Turning Your Email List into Profit

There is a reason email marketing remains close to the top of many digital marketing priority lists - it works. It is as simple as that. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is the intimacy of email. Your email inbox is one of the most personal spaces you have on the web. If a company makes it into your inbox, you trust them, and you like the emails they send, you're much more likely to buy something from them than from their competitors.

In a nutshell, that is how email marketing strategies work - get people on your list, build trust with them, and get them to open and read your emails.

This article assumes you have achieved some success in getting people to sign up to your list. These tips will show you how you can turn that list into profit. But a word to the wise first - the quality of your list is the biggest factor that will impact your results. If your email list is made up of people who genuinely and knowingly subscribed to your list, you will have a much better chance of turning them into paying customers than if you use some of the more dubious methods of email list building - including buying lists.

There are five crucial steps to turning an email list into profit:

1. Go Easy On Selling

One of the quickest ways to get unsubscribes to your email list is to bombard the recipients with sales messages. It should be the exact opposite. You should give your subscribers loads of useful and helpful content for free. This content should be exclusive to people on your email list.

In fact, the first few emails you send to a new subscriber should contain nothing that will generate you money - it should all be free. The idea is to win the subscriber's trust and show them it is worthwhile to open the emails you send.

Your email list does have to make money though, so you should start introducing your marketing and sales messages after the third or fourth email. Try to work them into the content, however, and never send an email where the sole purpose is trying to sell something.

2. Have A Monetization Strategy

You will need a monetization strategy that suits your business and industry. Here are some ideas:

• Affiliate links - Include affiliate links in your emails or on blog posts on your website that your email links to. The best way to be successful with this strategy is to only include links from products that you have actually tried and genuinely recommend.
• Offer a subscription service - You can offer a premium service to your email subscribers. This could be access to premium content or additional features on a product or service you sell.
• Sell a product - If you use your website to sell products, you can incorporate sales messages for those products in your email marketing campaigns.
• Create products to sell - You can also create products to sell through your list. Popular examples include eBooks or video courses.
• Sell your services - If you provide services (web design, graphic design, web programming, SEO, marketing, PR etc.), you can sell your services. Potential clients will often sign up to your list to get a better understanding of what you are about before they buy.
• Display partner messages or banner advertising - If you have a big list or a respectable number of subscribers in a lucrative niche, you might be able to do advertising deals or enter into a partnership arrangement with another company.

3. Use Autoresponders

The first emails you send to a new subscriber are often the most important. You might not get any sales from those emails, but it can set the tone for the relationship. Your new subscriber will decide if your emails are spam, annoying, or helpful by the first couple they open.

Therefore, you should give your best content in those emails, and the best way to do that is through an autoresponder. Autoresponders allow you to set triggers so that emails are sent at precise intervals. This ensures new subscribers are contacted promptly, plus you can measure results to get the best interval for each new email.

In addition, you can use autoresponders in more detailed ways once you get deeper into developing your email marketing list. For example, you can set an autoresponder to send a particular message when someone buys one of your products.

4. Segment

The more personal you can make your emails, the more you will convert subscribers into sales. That means segmenting your list and sending different messages to each segment. This can be achieved in a number of ways depending on your business and how you've decided to monetize your list. One simple way is by segmenting it into three:

a. People who buy from you regularly
b. People who have bought from you once
c. People who have never bought from you

You can send loyalty offers to the first segment, returning customer offers to the second, and introductory offers to the first.

5. Measure And Improve

This is the last step on this list, but it is probably the most important. Every email marketing strategy can be improved, and the way to do that is by testing, measuring, and then making changes. You should check absolutely everything about your strategy, such as:

• The subject line of your email - What gets the best open rates?
• Day of the week - Which is the best day of the week for open rates, and what is the best day for conversions?
• Time of day - As with day of the week, what is the best time of the day to send your email?
• Email body - Test designs, wording, length, button styles, and calls to action
• Landing pages - If you want people to read your email and then visit your website, test your landing pages.

By following these steps you will be on your way to making a profit from your email list. However, it is an ongoing process that requires continuous list building, content creating, and testing.