If you don’t have an email list, you’re leaving money on the table. That’s an indisputable fact. It doesn’t matter what your industry is. It doesn’t matter who your customers are. This is a universal fact. As a business, you always make more money with email lists than you do without.

Whether you already have an email list and are failing to tap into its full potential, or haven’t even started the list yet, keep reading. There are several quick and easy things you can implement today and see your profits increase immediately.

Consider setting up a tripwire

It sounds kind of sinister, but it’s just a cool hack that gets people used to buying from you. A “tripwire” is an easy-to-buy irresistible offer that subscribers get right after they sign up. You want it to have a great value-to-price ratio. Think of a product or service that could easily sell for $50, and offer it to new subscribers for just $7. This achieves many important goals.

First, it gets that subscriber used to clicking on your promotional link

The offer is so good, that they’re more likely to click on that link in your email that leads to the buy page. Even if they don’t purchase that super-valuable and cheap tripwire, it’s now more likely that they will click on future links and offers.

Secondly, a high percentage of subscribers are in fact likely to buy this product

If you’re truly giving an amazing value, they would be crazy not to. So you get a high percentage of your subscribers used to the process of purchasing things from you or paying you for stuff.

Thirdly, you get to show off the quality of your purchase process and products

You want to really focus on making the entire process very professional. This will depend on what you’re selling, so we can’t go into every possible scenario, but let’s look at a random example.

Let’s say you’re selling consultation services. You might charge hourly fees, but you’re willing to sell a 15-minute consultation for a very low price as a tripwire. You would want to make the purchase process extremely effortless.

People click on that buy button and are immediately redirected to a beautiful page that explains what happens next. They also immediately get an email confirming their purchase. Make them feel like they’ve bought something expensive, not something cheap.

You would then contact them personally, arrange that consultation and make sure that it’s a super high-quality experience. Give them a chance to see how good your service is when they buy the “real deal”. Leave them imagining how awesome it must be to get the “full service” if the tripwire is that good.

The most important thing is how you segment out the purchasers

If you’re using a quality email marketing solution, you should be able to do segmenting properly. Basically, the moment a subscriber buys that tripwire, your email marketing solution should immediately segment them out to a different segment or list – one that’s based around the idea that these are “buyers”. You can then treat them differently, send them more offers, different kinds of offers, etc.

In fact, the best thing would be to acknowledge their purchase of the tripwire. And then write a sequence that is based on this fact. Your wording and introduction of offers would be different. Something like “Since you liked [tripwire product], you’ll probably like this and that, and you might want to look into xyz”.

Start to learn what subscribers really like, and then segment

When you have a quality ESP, this is easy. It should allow you to study the behaviors and preferences of your subscribers and adjust. Additionally, it should let you easily segment out subscribers by behavior.

Let’s get a bit more specific about this though. You might realize that the most important thing in marketing is to properly target potential customers. Trying to pitch the same offer to every person on the planet just means you’ll go bankrupt fast. Different people need to be offered different things in different ways.

The first thing you want to do is study and understand subscribers

Part of this is a manual learning process. Send different kinds of offers, promote different kinds of services and discuss different kinds of topics. With a good reporting feature, you’ll be able to see what people react to.

You can study the open rates, the click rates, and whether subscribers forward certain emails. From this, you’ll find out whether they like certain topics more than others; prefer different kinds of email structures, etc.

Then you want to automate that segmentation

Fortunately, when it comes to email marketing, this (can be) very easy, with the right tools at your disposal. If your email provider allows it, you should be able to set up different levels of automation.

You may create an automation where if a subscriber clicks on offer A, they get moved to the segment for people who are into those kinds of offers. Or you might design an automation based on open rates. If they open emails from a certain category (topic), they would be moved to a segment catering more to people into that topic.

All of this will improve your earnings

You will make more money off of your email lists if you treat people differently based on their differing preferences. This will also improve your email deliverability, which also increases your profits in the long run.

