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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2529 How To Make Money with Email Marketing
00:27:54
Are you fully tapping into the potential of your email list? Every dollar spent on email marketing brings back an average of $42—so if you’re looking to boost revenue and build stronger customer relationships, email marketing might be your golden ticket.
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Hey, everyone. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm, and in today's lesson, you will learn how to make money with email marketing. Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools at your disposable. In fact, I believe it's the most powerful tool. And when you do it right, it can significantly boost your revenue. I'm going to show you the strategies and the tactics that work for me, as well as the mistakes I've made so that you don't make them as well. Let's get into it. First, let me shock you with a stat that's going to spring you into action, get you to implement what I'm teaching you today. Okay? Did you know that every dollar that you spend on email marketing has an average return of $42? That's a 42x return. That's according to a study by the Data and Marketing Association. Email marketing is ridiculous when it comes to ROI. I will take that 42x return. And by the way, that's the average. You could do better than 42x, which is crazy. Okay? So you should be leveraging email marketing in your business right now. Okay? Today is going to be a critical lesson, something that you want to take action on right now. Because if you leverage this right, you can maximize your earnings in a way you've never seen before. Let's get into it. When I started my software company, webinar ninja, 10 years ago, email marketing was a game changer for us. It helped us build a strong email list. It helped us engage with our subscribers, our audience, learn from our customers so we can build the right solutions. It gave us consistent traffic to our site. It helped us to really increase our sales in a way that we'd never predicted. I just never thought email marketing would be so powerful. But I'm going to show you why. First, let's step back. Why is email marketing so powerful today, whether you're watching in 2024 or beyond? Well, it's because our attention is being spread so much across The Internet, with rise of social media, with the rise of apps, with the rise of ads everywhere, right? Our attention is being pulled in different directions and our inboxes are the last sacred place in our digital world. Think about it. Your email inbox is something that you have to deal with, something that you actually open up. And you go through the emails, you either delete them, you either archive them, you read them, you open them, you apply to them. You have to do something. You can't just ignore. You can't just thumb through it like a feed on Instagram, right? So email is still the most intimate way to contact somebody in digital marketing. And if you have access to somebody's inbox, it's the best access you can ever have. I rather have a hundred thousand email leads in my email list, quality ones, than a million followers on Instagram, because I'm able to contact them directly in their inbox every time I send an email. And that brings me to step one or key strategy number one for making money with email email marketing. And that's building a quality email list. You want to focus on quality over quantity. It's better for you have a smaller, more engaged list of subscribers than a large one that's inactive. And I'm going to tell you why. Because the more engaged, the more people actually open and read and even reply to your emails, the better it is for your email reputation. And this matters in the digital world, okay? Because your email, the emails that you send out on your newsletters to your subscribers, it has a reputation in the digital world. And the more people that are actually engaging with your emails, clicking on links, opening them up, reading them, the more people that do that, the better your reputation is, the more it will land in the inbox of people that you send the emails to. But if I have, let's say 100,000 emails and I send an email out and only let's say 5,000 people open it, okay? That is sending a signal to the people out there in the Internet that are controlling all the rules, right? All the algorithms that, hey, my list, my maybe even quality of my content is not great and therefore deliverability will be low. Okay? But if I have let's say 10,000 emails and half of them open up 5,000, same people open up 5,000. It shows that, hey, this is actually great stuff. Let's make sure it lands in the inbox. So how do you build a quality list? Well, you want to build a quality niche list, and you do this by offering quality niche information or content. And this is Very important. When you think about when I build my email list, I build my newsletter, when I build my opt ins, when I give away my freebies, right? Those guides, those checklists, how do I make sure that this is actually going to help a specific avatar, specific target audience? Because if it does, they're going to really love my content because everything I give them is related and relevant to them. So you want to make sure that you stay as niche as possible. So for example, Webinar Ninja, it's in the live streaming world, right? Live streaming is a huge topic, but we don't talk about all the different ways to live stream, whether it's YouTube or Facebook lives or whatever. We talk about webinars, but not only just webinars, we talk about sales webinars. This is not for everybody. This is for people that are building businesses and are using webinars to sell the products and services. Not any businesses. These are businesses that are selling content or coaching, right? They're teaching for a living. So as you can see, we're niching down not just all live streaming content, we're going to go into webinars, not only webinars, but with small businesses, small businesses that are online, that online are teaching for a living. Now we're getting really niche now. Whenever I put out content on that topic, anybody that's on my email list is going to open that email because it's relevant to them. So I want to make sure that whatever I create to attract the people to join my email list, that that quality content is catered to that person. Okay? That that person really loves that content and the content that's going to follow up later on. So don't create a lead magnet, a checklist about a topic that is not really relevant to the continuous information you're going to be giving them on your email list through your newsletters and your offers and everything else. Okay? Everything's got to be aligned. For example, when it came to our opt in with our software company Webinar Ninja, we wanted to create something that was very, very much catered to our audience, which is a busy solopreneur or a small business of team, less than five people and they have a lot going on and they're nervous about their webinar and they want to make sure they get it right. So we created templates and one of the templates that we offered to grow our email list was email marketing templates for the webinar. So for example, when you are sending out follow up emails and reminder emails, we