It doesn’t matter what you’re doing to make money online, if you don’t run an email marketing campaign, you are leaving money on the table! But that shouldn’t come as a big surprise to you if you’ve been working online for any time at all. This post wasn’t written to try to convince you to start one.
As Internet marketers, we all hear the phrase “the money is in the list” over and over again. The reason is because many people have grown rich simply by collecting names and emails of prospects – hot leads who are likely to purchase whatever you are trying to sell through email campaigns.
First, I’ll tell you that I am not one of those individuals. At Qodewire, we do have a list of roughly over 300 newsletter subscribers, but we made a grave mistake from the start – we didn’t develop a relationship with those subscribers.
For the most part, email marketing is never about the size of the list, it’s about how you use it. A list of 100,000 subscribers means nothing if you haven’t gained the trust of your subscribers…it won’t convert!
We didn’t get serious about our own list building efforts until early this year. I’ve had a list for several years, but to be honest, I wasn’t confident in my own email marketing abilities, so the list didn’t convert. I was lucky to make ONE sale on a promo back then!
What We Were Doing Wrong
There were 2 things we were doing wrong back then
- We weren’t REALLY helping our list! – Like most marketers, we followed blind strategies from email marketing “guru’s” and promoted everything under the sun. If it had a way of bringing in money, we promoted it. The only thing we were concerned with was making money and as a result, we made very little money!
- We were targeting the wrong crowd. – Our email marketing promotions mainly pushed advanced Internet Marketing products to people brand new to money-making strategies.
What We Are Doing Now
It’s very simple…We help people! Would you rather be subscribed to a Marketer who constantly sells to you or a Marketer who sends you free helpful content and only promotes products he/she honestly recommends? I know my answer and I know that’s probably your answer too!
Some Stats
For credibility, I’ll share some rough stats.
Our email marketing list is composed of roughly 300 subscribers. If you subtract duplicates (opted in multiple times for various reports etc.) and spam users, that number is actually much lower. That is NOTHING compared to some of the big names.
Interestingly, there are people/companies out there with lists of 20,000 or more, who can’t get their lists to perform nearly as effectively as ours. Why? Because they sell, sell, sell and we give, give, sell!
Depending on the price, niche etc. we can generally bring in 20-50 sales per promotion. That may not sound like a very good conversion rate, but if you compare it to some of the claimed conversion rates of big names and you factor in the duplicate subscribers and spammers, it’s actually very good.
Our Email Marketing Strategy in a Nutshell
There are many email marketing strategies that could be used effectively, but I’ll share with you more or less what we’ve been doing.
We’ve collected a good majority of our subscribers through our free reports. The reports are essentially website audits we do for webmasters and bloggers. If you would like to get your website audited for both SEO and user-friendliness, you can also jump into the bandwagon by submitting a request on our pricing page.
We create detailed website reports highlighting the various areas you need to work one to optimize your website and online presence. The website audit reports are 100% Free!
When it comes to our actual email marketing, we send out emails roughly twice a month (we use Zoho Campaigns) I think that’s a good number because most of our promotions run month on month and it keeps our subscribers interested enough without seeming like your average spammy email marketer. We send them genuinely good, free information at least twice between promotions.
Initially, we were hesitant to use our blog as a platform to feed our list with content. We were worried that people would either unsubscribe from the mailing list. That may be true, but everything seems to be working out just fine.
That’s basically it folks! Retain your website traffic. Once you’ve retained them, HELP them and you’ll build trust and credibility. Help people and they’ll help you!
The fact is, no matter how targeted your email list is to your niche, if you don’t develop some sort of a relationship with them, the list is not going to convert.
