EMAIL MARKETING: The cheapest as well as the most effective way by which any company could reach a targeted customer or group, telling them the word about your products, and earning money in this digital culture. A small business owner or freelancer can do email marketing even from the confines of his room. Here’s how he can get started and make full use of earning through email marketing.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing can be simply termed as the act of sending promotional messages or newsletters to a subscriber list. It could be updates of your products, promotions, or other value-added content that keeps subscribers interested. The idea behind it is basically to build relationships with them which may finally be the paying customers or clients.
Step 1: Choose a Niche
Probably, the very first and most important step for an email marketer entering the sector is to assume that something the person likes and knows how to do, or he specializes in doing it, like:
- Health and fitness
- Personal finance
- Beauty and fashion
- Technology
- E-commerce
- Digital marketing
A niche with a clearly defined niche attracts an audience probably will actually respond to your content and may buy something you’ll be recommending.
Step 2: Email List-Building
Begin the process of making that list of people who actually care about your stuff. How do you get going? Here’s how:
- 1. Create a Lead Magnet: This is some type of valuable resource you’d gladly give away for free for their email address; it can look like an eBook, checklist, discount code, or anything else. Make sure it relates to your niche and addresses a problem of your audience that is suffering.
- 2. Sign-Up Form Create: sign up for an email marketing tool like Mailchimp, Kit, or ActiveCampaign, and create your sign-up form that you could then embed on your website or distribute otherwise by means of your various social media profiles.
- 3. Social Media: Shout out your lead magnet on your social media profiles. You can further also participate in the group or forum relevant to your niche and share your sign-up form with those people.
- 4. Run Ads: Use Facebook, Instagram, or Google Ads to run paid ads in front of hundreds of people with a faster growth list speed.
Step 3: Pick Your Email Marketing Tool
You will also need an email marketing tool from which to send out your emails, manage your subscribers, and campaigns. Here is one of the most popular ones:
- Mailchimp: perfect for newbies as Mailchimp has free and paid plans.
- ConvertKit: Author-reader and blogger-friendly and very user-friendly with powerful automation capabilities.
- AWeber: Email marketing tools most suited for small businesses
- GetResponse: This service comes with features of an email marketing service that include webinars, as well as automation tools.
These services allow you to have an automated series of emails, track your performance, and segment your list according to the targeted campaigns.
Step 4: Engaging Email Content
To keep people interested in your list, you’ve got to give value in terms of the content that you are sending them. Here is how you do it and how you can make it interesting.
- 1. Welcome Emails: Your subscribers are going to get a welcome email into your list along with the lead magnet you promised.
- 2. Education Material: You will be passing on knowledge, advice, or how-to’s about your niche. And it goes from budgeting tips if your niche is personal finance, or different strategies for investment.
- 3. Promotional Offers: Now that you have already obtained the subscribers’ trust, it is now time to begin sending links on products or services that you find your subscribers interested in buying. Chances are in most cases that these will either be through affiliate marketing or your very own products or services.
- 4. Frequency: Send one email per week. You may send it weekly, but you can send it bi-weekly; it’s that making it part of the pattern the subscribers might be waiting for.
Step 5: Monetize Your Email List
When people start wanting to hear from you, it’s about time that you begin making money out of the effort that you’ve put into place by your email marketing. Here are some of the ways through which you can make money off of your list:
- 1. Affiliate Marketing: Advertising another person’s product or services and get paid a commission as a result. Most companies, including Amazon have an affiliate program. You can add an affiliate link to your email; for every sale a subscriber gets through your link you will get some percentage of the sale.
- 2. Selling Own Products: Email marketing is an excellent medium for selling your own products if you have your digital or physical product offerings, be it an online course, an eBook, or even consulting services and selling it to other people.
- 3. Sponsored Emails: After you build a big enough list of interested people, business entities in your niche will pay for sending their promotional messages to your list. Of course, that’s an enormous advantage if it doesn’t require creating or selling anything to earn.
- 4. Membership or Subscription Models: Create a membership or subscription model here where you will be able to sell premium content and resources to your customers. They will start paying month to month only to access the premium content, which may include deeper versions of articles, webinars, or private coaching sessions.
- 5. Online courses: You can earn money online by teaching yourself on any online course via your email list. You can teach any particular skill, which has a relation to your niche, and then market it on your email list to create much hype and start taking the students.
Step 6: Monitoring and Optimization of Your Campaigns
Keep following the performances of your email campaigns continuously. Most of the email marketing tools will come with analytics regarding open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Pay attention to those and develop your strategy even better yet:
- A/B Testing: You can try different subject lines, email designs and call-to-action buttons so you know what works and what does not.
- Segmentation: You divide your email list based on interest and behavior. This will mean that you’re going to send significantly more targeted and relevant emails. Sometimes this will have a huge impact on engagement and sales.
- Automation: Better than sitting 24/7? It is your automated email sequence-a welcome series, cart abandonment email, or something else. This is how you nurture subscribers into paying customers on autopilot.
Conclusion
And e-mail marketing, in turn, is also a very powerful source of income for those who want to earn especially good income staying at home. With support of an involved and interested list of e-mails, valuable content, and relevant products or services, in itself, email marketing can be a business. You are able to gradually deliver value to your readership, build relations with them, and hone your efficiency.
Indeed, it could become a more stable source of income with just the right amount of effort from email marketing: a source wherein one can work anywhere and anytime, depending on his or her planning and means of relating a system to those concerned.
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