When it comes to making money online, email marketing is still king. In fact, it works better than ever. Business owners that do not incorporate email marketing in their way of doing business are losing out – big time.

So why does email marketing work so well in the first place?

And in fact, why does it work better than ever? This is actually quite simple. Email marketing is the best way to build a relationship with your current and potential (future) customers. This has always been a tremendous benefit. People are more likely to buy from someone they trust and have a connection with.

Today, however, this is becoming more important than ever. Traditional intrusive marketing is killing itself. People are becoming immune to direct advertising. Nowadays, it looks like a relationship-driven approach is becoming your only choice. In a word, if you’re not utilizing email marketing, you’re leaving a ton of money on the table.

Native ads deserve an honorable mention

There is a way of getting all these cool benefits while piggybacking on the relationship that someone else has built. This is where native ads come into play. A native ad is basically an ad that appears in a publication alongside its regular content.

It looks indistinguishable from the regular editorial content (it doesn’t look or feel like an ad). In that way, you get all the trust those readers already have for this publisher. You get all the benefits of that relationship, without having to build it yourself.

Native ads are typically recognized as something you place on a website. But AdMailr is here to change that. Nothing builds a quality relationship the way email marketing does. So why not have native ads inside of emails?

With Admailr, now you can. We’ve built a truly amazing platform that lets you easily get your ads inside of popular newsletters. You just write your native ad (or traditional display ad), and our system automatically finds the best places to insert it. You do get all the control you need, as you can choose from many targeting options. To learn more or get started, just check out our front page.

Get started with email marketing; here’s what you need to know

Sure, you can use AdMailr to place ads in someone else’s emails. And you should start leveraging this amazing opportunity as soon as possible. But you also want to combine this option with running your own email list. A smart business is one that combines both strategies.

Basically, you want to build your own relationships and leverage other people’s relationships. AdMailr actually helps with both sides of the coin. But more on that later. For now, let’s look at what you need to know about getting started with doing your own email marketing.

The first step, create an email list

It should be obvious, but you need to first identify a quality email provider. Fortunately, over at Emercury, we offer one of the most generous free plans when it comes to email marketing. You can sign up today and start experimenting with even the most advanced email marketing features.

But whichever provider you choose, make sure to learn how it works. Emercury offers a great knowledge base and tutorials for example.

• Be sure that you understand how to configure a campaign
• Learn about the options it provides for capturing email leads
• Explore the different features and see which ones apply to you
• Learn which features you need to start using immediately
• See which features you’ll come back to when you have a bigger list

It’s important to strike that balance of paying enough attention to detail versus doing too much too soon. For example, it’s important to study your email reports and analyze your open rates. But if you have 12 subscribers, it might be a tad too soon for that.

It’s never too soon to start learning, though, especially about things like list hygiene and email deliverability. So make sure to study these things as you go along. The emercury blog has plenty of free learning materials on email marketing.

Build some great incentives for people to opt-in

You know what’s the worst way to ask people for their email? Say “sign up for our list” and offer no further reasons why they should do it. Even if you have super-enthusiastic followers, most will not sign up without being given a reason why. And that’s just in terms of your raving fans.

If you want to get the most people to sign up, even people randomly stumbling on your website, you need to learn about incentives, i.e. promising people something of value in exchange for their email address.

Here are a couple of popular incentive-based approaches

• Perhaps you might offer a free PDF report. This would be a lengthy guide that has value to people in your niche. They receive it as a gift when they join your newsletter.
• Or you might offer a discount coupon for the products that you sell. This is an option for those who have stores that sell physical products. They would get the coupon after subscribing.
• You can even offer a “Free 7 Day Email Course”. With this popular option, you deliver those daily lessons by email. And when the course is finished, they automatically continue as subscribers to your general newsletter or email campaigns.

So, in summary: You need to identify some “great reasons why” people should sign up to your list in general. You can outline these reasons under your general sign-up form. But additionally, you want to create additional incentivized reasons that encourage people to give you their email address. This will take some experimentation, but over time you will discover great incentives that fill your list with new subscribers.

