7 ways to make MONEY with your Email list in 2023
Alexander James
SEO Expert | Digital Marketer | Affiliate Marketer | Researcher
I’m sure you’ve heard the expression – “money is on the list.”
And it’s true. Email marketing has a tremendous ROI, and we’ve got multiple case studies that prove it.
What’s also true is that there isn’t just one way to make money with email marketing. There are many. And I’m about to share them with you.
Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, coach, or all-around marketer, you’ll want to stick around. As these seven tactics are about to turn your email marketing program into a growing revenue source.
?? Did you know? GetResponse not only can help you run your email campaigns more effectively, but it can also help you generate income! By joining our affiliate program, you can earn $100 or 33% lifetime recurring commissions for every referred customer. Join the program today!
How to make Money with Email list: 7 Actionable ways:
Before going over the ways you can make money with email, I want to make a disclaimer.
Even though email marketing boasts an impressive ROI of 3,800%, it is a long-term game. Building an engaged email audience takes time and effort, and that’s only a part of the equation.
So if you ever hear someone making promises that you’ll generate an extra $5k in income from email just after 30 days of work, simply ignore them.
With that out of the way, let me take you through the key ways of making money with email marketing.
1. Use affiliate marketing and promote other people’s products or services
One of the first associations people make about making money online comes down to joining a lucrative affiliate program.
The dynamics are pretty straightforward — you select a brand that has a program for affiliates, sign up for it, and start promoting its product or services to your email subscribers. For every purchase that comes from your affiliate link, you receive a commission.
Let’s say you’re a personal finance blogger and online coach. The most fundamental way for you to capitalize on your position as a financial expert is to tap into the affiliate products offered by FinTech software such as eToro, Binance, or Robinhood:
Another option in this niche is to partner with banks offering an enticing commission for offering their products. There are plenty of them out there — for example, American Express pays up to $200 per sale.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Before we get into the technical side of this marketing channel, let’s say it out loud — the key to success is to promote products or services that meet both fundamental requirements:
Affiliate products are a proven way to generate income, and if you handle it well, it can be super easy (injecting an affiliate link in your email content) and profitable.
2. Include sponsored content or advertising in your emails
Another way to make money with email marketing is to introduce sponsored content and advertising into your email campaigns.
Those commercial tactics are an excellent fit for email marketers who have been on the scene for a while and managed to grow their mailing lists to a number of at least 2,500 subscribers.
Naturally, the bigger and more engaged your email list is, the better. Only this way you will become an attractive asset for potential advertisers.
There’s another reason why hundreds of folks on your email list won’t be enough, but thousands will make a difference. And it’s called CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) — a unit that will help you and your advertiser to set the prices for a banner displayed in your newsletters.
How about solo ads?
A solo ad works like this — advertisers go to email list owners and purchase a placement in their email. Simply put, a brand buys a dedicated email and taps into the existing email audience of that owner.
Even though solo ads don’t have the best reputation from the advertiser’s point of view, it can be a different story when you run a thriving online business and have the capability of providing solo ads service to advertisers.
To make it work, make sure that:
you don’t overuse solo ads and trigger your email subscribers to opt out of
your mailing list. Monetize your newsletter with sponsored content:
Brands are on the lookout for getting the word out about their products through channels other than paid social media ads and Google Display Network.
That’s why, once your newsletters become a powerful medium, several brands that will find your audience has an overlap with their buyer persona will be open for a partnership with you.
There are three main ways of sponsoring your newsletter:
3. Create a tripwire offer
OK, another method to generate more money through email marketing is tripwire offers. And while the name of that technique is not the most fortunate in the world, it’s pretty standard among email marketers out there.
Implementing a tripwire means offering your new subscribers a low-priced product or service. The entry threshold is set low (as the tripwire), increasing the chances of getting more people to purchase.
“OK, it costs only $5, no biggie” — and they’re in! OK, it doesn’t have to be that cheap. Let’s say you’re an online life coach, and you’re offering a bargain deal of $30 for the first online strategy session. As long as you deliver quality after closing that sale, you open an avenue to pitch your more expensive services.
In practice, it can mean creating a landing page with a curated offer and sending an upsell email after finalizing the first deal.
4. Sell your own product or service
OK, affiliate marketing and advertising can help you earn money. In some cases, those results can be impressive.