create Templ templates so that you can copy and paste it and put it right into our software webinar Ninja, right? Even with the short codes and everything that populate all the relevant information for the webinar. So it was incredibly valuable to somebody who is busy and wants to run a great webinar without screwing it up, right? So this is what I'm talking about. By creating very niche, very high quality, valuable content for a specific group of people that will continue to consume your content because you're talking directly to them. So you got them on your email list, right? And you've attracted them the right way with valuable content. Now here is the most important part. Before we can start asking for a sale or asking for them to buy our products or services, we have to build a relationship with them. And you want to be something of value to them. You want the actual existence of being on their email list to be valuable. You want to make sure that newsletter you send out is like almost like as good as your products, if not as good, right? You want people to say, I can't wait for the next email to drop. I can't wait for next week's newsletter because it's going to be great because last week's was amazing. And I learned this actually from a guy named Matthew Kimberly, who's an incredible copywriter and author of a book. The book is called how to Get a Grip, right? It's a very interesting book. It's actually like a self help book for those who don't like self help books. And if you read the book, you could tell he's a great writer. He has a course, Matthew Kimberly called Delightful Emails. This course is incredible. And let me tell you what I learned from it. What I learned from it is that you want your email subscriber to see you, the brand as something of value, a valuable person, right? Somebody that they really care about and can't wait to get a message from. And one of the examples he gives is that when you see your notifications on your phone when it's closed, right? And you see it from, let's say, for example, the love of your life, your partner in life, right? You can't wait to open it up and read it. Oh, you don't even care what it is, what it says there, right? You just, you're looking forward to just opening something because you value that person, right? If you got an email from, let's say, your childhood hero, let's say it's Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? And you got an email from Arnold Schwarzenegger and you see the subject line and you see the emails from Arnold Schwarzenegger, you're like, what? Let me open this up. It's Arnold, right? It's because you value Arnold Schwarzenegger, right? So the point here is that you want to be that person on the other end of the newsletter. You want them to be like, I can't wait to open up this email because I really value this person's opinion. I really value their content because every time they send an email it's so valuable. So you gotta come in with that mentality when it comes to crafting the emails you're gonna send to your email list on the regular. Whether, whether it's the newsletter, whether it's a sequence that you have built. This is all a part of the sales process. You might be thinking, Omar, what's going on here? What about making money? Where's the sales part? Well, in order for you to make it easy for yourself to sell your products and services, you want to become somebody of value, right? You want somebody to be like, I love the content, I love what this person puts out. This person's amazing. So that when there is a chance for them to buy something, they're going to be like, I am in. This is great. This is a no brainer. I love everything this person puts out. I'm going to love this thing too. Take my money. And that's where it all happens. The sales actually happens with the relationship building and the quality of the content that you put out. If your newsletter is incredible, it's something that they look forward to that they would be happy to pay for. If it was paid, then you know that when you put out an offer that they're going to be so happy to buy. Most people that love your emails and are able to buy will buy. So some examples of some really good newsletter if you want to check them out, are Mark Manson from the Subtle Art of Not Giving an F. He has a great, great newsletter and it's very tactical, it's very provocative, you'll love it. You'll also maybe like Tim Ferriss's newsletter is a good example to see like a good cadence. He has five Bullet Fridays where he gives you five tips every Friday. Also, Ryan Holiday, who's the author of Obstacles Away and very, very big on stoicism, his newsletter is very powerful. He gives book recommendations. So the point here is that it's valuable because there's information in there that I want to know, right? I want to know what are the great Books. This is a great author, and he is a great author, probably because he reads a lot of great books and he is somebody of value. So he creates something of value, like great books, right? So I want to know what is Ryan reading, right? And that's really helpful and really valuable to me. So that's why I open his emails. You may want to include some success stories from your audience. You may want to also offer some, some tips or some strategies. What I found really works best is short, digestible things that people can do quickly, right? Something to think about, something to do, something to consume. So it's not like overwhelming for them when they're reading your newsletter. Like, oh, there's so much to do. Some of the best newsletters I like, like, for example, I'm on Justin Jackson's newsletter, who is the founder of Transistor fm, and he just has a short newsletter. And it's just something to think about. It's an idea that he wants to explore. It's not even an idea that's fully formed or even resolved, but it's something that is interesting. So that might be a format that you like. Now, when it comes to calls to action, if you want to get them to click or do something on the email, that is something that is debatable. Some people like the fact that there's a call to action and they actually encourage other people. You should always have a call to action, right? And I understand the reason for it because if you take action from a technical point of view on an email, so if you click on a link again, that sends a signal to, you know, the algorithms of the email inbox, you know, wizards out there, that this email is worth reading and this, you know, a domain that is associated with this email is credible. That's great. Also replying, some people say, reply to this email and tell me your thoughts, or reply this email and ask me a question. Right? So all that is fine. I. I've tried all this and this, this is good. But there's another school of thought that says you don't really need a call to action if the email itself is the value, right? If the email itself is like, wow, this is incredible, I love this. You don't need a call to action because you may want to save your calls to action for when you have an offer. Okay? So something to think about, right? When you read a book, for example, and read a book and I go through a book, there's rarely a call to action in the book. The book itself is the action. So two Schools of thought. You can think about which one works with your brand, your vibe.
