Creating An Income Through Email Marketing

[This is part of a series on Successful Email Marketing]

Email marketing is perhaps one of the quickest and easiest ways to market your products or affiliate products on the Internet. It’s also incredibly cost-effective, making it an ideal solution for many small businesses. For the small cost of a mailing list service (which can range from a free service like www.yourmailinglistprovider.com to a fully loaded one like www.aweber.com for $20/month) you can build a target listed of potential prospects, and literally bring your market to your fingertips.

Now if you’ve been online for any amount of time, you’ve likely come across experts stating that, “the money is in the list,” or perhaps you’ve even read a few success stories from other business owners who’ve made a lot of money from their lists. With so many people claiming that an opt-in list is an absolute must if you want to increase your online profit, it makes sense to get on board and start building your own mailing list. After all, if all these business owners have allegedly found success, it can’t be all that difficult to do the same right?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as adding a sign up box to your site and watching the money roll in. People aren’t going to buy from you simply because they’re on your list.
So whether email marketing is an entirely new concept to you, or you’re just frustrated by an unresponsive list, here are 3 things you need to do before you can expect to see an income from your mailing lists:

Choose a profitable and targeted niche. To increase your subscriber response, build your mailing list around a proven money-making niche, and target a specific topic within that niche. For instance, let’s say that you’re business evolves around health and fitness so you decide to build a list and send your subscribers a new health & fitness tip each week.

Now you know this niche is incredibly popular and you wind up building a massive list quickly. But, whenever you promote your own products or those you’re an affiliate for, you‘re lucky if you make a few measly sales.

Why? Simply because you’re not targeting a specific area of the health & fitness niche, so this is where choosing a sub-niche comes in.

Your main niche is health & fitness, but you need to narrow that down to just one thing. Perhaps you’re a yoga fanatic and you’ve written a few ebooks on the topic, and even signed up as an affiliate for yoga products. Now instead of trying to reach a huge health & fitness audience in the hopes that you’ll make more money, you need to build a list of people who only want to learn about yoga. Of course your list will likely be smaller, but your yoga based promotions will be laser targeted and you’re bound to see a higher conversion rate.

Give your readers what they’re looking for. If you promised you would give them yoga tips when they signed up for your list, then by golly send them the tips. Don’t continually bombard them with promotion after promotion after they sign up; instead send them a weekly tip, and just 1 promotional email a month. If you do this from day one, your subscribers will be happy readers and they’ll come to expect and like your product recommendations.
Build a relationship with your readers. Before your readers buy anything from you, they want to know that they can trust you. By signing up for your list, they’re looking to you as the expert on your topic, so make sure that you share your knowledge with them on a regular basis. You can do this in the form of articles, blog posts, and even free reports that you’ve written just for your subscribers.

Not only is building a relationship with your readers essential, you also have to consider this: According to IEV Media, the average prospect needs to see your offer at least 3 times before they'll buy.

The first time they see your offer they dismiss it completely.
The second time they recognize it as something they may have seen before and then dismiss it.
The third time they see it they recognize it and think wow I have seen this company/product/service “everywhere” so it must be something worthwhile. So then they read it, consider it and possibly even buy it.

So your readers may need to read a promotion from you at least 3 times before they’ll consider purchasing. A great way to do this is by adding a simple PS to the bottom of your email telling readers about your recommendation, and where they can go to get it if they’re interested.

Building a profitable mailing list won’t happen overnight, but if you’re willing to put in the time and effort that it takes to build a quality list, you’ll eventually see the kind of results you’re aiming for.

Successful Email Marketing