Email marketing is the exactly how it sounds.  If you are an "email marketer" you use email as your medium to promote products/services/offers to other people.   Often times your website visitors will not make a purchase from your site the first time they visit, and once they leave your site, they are lost.  Unless you implement email marketing techniques to capture their name and email address, you will have no way of contacting them again.  If only you could contact them again… would you be able to convince them that the product or service is worth purchasing?  What about purchasing multiple items from you if they are happy with the first one?

Webpage Form (pop-up or inline) -> Your Autoresponder -> Email to List w/ Offer -> You Earn a Sale

Email marketing allows you to create a long term business with long term customers.  It allows you to fully monetize all of your website traffic.  In the next sections we are going to elaborate on email marketing and give you a couple of examples that will make the benefits of email marketing much more apparent.

It is very important that you understand the benefits of creating mailing lists and in particular collecting lists of buyers.  It takes much less work to generate a sale from an existing customer than it does to create a brand new customer.  This is reflected in email marketing campaigns as the same people will buy from you over and over again if you provide them with value and build trust.  A single person on your list could equate to $100's if not $1000's in revenue for you.

Where do you store your email addresses?

One thing that is outlined in the diagram above, is an Autoresponder service.   An autoresponder is a service that enables you to add a simple form or pop-up to your website and automatically store your collected names and email addresses in lists that you can manage.  Most Internet marketers use 3rd party autoresponder services that host all of your data, and provide a facility for you to easily send out follow-up sequences and broadcast emails to your mailing lists.  When building mailing lists of 1000+ people you need to have a system in place to manage your subscribers.

We recommend using either Aweber.com or GetResponse.com.  We personally prefer Aweber as they offer great support (very timely) and their interface is a little easier to navigate than get responses.  They also offer a wider range of options that will help you implement much more efficient marketing campaigns.

Our recommendations:

Aweber.com

Ultimately the decision is up to you as there are many Autoresponder services out there, but Aweber and GetResponse are the most reputable and you will be safe in the hands of either one of them.

A "Game" of Numbers

When we try to explain email marketing to people, the easiest way to do it is through numbers.   These numbers represent the exact goals that people need to achieve with email marketing, and the fact of the matter is this is probably the single most effective method to earn a long-term living online.  At the very least you should understand these numbers so that you can leverage email marketing in future campaigns.   

Email marketing is essentially the process of collecting website visitor's information in exchange for an offer that will appeal to them.  By signing-up to mailing list, someone expects timely and valuable information.  We have multiple mailing lists across many industries and building a list can be done within absolutely any industry that you are interested in.

So let's take a look at some numbers and find out how email marketing can become such a great revenue stream and put things into perspective.  Let's say you set-up a website within an industry like dieting and you drive traffic to a page that offers a free dieting guide & newsletter if someone signs up to your mailing list. 

In this case of this example we will say that you are able to get 500 visitors to your website per day (quite easily done within the dieting industry), and 20% of them (a very realistic number) convert into a sign-up to your mailing list.

500 x 0.20 = 100 targeted leads per day = 3000 email leads per month

After only one month you would have 3000 people that you could contact via email and sell to!  Let's say that for every mail-out that you send to these people, you can convince just 1% of them to buy a special offer that earns you $30 commission, and that you send out one mail-out to your list every week. 

3000 * 1% = 30 * $30 = $900/week * 4 = $3600/month

You would be making $3600/mth after just ONE MONTH!  Obviously the results will vary on how well you connect with your list and how relevant your offers are to their interests, but this sort of success is quite possible.  When someone talks about making $50,000 in 7 days this is because they have a mailing list that they sent an offer to.  Imagine how much more money you would be earning with this campaign if you followed this plan out for a full year!

Capturing Leads

Let's do some more number crunching (who said math wasn't fun?).  If you have a mailing list of 30,000 people and each time you send out an email to your subscribers 10,000 people open the email.  If 1% of those people make a purchase of say $30, you can expect to make $3000.  This is more money than the average person makes in 1 month working at a full time job.  How is it possible to get mailing lists of over 30,000 subscribers?  Some internet marketers have lists of over 300,000 subscribers.  Can you imagine making $30,000 each time you send out an e-mail offering a special product or service? 

The truth is that this kind of success is always being achieved online, and can be achieved by you too.  However, to get this many subscribers on your list, you need to start from zero.  In order to build a big email marketing campaign you need to understand the first step in the process which is how to effectively capture leads and make people actually want to sign-up to your list.  Capturing leads is done through web pages, and more specifically squeeze pages.