Stop pitching so much

It might sound paradoxical, but one of the easier ways to make more money is by focusing less on pitching offers. You want your free content to be more valuable and attractive. This will improve deliverability. It means more people will receive your emails and be exposed to your stuff. It will get subscribers to stick to your list longer, which also exposes them to more offers. This, in turn, increases their odds of buying.

Ironically enough, if you push too many offers in the beginning, you sell less in the long run because people will soon unsubscribe. But if you’re more subtle, you will expose them to more offers in the long run. You need to find that balance. It’s easy if you do two things.

First, you have to change your focus

Shift to having the main focus on providing great value in your emails. Make the offers a secondary thing. In fact, you want the offers to be a logically flowing consequence of the free value you’re giving.

An example will probably illustrate this best: you have an email where you teach the subscriber to use a tripod in their photography. You focus on giving the best possible tips, and only then, in the end (in a logically flowing sequence), you recommend some tripods they could purchase.

This isn’t to say you can never have strictly promotional emails. You definitely can. But most of your emails need to be “newsletters” or “value giving emails” where the promotional part is a logical ending to a value giving email.

It’s okay to occasionally throw in strictly promotional emails. But you need to know how many of your emails will be strictly promotional. It’s similar to how you watch the ratio in your regular emails, where you want to have many paragraphs of value before pitching something.

The same is true for the ratio of regular emails vs promotional emails. You need to have a sequence of several regular emails before you send out one promotional email.

Use the tools provided by your ESP to learn what works

You can’t educate yourself into having the optimal balance. You want to use the email reporting features in your email marketing software to learn what’s happening. Study the analytics, delve into the reports and “see what’s happening”. Tweak the frequency, experiment with more pitches, fewer pitches, and different ratios. With time, you will learn what works best.

Create your own product (if you don’t have one yet)

If you’re reading this guide because you already have products and services, but no email list, feel free to skip this section. Oh, and get that email list started today. If you’re in the opposite situation, i.e. you have email lists and aren’t pitching your own products yet, please consider that it might be time to do it.

A lot of people procrastinate on creating their own product because they falsely assume it has to be difficult. In fact, you might be here because you think that creating a product to pitch is difficult, so you’re looking for “an easy alternative”.

Yes, we all have that vision of the perfect product. But you don’t have to wait for perfection to get started. In fact, that’s why as businesses we can have different price points and create products that meet different needs.

If you’re mostly making money through affiliate marketing and offering other people’s products, here’s a quick trick. You can create a “mini product” that fills in a gap left by the affiliate product you’re promoting. It can be very easy to create a simple product that only solves a single issue or need.

And consider this, the people on your lists like you. They won’t be judgmental or think badly of you if you create an imperfect product. Especially if, as we said, it’s a supplement to the third-party products you’re promoting as an affiliate.

Oh, and of course, a lot of this will depend on your specific niche or industry. It might be a physical product, a digital download, or perhaps in your case, the “product” can actually be a service that you provide. Perhaps you can offer paid consultations or any sort of service.

Consider offering a paid email subscription

If your subscribers like your content, you should offer them even better content for a monthly fee. You can create great, helpful content and make money out of it.

Actually, you have to prepare content that they feel they truly need. It should leave them satisfied and anticipating each next email in that “paid subscribers only” sequence. They need to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.

Also, it needs to be exclusive content. It should be content that you don’t put anywhere else. This means you can’t pass off your old posts as paid content because they can easily cancel the subscription. Naturally, you don’t want to recycle your paid content and just copy-paste it into a future blog post. Your subscribers will notice this and feel cheated.

Monetize your email newsletters automatically

This is probably the single easiest way to make more money from your email lists. What if you could install a money-making mechanism in your newsletters that ran on auto-pilot? 

Fortunately, this exists and it is called AdMailr. Our ad-serving platform for newsletters makes the entire process effortless for you. All you have to do is perform the quick sign up and you can get started in no time.

Our platform will automatically display the best ads from the right advertisers in the most optimal spots within your newsletter.

And if you really want to make great profits and keep those readers happy at the same time, consider the fact that we’re now serving native advertising inside of newsletters. This increases your revenue from ads while improving your relationship with email subscribers at the same time.

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