How To Make Money With Your Email List – Part Two
What approach you take is important in email marketing. This is especially true when it comes to making money with your email list. In this article, you’ll learn the key ingredients you need to earn money with your list. Also, I’ll discuss targeted advertising and the huge benefit it can bring for both you and your subscribers.
Here are two mind-blowing statistics:
77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns. – DMA
Marketers have noted a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns. – Campaign Monitor
In part one of this article, we covered three of the five essential ingredients for making money with your email list. We’ll now continue with the remaining two ingredients. As we probe deeper, we’ll look at four specific methods used to earn money with email marketing, proven to be among the most successful approaches.
First, let’s review the list of the five essential ingredients necessary for making money with your email marketing list:
- Selecting a strong niche.
- Delivering strong, valuable content and/or products or services.
- Having a list of engaged subscribers.
- Using one or more monetization methods.
- Consistent email list maintenance.
In part one, we covered ingredients numbers one through three. Let’s continue…
4. Using one or more monetization methods
One of the most obvious uses of email is to encourage your readers to buy your products or services. There are several other ways to earn money from your email list as well. You don’t need any products or services of your own. Even if you are selling your own products or services, you can make added income from your email list with third-party offers that will interest your subscribers.
4 Methods To Make Money With Email Marketing
Here are four of the most common methods used to generate revenue through email.
- Selling your own products
- Affiliate offers (selling other’s products)
- Displaying sponsored ads
- Sending your subscribers to other sites
When used in the correct manner, third-party offers are an excellent way to create added income from your email list. They can be valuable to both you and your subscribers.
You might think: “Why would I want to offer my subscribers other people’s products or to send them somewhere else to buy?”
Perhaps subscribers in your niche need products or services to help them which are not products you personally offer. By showing them other products elsewhere that they need, you are helping them. At the same time, there is nothing wrong with you making revenue from referring them to other helpful products and services. It’s a win-win for both you and your subscribers.
Before choosing any methods to create income, you need to consider the offer carefully and ask yourself the following: “Is this offer something that will help my subscribers or that they will find useful?”
If an offer isn’t something your subscribers will find useful – you’re only selecting the offer to earn revenue. I’m not saying you can’t do that. But realize that you’re doing so at the peril of your list. In essence, you’re spamming your subscribers and you run the risk of losing them.
Any third-party offer that you include in your email list has to be relevant. If it provides benefit and value to your subscribers, they will welcome the offer. If not, the offer will likely irritate them. Luckily, there are ways to reduce that outcome – it’s by using targeted advertising. But before we discuss targeted advertising…
The main takeaways from this section are:
— Selling your own products or services is one of the main ways to earn money from your email list.
— The next most common method is third-party offers. You can even use third-party offers as well as sell your own products.
— Third-party offers can be something your subscribers are happy to receive. They can earn you significant income as well.
— Remember to choose third-party offers wisely. Make sure they are beneficial and that they fit within your niche, products or services. If they help or serve your subscribers, they will be happy to receive them.
— Don’t overdo sending third-party offers.
Targeted Advertising
Technology is available for email marketing that can help you provide your subscribers with third-party offers that will match their specific interests. This technology is “targeted advertising.”
The simplest explanation of targeted advertising is this:
Targeted Advertising provides each individual user with an advertisement that targets that user’s specific interests.
Targeted advertising works off a database of user profiles. User profiles contain many different types of information. This includes demographics, online behavior, interests and more. Using these consumer profiles, the technology can pair the most suitable advertisement to match each individual subscriber.
I’ll explain what that means exactly with a simple example. Let’s say you are a company that sells clothing. This also applies to someone running a fashion blog. They both have an obvious challenge. They both have female and male subscribers. Naturally, the clothing needs and interests of females and males are going to be different. Targeting advertising solves this problem easily based on demographics.
For example, the user profile database determines that [email protected] is female. It shows Susie an ad related to women’s clothing. Next, the user profile database determines that [email protected] is male – and that he is a business professional. It shows Joe an ad related to men’s clothing and business wear in particular.
You’ve just read the basic principle of how targeted advertising works. However, such targeting is only a small example of what’s possible. Targeting technology is able to look at much more information and in complex ways. Targeted advertising can consider different interests according to age, shopping habits, Internet viewing habits, device usage, geographic location and much more. Many different parameters exist beyond what I’ve mentioned here. Deeper levels of factoring and more specific targeting are possible.
Here are four of the most common, broad-based targeting methods:
- Behavioral targeting: targeting based upon certain web-based behaviors such as websites visited, web searches, online shopping habits, time on each webpage, things visitor interacts with, how recent online visits were, and much more.
- Demographic targeting: targeting based upon specific generalized grouping factors such as age, gender, income, education and much more.
- Contextual targeting: targeting based upon the context of the content that the ad appears within. The context may look at specific keywords or within a specific, defined category.
- Geographic targeting: targeting based upon a specific geographical location.
Targeted Advertising Providers
Different advertising providers have different amounts of user profile information. For example: Meredith.com has a database of 100 million consumer profiles. Larger databases can achieve broader, or more specific and accurate targeting.
Main Takeaways:
To make money with your email list, you should strongly consider using targeted advertising. Targeted advertising helps ensure that your subscribers are shown offers that match their unique and specific interests. It makes it more likely that you can provide offers of value to your subscribers. This reduces the risk of advertising having a negative effect on your subscribers or causing them to unsubscribe.
5. Consistent Email List Maintenance
Be aware that many people will only subscribe to your email list to get your gift or free information. Once they receive it, they may not unsubscribe, but they may no longer open your emails or click links. They become “inactive” subscribers. Therefore, you need to monitor the performance of your email list regularly.
Earlier I mentioned that you want engaged subscribers and those with “buying intent.” Remove subscribers who do not open your emails over a certain period of time. These subscribers are not helping you. Keeping inactive subscribers on your list will hurt the reputation score of your list.
List Size
You might think growing the biggest email list you can is the objective. Not exactly. Here’s why that isn’t true: A list of 5000 active subscribers beats a list of 15,000 where only 5000 are active. You are wasting two-thirds of your money and resources on 10,000 useless subscribers. Plus, you are hurting your email reputation score which will affect your deliverability with various email providers.
A bigger list will not make you more money. You’ll make more money from a smaller list full of ideal subscribers. Subscribers who take action and those who have buying intent.
You’ll find advice on vital email maintenance tips here.
Main Takeaways From Part 1 and 2:
Making money with your email list requires five essential ingredients.
– You need to be knowledgeable in your niche or field.
– You have to build your email list the right way over time. You do this by providing valuable content to your subscribers, helping them with their concerns and problems. In turn, subscribers become your loyal readers and customers.
– You earn money by selling your products and services and/or those of others. As long as you consistently offer valuable information and help, your subscribers will stick with you.
–As they say: “the money is in the list.” That is only true if your list consists of engaged subscribers. Collecting the biggest possible list of email subscribers is not what you’re after. Subscriber action matters before size. You want a list full of active subscribers who, ultimately, have buying intent. Remove inactive subscribers from your list as they do not help you in any way.