information about the product you are selling.

No, information that the people could use to really understand something new, or fix a problem they have.

Your email marketing efforts should come from a place of wanting to help people rather than a place of wanting to take their money.

Our readers are not stupid. They will sense your motive if not right away then eventually.

No one is comfortable trusting someone who just wants to sell them something. I came up with a little system for myself, I email my list daily, I only put links to products no more than 3 times a week.

The other 4 or more days I either send them information in written form…

Or even a free video on youtube about a particular topic that I explain briefly in my email. I sell them absolutely nothing on these.

This creates a relationship of trust with your readers. They won’t hate you for sending them products. They understand you make money from email marketing and are ok with that fact. So if you genuinely help them, and they sense your sincerity, they’ll be more willing to buy from a link you send them.  

8. Hygiene, Hygiene, Hygiene!

List hygiene is one of the most important things when email marketing.

Remember how we spoke about the ESP algorithms and getting blacklisted? This can also happen by sending emails that don’t get opened over and over again. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. If you offer a gift or bonus for people signing up to your list they will sometimes give you email addresses that they don’t check.

Then only check it the one time when they get the gift in their inbox from you. Good luck trying to make money from email marketing with such leads!

Other times you will buy solo ads where the provider is giving them an incentive to sign up. That incentive can be monetary or otherwise and unfortunately you will also get a few “dead” email leads.

So what is list hygiene and how does it help you make money from email marketing?

It is cleaning your list on regular basis from unresponsive leads. I know it’s hard to part away with leads that you’ve worked so hard and spent so much to acquire.

But believe me, keeping them on your list and sending them emails regularly that don’t get opened is doing you more harm than good. First of all, if you are using an autoresponder that charges you by the number of email addresses in your list…

eventually, you will need to upgrade and pay more as your list grows. Let me ask you, why would you want to pay more when you can make room in your current plan for other new leads that open, read, and click through your emails?

Dead leads will also get you flagged sooner or later and the more dead leads in your list the faster and higher likeliness that this will happen.

Plus they ruin the stats that we mentioned earlier and make it more difficult for you to reach the industry averages. List hygiene can be done manually if you are not on a plan or autoresponder that offers you automation.

Otherwise, you can set up your autoresponder automation to do it on your behalf at the intervals you set.

So what is a good cycle for list hygiene?

Opinions on this vary, but most expert email marketers will tell you nothing longer than 3 months. I prefer a strict operation and set my autoresponder to 30 days.

The cleaning up process happens automatically for me if they haven’t opened a single email within 30 days. Then, I also split my lists into readers, clickers, and buyers. This allows me to reward each separately, I suggest you do something similar with your database.

Even if you won’t reward them, the knowledge of who on your list is willing to do what is useful on many occasions.

Now Go & Make Money From Email Marketing

Now that you are armed with sufficient knowledge to get you started and make money from email marketing… you can start taking actions and making decisions that will help you make more money from it!

We’ve covered 8 tips to help you in this article and we’ve just scraped the tip of the iceberg here.

This is not the last article about email marketing. there will be more and we will be getting into more technical aspects in future articles to even further improve your results.

In the meanwhile try to apply anything new that you’ve learned here and you’ll see how your results will improve. Plus if you’re new and trying to make money from email marketing you’re already ahead of at least 90% of the other people about to start but don’t know this information.

I’d love to hear your questions, thoughts, and suggestions in the comments section.

Good Luck!