The fact is that most marketers are failing to fully utilize email monetization. There are several reasons for this, but the main one merely involves ignorance of all the options and ways to monetize. If you’re an email marketer you need to learn how to monetize emails in a variety of ways. Fortunately for you, this guide will cover everything you need to know, so keep reading.
Why Email Marketing Is Still An Untapped Channel
All marketers know this fact – email marketing dominates when it comes conversion rates. It is the one marketing channel that offers both the best quick returns on investment as well as the best long-term ROI. What most marketers don’t fully realize though is that they’re severely under-utilizing this channel.
Ironically enough the fact that it works so well is the reason that so many marketers are lackadaisical about it. They set up this basic email campaign, see some good results and move onto experimenting with other channels.
It can feel a lot more fun to experiment with the latest social media trends than to delve deeper into your email marketing. The largest increases in profit, however, reside in learning how to make your email marketing work harder and then how to monetize email lists properly.
In this article, we’re going to cover the latter subject – email monetization methods. However, these methods will only work as well as your email marketing does. This means that if you’re not utilizing the full potential of email marketing, the monetization will be suboptimal as well.
We cover all of these subjects in depth on our blog, so be sure to bookmark the blog and start reading when you can. For now, let’s look at the main four areas that marketers overlook.
1) Email Automation
Surprisingly enough, despite the great advances in email automation technology, most marketers are failing to utilize it. Fortunately for you, the team at Emercury has worked really hard to make email automation easy and accessible to everyone. Even our forever-free plan includes all the fanciest automation features so that you can start learning how to utilize it today.
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2) Segmentation
Most marketers completely fail to segment customers based on the factors that differentiate them. This is crucial to monetization. Fortunately, Emercury makes segmentation easy. Aside from the basic segmentation feature, you can also segment users based on personal characteristics, as well as based on how they interact with your emails. Or let automation handle it for you. |
3) Personalization
While segmentation is about organizing people based on their differences, “personalization” is about the art of making each recipient feel like they’re getting a personalized experience. Email personalization is quite a broad subject and it involves learning about several fascinating areas such as behavioral marketing, how email automation helps you personalize better as well as how to write in a personal manner.
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4) Split-testing
As a marketer, you should be constantly testing and analyzing the results of everything that you do. Just as you can analyze and test different types of ads to see which ones work better – you can also analyze and test different parts of your email marketing. Fortunately, Emercury makes it very easy to split-test your email campaigns, and yes, we include this feature in the forever-free-plan. |
Now, there a lot more things to fully utilizing and mastering email marketing as a channel, and we cover all of them in our newsletters and blog. However, mastering these 4 aspects is a must if you’re serious about monetizing your emails.
The Email Monetization Journey
Most newbies to email marketing will mix up their priorities. For instance, they might choose to spend months developing their own “ultimate product”. This is even though they don’t have a track record of getting their list to buy stuff in the first place. Hint – it’s much easier to test your list’s ability to buy stuff when you promote other people’s products, services and events.
Another common mistake is that a marketer will rush into selling and promoting stuff too soon, long before the list is ready. And how do you get that list ready? You “feed” the list with a ton of high-quality valuable content for free. Only then will they trust you enough to buy the things you ask them to.
While it is possible to monetize your list by following an un-optimal strategy, we would recommend following our guide. This is the closest thing you will get to the “optimal journey” in your quest to monetize your list. Try to look at and explore these methods in the sequence that we list them. Not all of them will resonate with you, and you might choose to skip some of them.
Create High-Quality Free Content
One of the first things that you should think about when growing your list is what value will you offer your readers (or visitors) in return for their subscription. After all, there are a lot of marketers, bloggers and online businesses vying for their attention, so why should they choose you? This question is crucial for developing a relationship of trust with your potential customers. You are essentially proving to them that you are not taking their subscription for granted.
Really think about the content you’ll give away for free. It’s ok to start out by creating a “7 day email sequence” made up of your most popular blog posts. But don’t stop there.
You want to treat your newsletter as a premium content delivery service. As “cheesy” as this sounds, you want people to get excited every time they get an email in your inbox. And yes, that is actually possible if your content is just that good. It’s not easy, but it is simple. Create content that provides a ton of value as a reward for their subscription.
In essence, you are treating them with the respect they deserve, and establishing a meaningful relationship that could lead to monetization. Never compromise on quality. Free in this case, does not mean that you can slack off and send whatever random content you stumble upon.
Set Up An Affiliate Program
In the past year, there was a rumor floating around marketer circles that email providers are “starting to ban affiliate marketing”. Many marketers started believing the rumor, and panic started to spread. Many email services and gurus had to come out and settle the confusion, by explaining an important distinction.
The only thing being frowned up is stupid valueless attempts at affiliate marketing. If your emails amount to nothing more than ads for an affiliate product, then be prepared to have very low engagement and possibly not backing out of the cost to mail. If you send your reader a good page of high-quality valuable advice/content, then organically find a way to mention an affiliate offer, send an affiliate offer or even send them a sponsored offer – this is a good win-win.
Affiliate marketing is only an issue when done selfishly. Don’t send your readers what amounts to be thoughtless “get this affiliate product now or perish” type of email. You’re only losing trust with the readers and that leads to higher attrition of your subscriber list.
If you’re wise, you can develop a really good system where you’re giving your readers genuine life-changing advice or resources. Yet at the same time, you’re also sending them to an affiliate offer that complements your advice or that vertical.
