It’s the old saying that I always thought was insane:
The money in Internet marketing is in the email list.
How could there be money in a bunch of email addresses?
I mean, I get a ton of emails each day. I wouldn’t say that my email address is valuable at all. I give it away to companies all of the time.
At least that was what I used to think.
Until I was able to get an email list built and started using it to its full potential.
Damn. I take back what I said. There is some serious money in a good and clean email list.
Now let’s take a look at why there is such incredible value in an email list.
1 – When someone gives you their email address, they are giving you the right to communicate with them on a daily basis. As a business owner (or a blogger), this means I can send out my information to the subscriber at any time (now don’t spam someone).
2 – A good chunk of people check their email multiple times per day. Compare that to the number of times you check your favorite blog per week. My guess is you check your email 10x more often than your favorite blog.
3 – You can contact your subscribers on multiple platforms. If you are like me, I check my email on my laptop, mobile device, and tablet.
4 – If you provide value, you will have a consistent readership. Email is a push form of communication (blogging is a pull form) and you can push your messaging when it is relevant for you and the reader.
5 – You own the list. It is not dependent on a search algorithm on Google or Facebook’s algorithm for their timeline. You control the list and you can use it as you please (again – no spamming).
Ok Chris – All of this sounds good, but how does this make me money?
That’s a good question. The best way to look at it is with an example of an email push I sent out yesterday.
A few stats before we get started:
– Number of email subscribers: 11k+
– Price of the product being promoted: $59 with $10 off
– Time spent composing the email: 10 minutes
Yesterday, I received an email from one of the people we have an affiliate agreement with for my other blog. It was announcing that he was offering $10 off his new, updated for 2017, copy of an e-book. I read this and I was excited because I had done a 3,000+ word in-depth review of the book on our blog.
Then I got sad. The blog post I wrote was around 1 year old and it was getting very little traffic compared to our newer posts on the blog.
Instead of just deleting the email, I decided to use our email list to send out an email about the promotion and remind people that this blog post was written last year.
After about 10 minutes, I had composed a nice little email using some of the content from the blog post, some info from the promotion, and a little personalization. I had an email and it was ready to be sent.
So I pressed the magic button and sent it out to all of our subscribers.
Now lets take a look at the results:
Total income generated from the email: $541.31
Open rate: 26.2%
Number of clicks: 342 (2.6% click through rate).
If I would have done nothing, I would have been lucky to make $20-$40 off this promotion (this actually happened back in November, so I know that I missed out).
Now we need to take a look and see why this worked:
1 – I provided relevant and timely content to an audience that I knew was already interested in a topic.
2 – I was able to push content to the subscribers instead of hoping they would dig through the blog archives and find my old blog post.
3 – I was able to reach my subscribers over a busy holiday weekend by sending them an email they might see on their phones or tablets.
So I’ll say it one last time:
The money in Internet marketing is in the email list.
The email service I use is Aweber (this is an affiliate link and I will get 30% subscription fees for the lifetime of your account at no cost to you) – I’ll go into more detail on using it in future posts, but it has been a great service that has met all of my needs through the growth of my blog (Note – You will notice that MailChimp is also used by me – I’ll explain why that is the case in a later blog post).
Chris Wilkey (CW)