How Does Email Marketing Work?

Have you already heard the saying that “money is on the list”? What does it mean exactly?

If you have many email addresses on your list, you have a great possibility to contact your subscribers directly and as many times as you want to.  This is one of the easiest ways how you can promote anything you want. And the bigger your list the bigger your potential of earning you have.

OK, I admit it is not as easy as it sounds, therefore let’s break down How Email Marketing works.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing as a part of affiliate marketing is considered one of the best and long-term income-producing methods on the internet.

It is  also called opt-in marketing and can be divided into 3 following  steps:

• You ask your visitor for an email in exchange for a guide or tutorial which you have created.
• They will provide you with the email and name
• You can offer them valuable information and eventually marketing promotions

You are now in direct contact with your potential buyer.

Do you know why email marketing is the best way how to promote a product(s)? It has been proven that most people spend more time on their emails than on social media or other search engines.

People tend to hang out on their email since it is their territory. A place where they feel safe just like they would feel at home. Before you start your first email marketing campaign you want to remember this fact.

Therefore, please treat these people with respect. You must ask their permission before you step into their territory.
Don’t forget that you should behave like you are a guest.  

You must show them that you have something valuable for them, something that they might be interested in. (I use might, since you never know what mood they are just in, and the last thing we want to be mistaken for is a used car seller)

When we respect the above, then the sequence of email marketing looks like this:

Here are the top 3 advantages of email marketing

• Once you have that contact list, you can reach your potential customers as many times as you want – with no costs.
• You communicate with your list (people), so you can raise a discussion and see what people are interested in. You can promote also a different product, based on communication with your subscribers.
• You can automate the whole process.

To maintain a good relationship with your list, you want to keep delivering valuable information. You do want to help them and also what is very important, you want to humanize your brand/website.

Of course, it does not need to be done in one email. You will spread out this information into 6,7 or 9 emails. Out of these 7-9 emails, have 2 where you talk a bit about yourself – just be genuine and show them that for example what mistakes you have done.

Connect with these people also on an emotional level.  And keep in mind the golden rule – deliver more than is expected.

Most marketers do just a bare minimum; be different and let me repeat myself: do more than is expected of you.

Automation – Benefits of Autoresponder

Let’s elaborate on the 3^rd advantage listed above – Automation.

I was mentioning that you want to keep delivering value and information to your subscribers. You need to do it let’s say in 7 separate emails which are sent out in a time frame of 5 weeks or so. If you have 15 subscribers you can easily manage it manually, even if some feedback is required.

But your list will grow, and you can easily have 20,000 subscribers. To manage such a list manually is an impossible task.

Therefore automation comes into place. With an automated tool, email marketing becomes so powerful. Such a tool is called Autoresponder.

Everything regarding email communication that you can imagine, such autoresponder can automate, from subscriptions, emailing, and reporting to a thank-you page, and also you will be able to see who opened your email, and who did not. Based on that, you can create a sub-campaign for those who did not respond.

One of the most favorite tools is Aweber.
This autoresponder offers also a free trial. If you do not have a budget yet, do not buy it. It is not that cheap and meanwhile, you can manage a small list manually as well, or you have the option to use free autoresponders as well.

They have limited features. Once you start to generate revenue you should invest in Aweber. It will make your life much easier.

How To Choose a Niche – Which One Is Better, Broad Or Small

Many people think that it is convenient to start with a broad niche. That way they can reach more people. That is not entirely true and here is why:

Let’s say you want to pick a niche – Furniture. That is a very broad one it is so broad that it is not a niche anymore. When you focus on such a wide term, you will have a hard time targeting the right people. Think about the term Furniture

Is it furniture for the office? For kitchen? Is it something about how to build furniture?

So let’s narrow it down.

Furniture for house -> Bedroom -> Bed -> Mattress.

Here we go, we have our niche. It is much easier to target people interested in mattresses much more efficiently than in the entire Furniture industry.

The goal here is to get as high a conversion as possible. Your information (and eventually promotion) regarding the wooden bed frame is interesting only to the list of people who genuinely have an interest in bed frames.

Remember that relevance is the key.

TIP. If you need to make sure what your niche is, go to Amazon and browse over the categories you like. Also, go check  http://wikihow.com/ and see what kind of questions people ask.

Getting Traffic – Way to Start Building a List For Email Marketing

There are 2 ways of getting traffic. It is PPC or pay per click and then there is the organic traffic. Once you have the traffic on your site, you can start to build a list.

