Having an email list can be incredibly profitable and rewarding, but you have to do it right. What’s the point in having a HUGE email list if you can’t monetize it?
Several things come to mind when you think about how to make money with an email list. One of the most common questions that I get is “how big should my email list be before I start seeing profits coming in?”
The answer to that question may surprise you. It’s entirely possible to have a list of 300 subscribers and be more profitable than someone with 1K subscribers.
That’s because RELEVANCY is way more important than quantity. Think about the following example for a second. If you were to offer gaming equipment to a thousand people that have never played a single computer game in their life, how likely is it that someone will end up buying from you?
Best case scenario, a couple of them will buy a headset or something else as a gift for someone, but most people will not even bother with opening that email in the first place.
What if you were to offer a discount on some HIGH-QUALITY gaming tech to a list of 300 professional gamers? You will most likely end up making way more than just a couple of sales.
Other factors play a big role in this such as building trust with your audience, but if you don’t offer them anything relevant to what their interest are, it doesn’t matter how much they trust you.
Now that we’ve covered the most important part of monetizing your list, let’s discuss everything else that you can do to ensure that your efforts don’t go to waste.
Build Trust With Your Email List
Let’s say that you already have an email list of people with specific interests, and you know exactly what they are. The next step to ensure that you make money with your email list is to build trust with your audience. This should go hand in hand by offering relevant content. One cannot work without the other.
Think of it as pieces of a puzzle that you need to put together, to ensure that you are profitable with your email marketing. If you always pitch a product or some kind of offer with every email that you send out, without any actual value, then don’t expect to be making a lot of sales.
By knowing your audience, what they like, and what they are interested in, you will also know what kind of problems are they facing. The key here is to make sure that you help them solve a problem that they are having.
If you manage to do that for free, without asking for anything in return, you will build trust. There are many ways that you can make money from your list. You need to have a clear path as to how exactly you plan to monetize your email list.
You can always get help with that by exploring the many different email marketing courses out there, but my advice is to always look for unbiased reviews if you do consider paying for one.
Here are a few examples of monetizing your list that you can consider.
Sell Your Own Products or Services
If you already have your own products or services, then you probably know what your ideal client looks like. If not, then maybe it’s time to figure the exact struggles that people in your market are dealing with on a daily basis and offer them something that can solve at least a portion of these problems for free, in exchange for their email.
That way, they will be more than happy to give you their best email, and it will increase the likelihood of them interacting with your future messages. If you don’t want to wait around, you can use a tripwire.
That’s an affordable product that is offered to a new subscriber as soon as they sign up. The tripwire should be something inexpensive, ranging from $5 to $20 or more. The idea behind using this method is to speed up the buyer-seller relationship between you and your subscribers.
Promote Other People’s Products and Services
This is what affiliate marketing is all about. Giving away free value here plays a bigger role, simply because, affiliate marketers, can sometimes be perceived as overly promotional. After all the main job of an affiliate is to connect people with the right products for them.
This means that affiliates have to take things one step further in order to ensure that they actually know what their audience is looking for, and how to provide it to them, without looking too salesy.
No one will open your emails if all they see is you pitching a bunch of different stuff over and over again. Make it worth their while, and you will see an increase in engagement and open rates.
Create a Paid Subscription Newsletter
If you can give enough value to your email readers, they will be interested in your paid newsletter. This means that you have to ensure that you deliver only the best quality, and it should be able to exceed what you are already offering for free.
You will have to commit to a regular publishing schedule up to twice a week. Remember, this is not the place where you should pitch your products or services. This is where you can provide people with unique content, filled with value to the readers.
If you do decide to create something like that, you will probably need a bigger audience, because a paid subscription newsletter should not be too expensive ($5 – $15 per month), otherwise most people will choose not to take advantage of it.
Also, you will have to keep up with replying to your audience on a regular basis, and if you are a solopreneur with a big following, it will be time-consuming. However, if you are able to do it right, it’s going to be well worth every hour that you invest in perfecting your newsletter.
I am a passionate blogger and developer sharing business tips. I Help others solve programming problems on various online forums.
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