Email lists are crucial for your new blog for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, you can make money with your email list. Second, you can also interact with your followers and ask them to get involved in ways to help your blog/business grow. Asking your audience questions can inspire some great ways to help get your new ideas off the ground.
So many people who have popular blogs and websites all say the same thing: they wish they had started an email list when they first started out. They also say that a majority of their income comes from their email list.
A big email list = greater chance of earning additional income. After all, why just make money from your blog when you can also make money from your email list?
Imagine having the potential to fire one email to thousands of people when you have a new product or a service to sell? This approach works great with niche websites and can help grow your income even quicker.
Sending an email to people who are interested in what you have to say and what you have to offer and love reading your content is vital, if you can create this type of platform for yourself you will give yourself an excellent foundation to earn an extra money on a monthly basis, creating a regular stream of income.
Is Email Marketing Dead?
You may be wondering if email marketing is still important. The answer is that it’s as important as ever. Email presents an amazing opportunity to reach your potential customers. Through email marketing, you can provide your customers with exclusive discounts, awesome limited time only specials and share with them your new product launches as they happen.
Having a strong email marketing strategy is essential for your small business so you can truly connect with your target audience.
Here are 9 reasons why email remains important to any digital marketing campaign.
1. You can keep your customers updated
Staying in touch with your customers is crucial. A great email marketing campaign will focus on boosting engagement with your audience, rather than selling products.
The trick to a great email newsletter is to not make it look like spam. It’s important to offer something of value in every email. This could be a coupon code or some valuable information.
2. You can reach customers in real-time
More than half of all email is opened on a mobile device. This means you can reach your customers at a moments notice. If you pick the right delivery times, you can take advantage of this and increase your email open rates.
3. People engage with emails
Even though email has been around for a long time, it is still thriving as a source of communication. Text messaging and instant messaging haven’t put a dent in email usage throughout the years.
When you place an ad on a website, you may not get much engagement out of it. But when you send an email, the odds are much higher that you’re going to get results from it.
4. Email traffic is easy to measure
When you send out an email marketing campaign, no matter what service you are using, you can get detailed graphs showing you valuable statistics.
You can track a wide variety of things such as delivery rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, click through rates and open rates. By looking at this data you can analyze what subjects work best, what send times work best and what type of content your audience likes.
5. Email marketing is very affordable
Many forms of marketing are expensive. Placing an ad on a popular website in your niche could cost you thousands of dollars per month. Likewise, you can spend a lot advertising on Google and Facebook.
Email marketing on the other hand doesn’t have to cost a lot. Some services even allow you to send email completely free under a certain subscriber count number.
If you want to automate the work flow to send personalized bulk emails to your subscribers, you can use any one of the powerful yet affordable marketing automation tools available in the market.
6. You can send targeted messages
When you collect emails from your website or blog, it’s a good idea to create different lists to categorize your audience.
If your blog has a section on real estate, another on investing and another on small businesses. Then it would be best if you had 3 different email optin forms. Each of these forms would capture emails and add them to their own unique email newsletter. The more targeted your newsletter is, the better your future engagement will be.
7. Send emails increases brand awareness
You can tweet all you want, but nothing beats email to increase your brand’s awareness. Email marketing gives you the option to get your brand seen as often as you’d like.
Now you don’t want to send daily emails (unless your industry is fast-moving like stocks). But at the very least a weekly email is more than enough to keep your brand visible and on the mind of your customers.
8. You can send personalized offers
When you collect someones’ email address, you can also choose to collect other information about the user.
For example, you can ask for their first name, email and their birthdate. With just these 3 pieces of information, you can create highly customizable and personalized emails.
When it’s their birthday month you can send them a coupon or a special offer and then send them another email on the actual day, wishing them a happy birthday.
Every email should also have their name at the beginning so as to draw their attention to it.
You can also personalize emails further by sending seasonal emails where you have a sale or an offer based on a holiday.
9. Everyone checks their email often
Email marketing has always been effective because it reaches your potential customers directly. But email is now more personal than ever. Most people have push alerts activated on their smartphones so users are alerted immediately as emails are received.
So as to the question of whether email marketing is dead, the answer is a resounding no.
This video on YouTube by Neil Patel explains in more detail how he grows his email list:
“2 Ways to Grow Your Email List FAST (How I Captured 700,000 Emails)”.
How To Build Your Email List
OK, so you are probably thinking currently “You are telling me that I can make money with email lists, but how do I get one??” …Good question!
First off, you are going to need a website, you need somewhere for people to find your services and products, e.g. a niche website.
If you are looking to create a niche website we have a section here to help get you started.
Once you have your website up and running with plenty of great content added, you can start to create an email opt-in.
Not sure what an email opt-in is? Basically, it is an incentive to get someone who is currently visiting your website to sign up to your email list.