Building a relationship is the key here and then determining how much value vs to how much to send affiliate offers then becomes your new metric. I’ll break this down a bit in a future post.
Promote Sponsored Content
Promoting other people’s content for a fee is an extremely underutilized way of monetizing your emails. Print publications have been doing it for well over a century, but web publishers have only recently started adopting this model. In fact, as of today, this trend seems to be blowing up and taking over the web. Expect to see sponsored content on a huge chunk of the web in the near future.
The good news for you is that email publishers are still lagging behind in this trend. While web publishers are adopting it in droves, there’s a slight delay with email publishers. That means you will get to reap many more benefits as an early adopter.
Monetize Newsletters With Native Ads
Putting ads in your email messages and newsletters is one of the fastest and easiest ways to monetize your efforts as the owner of an email list. In turn, native ads are the most profitable and effective form of an ad, beating traditional ads by quite a huge margin.
It then logically follows that many email publishers should place ads and especially native ads in their newsletters. Yet, this isn’t the case. Very few publishers have ads in their newsletter, and even fewer still have native ads.
There is actually a very good reason for this “oversight”. Until recently, placing ads in your emails was quite the hassle. Whilst placing ads on a website is simple thanks to things like AdSense, there was no equivalent for email – until recently that is.
As an email publisher, you had to manually find advertisers, set up a deal, and then manually find a way to format that ad and place it in your emails. It is no wonder that few publishers ever bothered.
Fortunately, there is now an effortless way to place ads in your emails. This includes both traditional and native ads. Introducing AdMailr, an ad-serving platform that aims to make this process as easy and straightforward as possible. Give it a try today.
Create And Launch Your Own Product
This is probably the last step you should be considering. Make sure that you’re first making a solid profit through the easier and simpler methods listed above. Once you’ve established that you have a list of “hungry” buyers, product creation becomes a good next step.
The most common reason for this is that most novice marketers make the same mistake when they think about how to monetize email lists. Their very first attempts at monetization go toward creating and selling products. These are usually products that take a lot of effort and time to create. Many of them find that the effort is wasted and gives a very low return.
Although it’s great to have those products in your repertoire, it shouldn’t be your first step. In fact, you should be making a solid profit before you create a single product of your own. By the time you create a product, you want to have an email list full of hungry buyers begging you to produce a product. Despite new and innovative trends in social media and content marketing, the most effective way to get people to buy your products still involves going through their email inbox.
We’re not saying “don’t sell your product even if you have one”. If you have products from before you decided to build an email list, great! Tell people about those products in a meaningful way. Make it an organic part of your email-subscriber experience though. Make it subtle and natural, just like we talked about with mentioning affiliate products. Just because it is your own product, it doesn’t mean the same rules don’t apply.
Develop a paid version of your newsletter
In some cases, your newsletter can actually be the product that you sell. This is highly dependent on your niche and audience. There are certain industries where a “paid newsletter” is a realistic proposition. This might be something highly specialized like a newsletter about a medical field or stock advice.
You have to find out if your specialty is something that warrants a paid-for newsletter. The first step is to trust your gut. Is this possible in my field? If your gut says “no”, then you’re probably right. If the answer is “maybe”, then do a survey or prototype sales letter and find out if there is interest.
Promote Events
You would think that with all of the new ways to communicate over the internet, physical events would be dying out. But that’s not the case. In fact, people still choose to invest in airfare and pay high-ticket items, just so that they can attend an in-person event related to one of their interests, personal, business or otherwise.
Sell Yours Or Someone’s Professional Services
There are many online experts for whom this is their primary type of monetization. Their business model is simple: give a ton of valuable advice for free, and upsell people on personal coaching. If these experts are smart, they make sure to keep their best “free content” for the email list. This is because it is a lot easier to convert an email reader into a paid coaching client.
Free content in the form of blog posts and videos actually serves as a way to get people onto your email lists. You want your free public content to be so good that people say “ok, so what’s in that email newsletter then?”. And in turn, you want your emails to provide a sample of what the paid coaching experience will be like.
Important Tips To Remember
Improve Your Deliverability
It might sound obvious, but the best way to improve your monetization is to make sure that more people actually see your emails. And no, I’m not talking about just growing your list. Even if you implement absolutely no new monetization methods, and your list-size remains the same – your profit per email can still increase, and by a large margin at that.
Sounds implausible? It’s actually pretty simple. As it turns out, most list owners are completely oblivious to things like email deliverability. Many of them just look at the total number of emails on their list, and somehow assume this is the number of people who get their emails. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Depending on the ESP that you use and your emailing practices, your actual deliverability rate might be surprisingly low. And chances are that unless you’ve paid very specific attention to this – your deliverability is probably low.
Choose the right partner
Emercury is the right partner to help you succeed in email marketing. As you learned today, monetization is nothing if you’re failing to fully utilize the power of email marketing. And Emercury is the right partner to help you reach full potential in your email marketing.
Unlike other “email service providers”, Emercury is more than just a “service that sends your emails”. We’re deeply passionate about helping marketers achieve higher profits with their lists. This is why so many high-volume senders keep moving to our service. But hey, don’t take our word for it. Feel free to try our forever-free plan, it takes just seconds to register.
You will get immediate access to (arguably) the most generous free plan in existence. We even include features that others reserve for their enterprise plan and leave very little in reserve. At the very least, you’ll get access to our members newsletter which is jam-packed with content to help you succeed as a marketer.
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Tags: affiliate marketing, branded offers, email marketing, email monetization, native ads, newsletters, segmentation