Work on your writing craft, make those emails feel personal

One of the cornerstones of a successful relationship with your subscribers is trust and integrity. Being a good writer allows you to become an authority in the eyes of your readers. So you definitely want to focus on mastering this skill.

When it comes to email marketing though, you want to pay special attention to develop a casual tone. You want your emails to feel personal. Almost as if they were written for each participant individually.

If you get a lot of people hitting reply and responding to your automated emails as if it were a personal email, you’re doing it right. And if you haven’t gotten such responses yet, work on your craft until you do.

Don’t send a barrage of emails

Sending emails seems straightforward, but there’s always a catch. You don’t want to send too many emails and seem needy or desperate.

If you send one today, don’t send another one tomorrow. The exception to this rule is if you specifically had people sign up for something like this. Perhaps you offer a “7-day course” and people will get an email every day in the next seven days.

But if people are signing up for a general email list, as a general rule, two or three times a week is about right. Alternatively, “an email every couple of days” is also a good “starting guideline” to follow.

But don’t let yourself slip into obscurity either

Never have a subscriber that goes a long period of time without getting any emails from you. You want to get them habituated to getting emails from you. If you go missing for weeks or even months at a time, you can become a “random stranger in the inbox”.

Many people will forget how they signed up for your list in the first place. They will see your email after a long gap and decide to unsubscribe. Even worse, they might mark you as a spammer.

Consider having a schedule

Scheduling is another strategy you can try in attempting to get that balance right. If you create a specific time and day of the week when you send out emails, you’re making it easier for yourself and your subscribers.

You’ll know that there’s a day in the week when an email should go out. This saves you the mental energy of having to decide when to do it. Your subscribers get used to this schedule and know at which time they should expect an email from you.

Tim Ferriss does something like this with his “5-bullet Friday” series. He has an email that goes out each Friday, and people are used to it. In fact, they look forward to getting that “Friday email from Tim”.

Note, each list and industry is different. All of these suggestions are “safe guidelines” that work quite well for most people. To find what’s optimal for you, however, look to the next tip.

Study your reports, learn what works

Here’s a little-known secret about email marketing: nobody can teach you what’s “best” for your email list. This is why high-quality email providers provide good analytic tools. They let you delve deep into what your readers are doing, so that you can find out what works well and what doesn’t.

You want to study those email reports and learn what works. Which topics do people respond to positively? When do they have a negative reaction? Is it because of what you’re sending them or how often you do it? If you take the time to study and experiment, you can learn to “feel the pulse” of your subscriber base.

Work on your list hygiene

As important as growing your email list is, keeping it in order is just as important. This is known as “list hygiene”. It might sound “boring”, but it actually affects you in a huge way.  

If you let your list “get dirty”, it actually means your emails get less and less effective over time. You actually get less opens, fewer clicks and much less profits for every 1000 emails that you send. This is because over time, the list will accrue fake emails, honeypot emails, some of the subscribers will become inactive, etc.

Maintaining proper list hygiene means you can get as much as twice the results from your list. This is because of things like improved deliverability and reputation. But also because you’re paying for sending emails that don’t convert.

If you want to learn more about this, the Emercury blog has many tips on list hygiene and email deliverability. Furthermore, it’s the only ESP that has list-hygiene included with every account, along with a deliverability manager.

Monetize your email list

The end goal of all types of marketing is producing profits. The same is true when it comes to email marketing. After you apply all the steps listed above, you’ll actually want to learn how to best monetize. There are many quality ways of monetizing your email list, and you’ll want to look into them.

But consider that we’ve gone out of the way to build the most effortless and easiest way to profit from your emails. Introducing AdMailr – an innovative platform that lets you sell ad-space inside of your emails. It uses technology that was crafted to make the process automatic.

You just have to configure a few settings, and the platform does the rest. It automatically places the ads in the positions most likely to create profit for you. Additionally, you get all the control you need in terms of what kind of ads can and cannot appear in your newsletter.

Give us a try today, it might just be the most important step you make in your email marketing endeavors.

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