Free Mailing List Service
That is one of the joys of having a website in this day and age….you need to give away lots of free content, and remember that everyone is now doing that so your free giveaway will need to be really good to inspire people to sign up to your email list.
To create your email list and opt-in you need to sign up to a company that provides such a service, I would recommend using Mailchimp, their basic service is free up to your first 2000 email sign-ups, so you should have no costs to pay out for a while.
You can sign up to Mailchimp here.
A very in-depth look via this video on YouTube shows you the exact steps that you need to take when it comes to using Mailchimp as your email sign up service provider:
“How To Use Mailchimp Step By Step Full Tutorial For BEGINNERS (Free Email Marketing)”- watch the video on YouTube here if you prefer.
Building an email list can be hard work and a very slow process… don’t expect to get hundreds or thousands of sign ups straight away, be patient and keep offering great content and hopefully, people will be happy to provide you with their email address and click on your subscribe button.
Just remember, if you are to make money from email lists, you will need to work on the basis that the process is a marathon, not a sprint.
Being optimistic and realistic though will help you believe in yourself more, so with that frame of mind in place, work hard on reaching your first 100 email subscribers. That should be a simple enough target for you to hit.
How To Get E-Mail Subscribers When Your Blog Is New
This video on YouTube provides you with some great tips on how to get your first 100 email subscribers and to help you earn money from email lists.
“How To Get Your First 100 Email List Subscribers”
THE RIGHT WAY TO MAKE MONEY FROM EMAIL LISTS
If you want to make money from email lists there is only one option – NEVER oversell.
Think of this as an example, do you like salespeople knocking on your door? Or perhaps phoning you up? Probably not…I know that I don’t, it can become very annoying, you tend to slam the phone down or not answer the door.
If you want to make money from email lists then your way of thinking needs to be along the lines of the person slamming the phone down, how would you like to be sold a product or service? Be constantly harassed? No probably not, so how about if someone provided you with lots great advice and content about a niche that you are interested in? with the occasion selling email in between? I think you would like that approach much more, so that’s how you need to run your email list.
Again, if you are serious about your business, taking the correct approach is critical for Three reasons:
- You want to keep people on your list and not have them click unsubscribe
- The content and advice that you providing on your email list makes people want to click on the links from your email broadcast and have them visit your website
- You want to make money from with email lists
When you first set up your email list, make sure that create a detailed sequence of auto-responders, these will be a set number of emails that your new subscribers will receive from you e.g a welcome email followed by some great advice over several more emails. It is then important to keep this kind of approach up, you need to be emailing your list at least once a week or at the very least once every two weeks, this approach keeps your subscribers interested in the free content that you are providing and it also gets them used to receiving emails from you on a regular basis.
So when do sell? Honestly, it really does need to be as little as often and only when you have a really great offer to provide to your email list. Some examples would be when you have a new book for sale on Amazon and then offer the book at a discounted rate as an exclusive to your subscribers, or when you have a discount code for a course that you are offering yourself or perhaps or behalf of a fellow website owner that you are friends with.
Selling on an infrequent basis but with enough of an offer to make people click and make a purchase is the only way you can make money from your email lists, work on the phrase that “less is more”.
As I mentioned at the start of this article, asking your subscribers questions related to your website and business will also help you in the long run, when you are working on few ideas along the lines of new article or ebook cover design etc. you can ask your subscribers for their opinions and advice, make them feel involved in some big decisions and feel part of your business family, this approach will grow your business in the right way in the long term.
WHEN SHOULD YOU START SELLING TO YOUR EMAIL LIST?
When it comes start selling products etc. to your email list, you really want have sent out at least 4 or 5 solid emails full of great content before you send out an email selling something, you need to earn people’s trust.
You need to build up trust between yourself and your subscribers, over selling will not make that happen, it will just feel like that you are spamming people and that is a big turn off.
Offering at least 4 or 5 emails before selling to your email list is the approach that Gary Vanerchyck in his book Jab, Jab, Jab , Hook, so this approach is all based around offering much more to your subscribers than working on the basis that you should just take, take, take…that is completely the wrong approach, don’t be greedy and always look to provide your email subscribers with lots of excellent content in the same way that you would when it comes to creating articles for your website.
CONCLUSION
Starting an email list is easy…sign up to a service such as MailChimp, create a couple of free opt-ins and sign up forms that show up on your website,, the hard part is growing your list to a big enough size to enable you to earn an income – or at the very least some extra revenue every now and again – over a consistent period. The approach is the same as it should be for good business ideas, be patient, work hard and believe in yourself, learn from your mistakes and keep trying new approaches until your hit a home and run and see your email list hit some big enough numbers to enable you to earn some revenue.
And that is how you make money with email lists.