But, regardless of how high the affiliate commission is, it’s still a percentage. If you’re lucky, you get 20, 30, or 40% of conversions or sales.
By selling your own products or services, you can make money on a scale that will drive your online business forward substantially.
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You own it — the 100% goes into your pocket without sharing that with a sponsorship marketplace or a merchant.
At your service:
Let’s start with offering a service. If you’re a consultant, an online coach, or a freelance marketer, you can market your services to your email subscribers. Your email list is your potential customers.
As long as you provide them value for free through your email marketing program, at some stage, they will naturally go down the sales funnel and be more prone to try your offer.
Create your own product:
Another one is a digital product. It can be a paid ebook or a package of coaching sessions. The rule of thumb would be the same as with your services.
Your product needs to solve pains and generate gains for your target audience. It has to be relevant to them!
We’re in the middle of an AI revolution. And for you, as a content creator, it’s a massive opportunity because, with ChatGPT4, you can now develop applications, Chrome extensions, mobile games, and other digital products without an army of software developers and designers!
And how to know if your audience will be ready to purchase your product?
Use newsletters and autoresponders to survey your subscribers and get their opinion first. The best way to market any product is to learn what your buyers need.
5. Create a paid newsletter:
This part might be tricky. Especially if you have just started growing your email list. You can say: “I’m struggling to have people opt into my email list for free, so how am I supposed to get them to pay me for it?”
And you’re absolutely right. It’s a real challenge at the early growth stage. It will take some time, but by providing high-end value to your readers, you will reach the moment to:
Before you go full-scale, try to test the waters first. Voice of customer data is essential here. Email marketing gives you a natural opportunity to gather feedback from your email subscribers. Ask them:
Earlier, I mentioned crafting a digital product to make money with email marketing. Creating a paid online course is one of the most popular and profitable digital products used by solopreneurs.
Sharing tips and tricks and leading thoughts through a free or paid newsletter is one thing. Teaching your subscribers interested in your expertise, new skills, and workflows is another.
To create a paid course, you’ll need to get back to the drawing board and list your audience’s pain points. From then, make a step-by-step process to overcome those challenges.
Once you have the idea for your online course, you need to:
Run a successful email marketing campaign backed up by paid social ads to drive traffic to your page.
Sell your online course with a conversion funnel.
Over the past few years, the booming popularity of e-learning platforms like Udemy or Coursera has translated into proven ways to make money online for thousands of coaches and trainers.
But the entire process of managing a digital course can scare many people away. The good news is — that there is a way to manage it from top to bottom through GetResponse’s conversion funnel.
And the most enjoyable part of your digital business journey is connecting to your chosen payment system and observing how much money you earn on sharing your know-how and skills with your email subscribers! How can you customize your funnel:
But the best part of conversion funnels for teaching and training online is that you can build that architecture of actions and stages the way you want!
7. Run paid webinars:
And there comes our last email monetization method — running webinars. Conducting online events can serve multiple purposes.
For instance, free webinars are a perfect way to generate leads and nurture existing email subscribers with additional helpful content.
Webinar tools such as polls and surveys, chat, and Q&A enable you to interact with your audience and know them better. This knowledge can help you refine your messaging when you are all set to create content — for a blog post or an ebook.
But paid webinars are a different story. It’s not about capturing leads. Running webinars with an entry fee means selling advanced knowledge and insights to people who want to upgrade their skill sets or learn something super valuable that is not available for free elsewhere.
How much money can you make with paid online conferences and training sessions? Here are some examples from the State of Online Events 2022:
Impressed? No wonder! Let’s sneak a peek at how to run paid webinars!
How to run a paid webinar:
Follow this step-by-step workflow:
Pro tip: You can orchestrate everything in GetResponse – your webinar, an email campaign, and paid ads on Facebook or Instagram.
Start making money with email marketing!
Even without a big marketing team or a dedicated email specialist, email marketing has a wide array of options to make money — from promoting affiliate products, through running a paid newsletter, to implementing advertising in your emails.
Another strategy is to pitch your services to your subscribers and sell products, such as ebooks, templates, workflows, training sessions, online courses, and paid webinars.
The critical point is consistently delivering high-quality and value for your target audience. Once you look after this part, you can experiment with different ways to make money.
And finally, to start implementing your revenue-generating program, you need a solid email service provider!
And GetResponse is the one that will help you keep everything under one roof! Try all the features for free for the next 30 days.