4 Ways To Make Money Online With Email Marketing

It feels pretty good to send out emails with a push of the button and make money doing it. In the most recent episode of the High Value Skills Podcast (available on Apple & Spotify), I broke down some of my favorite ways to monetize your email list which I’ll be recapping here!

In this article I’m going to share with you:

• Why you MUST be building, growing and nurturing your email list if you are doing business online.
• 2 best practices about selling with your email list.
• 4 ways that you can make money online with your email list.

I’ll never forget how much money I missed out on by NOT starting an email list back in the mid to late 2000’s when I had my first E-commerce business. But I didn’t know it at the time and it wasn’t until I looked back that I realized what could have been. I don’t even know if they had effective Email Service Providers at the time like we do now that allow for good email marketing.

Online marketing legend Amy Porterfield said in her best-selling book “Two Weeks Notice” that her biggest mistake in business was NOT starting an email list. Same with YouTuber Pat Flynn.

When I had my first online business, I was able to get traffic to my website because I was able to rank high on Google, usually in the first 1 to 3 places. This was great for my business and I was getting 5 to 15 orders every single day buying from my site. It never occurred to me to use all of those email addresses and be sending them out weekly content letting them know about the market, new products, sales or staying in touch with them.

A few years later it became harder and harder for me to rank in the top 3 on Google because of an algorithm shift, this is why its so important to capture email addresses for your business.

People do the exact same thing when it comes to social media, they spend all this time creating posts and then they are only active in the feed for a few hours or a few days at best, then start to fade away. All that time and energy wasted. On top of that, its pretty normal for peoples profile pages to be shut down, years of work on Instagram gone in just one minute, and then having to start all over again.

Ok, I’ve made it clear of how important an email list is, and a few weeks ago I posted an article about ‘5 ways to grow your email list fast’. Now let’s talk about how to monetize it!

4 Ways to Make Money Online From Your Email List:

Method #1: Get intentional about using your email list to market an sell your current products.

Yes, this one is pretty basic, but even so we can give it a lot more thought and start to get tactical about launch windows, creating urgency, limited (time, pricing, numbers available) to get people to take action. We can also do sales and new product releases, as well as share stories of how our customers have used these products and then selling through ‘story selling’.

Come up with a plan of action for using your email list to strategically sell and get your email sequences set up ahead of time so you aren’t rushing to do them.

Method #2: Start creating more low ticket offers ($7-47).

A lot of people miss out on the power of low-ticket items because they think ‘they aren’t money makers’. Maybe that’s the case with physical products but if you are talking about digital only products (cheat sheets, templates, workbooks, mini courses, etc.) these can be created once then sold over and over again without any extra time or energy after they are completed.

Use these low ticket offers to grow your list even more! If you have 1000 people on your email list and sell a $47 item once per month and make $300 from it, that’s an additional $3600 per year that can be used for advertising or outsourcing some help in your business. On top of that, your list won’t stay that size, it will keep growing so at 10k subscribers, that will be $36,000. Imagine putting $36k back into advertising for your business to keep it growing even more!

You could also think about ‘print on demand’ services. These days people can order physical merchandise from you such as t-shirts or journals and you can print them on demand, although the margins will be lower because of the costs.

Method #3 – Affiliate Marketing

Do not miss out on the power of affiliate marketing! If you have an audience, you probably get questions all the time about products or services that you recommend that you aren’t selling yourself. Find out if there are affiliate programs from these vendors or sellers and get singed up! This was something I overlooked for a long time but now take full advantage of.

One example is my podcasting colleagues love to use Descript for editing and cleaning up episodes. They coach other podcasters so it’s easy for them to recommend this app and then make a commission by doing so.

For me personally, I LOVE to recommend my favorite all in one solution for online business owners, Kajabi. It’s been something I’ve recommended for years and now I use my email list to let people know not only what I’m using but how I use it, and keep them updated on specials from the vendor. It doesn’t cost my audience any extra money to use this app through my affiliate link.

I also love recommending other peoples courses who do a better job than I can, for example I am an affiliate for Amy Porterfield and love letting my audience know about her Digital Course Academy which is available once per year.

Method #4 – Paid subscription

One thing I’ve not done but could be very effective is to start a paid subscription to your newsletter, this would be an upgraded version of your current email list but with a higher level of value. I remember when I used to do a lot of stock investing I would subscribe to some monthly or quarterly newsletters (these were actually physical ones that were sent out), but now you could just do this online.

Patreon or Substack could be very useful apps to use to grow your subscriber list and deliver this type of content.

Some ideas on a paid newsletter: Recipe’s, meal plans, work out routines, industry news, templates, scripts, marketing or sales funnels, micro coaching.

Think of paid newsletters as a ‘subscription box’ but with information!