Squeeze Pages That Deliver

squeeze page is a single landing page that's sole purpose is to create a mailing list.  Creating squeeze pages is fun, and building a list is also fun.  It is much easier to obtain a subscriber to a mailing list than it is to sell a visitor something straight away, so you will experience much higher conversions because you will be collecting "Leads" (clicks/leads vs. clicks/sales).

You should try creating a squeeze page this week.  If you have not already signed-up for an Autoresponder service, you will want to do so.  As we suggested, we recommend using aweber.com as it is the autoresponder that we use and continue to be very happy with.  By having access to an autoresponder service like Aweber you will be able to create mailing lists easily and efficiently.

You can create a list within any industry that you like.  That is the great thing about mailing lists.  You can essentially create a list of potential customers within any industry.

Free Email Marketing vs. Paid Email Marketing

As we have mentioned in each prior lesson, there are free marketing techniques and paid marketing techniques. Email marketing is a technique that can be used in combination with either.  Depending on which direction you are heading, you will implement your campaigns slightly differently.

Below are the flow diagrams of a Free Email Marketing campaign and a Paid Email Marketing campaign.   You will notice that the only difference between the two is the method in which you use to drive the traffic to the squeeze page.

Free: Article/Forum/Blog Squeeze Page Your List
Paid:Adwords/YSM/Paid Advertising Squeeze PageYour List

There is also an alternate method in which you can create a list which should be touched on again because it is very important.  If someone buys from either your affiliate page, or if you are a product owner, you should concentrate on creating a list of these buyers so that you can contact them in the future.  Offering upgrades, updates, or bonuses to customers is a great way to build a positive relationship and earn trust.

So how do you do this?  Well, the easiest way to collect a list of buyers is to offer a bonus to them upon purchasing through you.   Offer an email address where they can contact you upon purchasing (and send their receipt ID).  In exchange for their name and email address you will send them their bonus…and subsequently add them to your list.

Here is a diagram of what this should look like:

Purchase is Made >> Buyer Sends You an Email >> You Send Bonus >> Add Email Address to List

Like we mentioned earlier, a list of buyers (or existing customers) is at least 3 times easier to sell to again than creating a brand new consumer.  If you do not create a list of buyers you will truly miss out on a huge opportunity for long-term customers.

The Art of Email Marketing Income

The biggest failure that we see in email marketing campaigns is when people fail to offer their subscribers value and simply continue to push promotion after promotion their way.  Sure this will generate sales for a short period of time, but you are essentially limiting your lists potential if you fail to offer value and industry specific information that your list will benefit from.

Creating a responsive list is essentially building a relationship with the people on your list.   Become their friends and to talk to them as you would with friends that you are genuinely trying to help out.  A responsive list will absolutely love buying from you and will always look forward to opening your emails.  This directly equates to dollars in your pocket!

Before you take, you should always remember to give.  People are not going to buy from you if you don't come across as an expert or someone that is willing to give a helping hand.  People will see through promo after promo, so make sure you offer value every chance you get.  You won't regret it, and your bank account won't either.

If you are going to promote another persons product, make sure it is one that you can seriously feel good about promoting to your list.  You need to be able to support the product and you should be able to recommend it to your closest friends.  People who send out "Blind" recommendations about a product or service are attempting to rip people off, and this always results in a broken list.  You may make some sales initially, but as far as long-term customers go, they will be non-existent.  Also, making blind recommendations that you cannot stand behind can give you a bad reputation in a certain industry, so don't do it!

Treat your list like gold, and you will see the benefits.  Treat them like your real friends, be personal, and don't promote without offering value.  If you follow these guidelines you will have very successful email marketing campaigns!

Recommended Read: Inside the List

Inside the List has been one of top received Internet marketing books available to this date.  It is very easy to understand and very affordable for anyone that is interested in email list building and how to earn a full-time income through Internet marketing.  Inside the List outlines everything in a step-by-step manner and elaborates on topics and provides real-life case studies on tests that we have performed.  You do not need this book to succeed with email marketing, but like Beating Adwords it will act as a great reference book. Of course we're not saying that you "have" to pick up a copy of Inside the List to be successful with email marketing, but for those of you who are looking for a VERY in-depth guide on the topic, this is for you.

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