• Keyword relevance is crucial also when it comes to PPC. For this purpose, we can go to Google Keyword Planner (GKP), or Jaaxy.

You want to start with a broad keyword. Do the research and see what is in the results. Pick 5 or 6 keywords. You can do the same research for these 5-6 keywords. This way you will have a list of keywords for your campaign

• The article marketing technique is the best way how to get traffic to your email marketing campaigns. And it costs nothing. The downside is though, that it requires time. The keyword research is in this case even more crucial since you want to consider the competition as well. You do not want to use keywords that have high competition – More about KW research

TIP:
There is a simple technique how to find how many websites use that particular keyword. Just type your KW in quotes “ ”. Google will give you the exact number of such websites.

Landing Page – It Can Be Any Page or Post on Your Website

The landing page is the first page the visitor lands on within your website, regardless of the traffic source he/she is coming from. On the landing page, you can also have an affiliate link where you want to sell some products.

Since we are talking about Email marketing, our landing page is called a Squeeze page.

And remember what we talked about at the beginning? We are going to build a relationship. That means we are not selling anything (at least not at this stage).
We are building a list, so we want to have only a name and email address.

This is the sole purpose of the squeeze page.

A squeeze page should have these 3 attributes.

Headline

This is the first thing people will see. Ideally, you want to include your keyword with the headline, so people will spot the very same thing they are looking for.-> relevance

Offer

This is the core of your squeeze page. It can be a guide or tutorial. The thing is that it must interest enough that people get excited about it.

Email and name section

This is part of the squeeze page where people simply put their name and email address. In my opinion, the first name is enough, so the visitor is not that concerned about giving away his details.

What Products to Promote – Affiliate Programs

By now we know how to set out a landing page, we know how to get traffic we even know how to maintain and build our relationship with the visitor. We also have decided what to promote.

But how are we going to promote it?

Here is the answer: we are going to join one or more affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs belong to affiliate networks.  Such an affiliate network usually allows you to promote more than hundreds of programs. The thing is that you do not have to sign up for each program separately.

You create your account with the affiliate network and you are good to go to promote any program within that affiliate network.

I am sure you already heard of ClickBank. That is one of the affiliate networks among others like for example:

• CJ Affiliate by Conversant (formerly Commission Junction)
• LinkShare
• Pepperjam Network
• Rakuten Marketing
• EU (Europe)

It is recommended to sign up for more affiliate networks, so you have a wider range of doing business.

How to find any affiliate program is very easy. Go to Google or another search engine and type your favorite niche – like furniture bedroom.

In the search bar just write the “furniture bedroom affiliate program”.

When you choose any of the affiliate programs and you are going to sign up, it can happen that you will be redirected to the page of Affiliate Network. Just continue with the sign-up process and once you are done you are ready to promote the program you have chosen in the first place.

Do you know what another beauty of email marketing is?

Once you have that list of subscribers and you see that they are interested in one kind of product, let’s say mattresses for people with back pain, it is more than likely that they might be interested in other related stuff, for example, night lamps, or what is the proper height of the bed.

You can offer them special pillows, or how about electrically adjustable frames; Even a book regarding back pain. Do you see where I am going, right?

By now you have 4 or 5 more campaigns you can run.

Here is an example of a simple funnel you can check.

Conclusion

We have gone through the email marketing introduction. I

am sure you understand now the importance of email marketing and you realize that this kind of marketing is still strong today and maybe even the best strategy for business.

Let me also share a video regarding the potential of email marketing including some tips as well.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that you are a visitor to your subscriber. You want to behave like the best guest. You make sure you deliver value to him; you are here to help him.

Talking about the guest in someone’s inbox – do not forget that in the EU it is mandatory to ask permission of your subscriber to collect the email address. Without permission, you have no way of collecting his email.

I wanted to give you a clear and thorough explanation of email marketing.

It is not a science, so there is no linear way how to do things. It is about art, you have to try what works and what does not.
If you want to learn more about email marketing, or affiliate marketing, this platform has an awesome step-by-step course, and it is ideal for newbies as well.

To wrap it up, remember, do more than is expected of you.

Hope I did not overwhelm you 🙂
Let me please know in the comment section below.

If you would like to learn more about email marketing let me know as well, I think I have something that you might be interested in.

Thank you for reading
Mike.