“The money is in the list” - mr. guru

Yes, most internet marketing gurus tell use that “the money is in the list”. As a product creator or affiliate marketer, an email list is your most valuable asset. It represents an available target market that you can market your products and services to over and over again.

However, email marketing can be confusing and frustrating if you don’t understand how it works. Of course the bigger your list the more money you make, but sometimes people make a LOT of money with very small lists.

What do they know that you don’t?

The Relationship Factor

Well, the money is in the list alright, but more importantly, the money is in the relationship with the list. To build a relationship with the list, you must first do these things:

1. Understand what they want - Each target market want different things. You have to understand what your list members want, and the easiest way to do this is to look closely at the replies they have sent you over the last couple of months.
   • What is their primary problem that they are trying to solve? What do they need desperately?
   • You can also use some sort of survey software like the ASK Database or Wufoo to survey your list to find out their wants and needs.
2. Create / Find a Product That Fulfills Their Need - If you can, create your own product that fulfills the need of your target market.
   • I sent out a survey some time back and discovered that what people really wanted to know about using WordPress is where and how to put their Adsense ads.
   • As a result of that one survey, I created a product called WordPress Adsense System and currently make $2500 – $3500 a month from it.
   • If you’re an affiliate marketer, find other people’s products or services that your list may be interested in, and recommend it to them.
3. Always Keep in Touch - Your list members are going to forget all about you if they don’t hear from you in 4-8 weeks. You can blame them either; they have their own lives to lead and the average person seeking information on the Internet is so overwhelmed by different offers from different people.
   • Stay on their minds, and they will respond better to you.
   • If you have nothing to sell or promote to them, just tell them something about your life and how you’ve been doing the past one week.
   • Have a competition, give away some prizes. Let them get something from you and they will return the favor later.
   • Send them to your blog to read an article you just wrote. The article doesn’t always have to be about serious stuff, sometimes if works if you make them laugh!

If you can do those things well, then you don’t need to keep looking for new opt-in subscribers every day. Most will come looking for you, Some will even become your affiliate, marketing your products and bringing in the traffic and subscribers you want.

However, even if you do all those things perfectly, not every single person on your list is going to buy from you all the time.

Understand The Numbers in Email Marketing

Email marketing, like most marketing, is a numbers game. If you have 5,000 people on your list, not all of them are going to buy something from you. In fact, not even 10% of those people are going to purchase from you, and I’ve drawn an “artistic” diagram to show why.

Here’s how the numbers in email marketing work for or against you:

There are several key metrics that determine how profitable your list can be, and they are:

1. Open Rate - The percentage of people that read your emails regularly. Not every single person is waiting at their computer for your emails. Most of them are not going to open it immediately, and in the course of time they usually forget about it or accidentally delete it from their email inbox. An open-rate of 20% is ok, 30% is standard, and anything above that is very good.
2. Click-Through Rate - How many people click on the links in your email. Again, not everyone is going to do that, no matter how hard you try. A 40% click-through rate, from my testing, is a good figure. I also noticed that the CTR decreases significantly when you have more than one link in a single email. Always keep it simple, and don’t promote multiple products within a single email.
3. Conversion Rate – The percentage of people that respond to your offer, or buy your product. The industry standard is 1%, and as pathetic as that may sound, it takes a considerable amount of skill and persuasion to get that figure.
   • If the sales page is good, and the product offer is attractive, you can get a higher figure.
   • I get a conversion of between 5-17% when selling my own products, simply because it’s created around my list.
   • When promoting affiliate products, I get between 0.02 – 2.5% depending on the price and overall appeal of the product.

Unlocking The Secret to Email Marketing

So what do all these figures and ugly artwork really mean?

It simply means that there are a lot of components to email marketing, and when you know how to improve on each statistic, you can truly have a powerful, responsive, and ready-to-spend list. Here’s how to improve your email marketing nuts-and-bolts for an overall more efficient marketing machine:

1. Create Short, Appealing Headlines – A good headline will improve your Open-Rate.
   • I have tested emails with and without personalization, and in almost all cases it helps if you put the name of the recipient into the subject of your email, like “John, Do You Believe in Angels?”
   • Putting a question mark also improves the open-rate significantly.
   • Write in your own style, and avoid using a carbon-copy of the promotional emails you get from the product owner.
   • The more people that open your emails, the more clicks you’re going to get.
2. What’s The Story? - Don’t hard sell in your emails, and don’t get technical either. Just tell a story.
   • History has proven that the best sales people in the world are excellent storytellers.
   • By telling your prospect a short story, you grab his / her attention and relate to their problems.
   • They should be able to “feel” your problems and associate them with their own.
   • Tell them how what you’re going to show them solved your problems, then lead them to click on the link.
3. One Link Only - I practice the “one link only” policy in most of my emails to improve my Click-Through rate, which means that each email promotes only ONE product.

1. • This give the readers no choice other than to click on the one link.
   • Having two links is still ok, but more than that reduces the efficiency and dived’s the attention of your readers.
   • The exception to this is if you’re sending out “ezine-style” emails that contain the summary of different topics on your website or blog.
   • More clicks mean more eyeballs looking at your sales page and product offer.
2. Good Sales Copy- Copy writing is a whole new subject that I can’t cover here, but understand that good sales copy will improve your sales more than the first two points I mentioned.
   • Your emails have to build interest before the person sees the sales copy.
   • If you’re an affiliate, you have little or no control over the sales copy, but you can learn to distinguish between good copy and bad copy. Just avoid the bad ones.

Conclusion

Email marketing is simple, but by no means easy. You need to understand the components that make it work. The marketing beast once understood, needs to be mastered and fed constantly.

Don’t worry about the size of your list as this will grow over time. Learn to build a relationship with the ones you have now instead of ignoring them. I made a living full-time on the Internet with a list of less than 1,000 people and most of these people are now my repeat customers, affiliates and even partners.

If you want to conquer email marketing, you have to take it seriously. Invest in a good autoresponder and study the email campaigns that failed more than the ones that succeeded, for the secret is in the tragedy not the triumph.

Of course, sometimes it may seem like you did everything right, and yet the results say otherwise. In these cases, you’re probably promoting the right product to the wrong market, or the wrong product to the right market. Either way, just move on.

The beauty of email marketing is that mistakes cost you nothing, and you can try again tomorrow!