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So we've talked about building a quality list. We talked about making sure having quality content, valuable content, being somebody of value. What's the third thing I want to share with you is segmenting your list. Now we talked about you're talking to a specific person with specific pains in a niche, in a marketplace, and that's true. But even within your list, you want to personalize your emails and make sure that you're giving everybody what they need. Okay? You want to see this as sort of like onboarding. If you ever started signed up for some software, they walk you through some onboarding, some steps, some orientation basically, and they ask you some questions. Are you going to use the software to do this or that? And the reason why they're asking this question is because they want to segment their users to provide them the value that is specific to them. And you may want to do the same thing with your email list, right? You want to segment your email based on demographics, maybe even or behavior based on what they click on. What I like to do is I like to make sure that I segment people from action takers and non action takers. Okay? So eventually you're going to make an offer on your email and you're going to say, hey, click this link to check out more information about this offer or about this course, about this training, about the Surface. I like to tag in my email list software and segment people if they've clicked, okay? If they click, that means they're interested, right? But if they've never clicked on any of my links to see any offers, I know that they're a little bit colder in terms of getting to the byline and I don't need to keep throwing them offers, right? I need to still build a relationship with them. I still need to warm up to them. We still build some trust, okay? They need something else. They don't need more offers. So those who click though, they are interested and that tells me something, it gives me an indicator that I want to give them other ideas. If they haven't bought yet, maybe I can give them another offer, counter offer, that's maybe a little bit more of an entry level product. These are the ways you can segment your emails by just simply identifying the actions they take with your emails. So that way you can give them the right content, the right type of follow up. Let me give you an example on how we use this with Webinar Ninja. So with Webinar Ninja, when we would launch a new product, a new service, a new offer, maybe even like an accelerator program to help them with their webinars that was paid, we did a lot of different kinds of things to get people into our ecosystem and sign up for Webinar Ninja. But what we did was we would send out free content. We would say, hey, we have this 15 minute video on how to use webinars to grow your podcast, for example. And we would do this to people that were podcasters in our segment or people that had podcasts or were interested in the topic of podcasting in the past. So we'd send that email out and in that email there would be a link to the video. Now there's a 15 minute video on this topic. If they didn't click on the link and watch the video, I will not send them the offer that's related to that type of content. So say, for example, we had a course on how to launch your podcast. That course is not relevant to somebody who's not gonna click on something free. Okay? So it's a great way for you to kind of seek permission to give an offer by saying, hey, here's something free, a valuable piece of content. If you wanna learn how to start a podcast. This is a great video. They click on it, they watch it. If I know they've clicked on it, then I know they're interested in this topic. And then I could say, hey, if you like that video, we have a full course showing you A to Z how to do everything, we walk you by the hand and we even have a service to do it, blah, blah, blah. This is just an example, but the point here is, is that this gives you permission to give them more information and give them an offer where they're willing to pay for a solution because they've shown interest in this topic. Number four, in order for you to build trust with your audience, it's gonna take some time, which means it's gonna take some emails. So you may wanna automate the process. Okay, so you can have newsletter emails, but you can also have automated emails to onboard your customers or your potential customers that are joining your email list. So email automation is your friend. You want to onboard those new subscribers with the best quality content you have on your website. Maybe a popular blog post or a great podcast episode or video that you have on your site. The point here is, is that you want to give them as much high quality stuff on the regular automated. So you can build this out in advance and then just say, anyone who joins my email list, send this sequence in this time, you know, allotment, like every five days, send them a new email or whatever you choose to do. Some people don't like to bombard their email list subscribers with so much email. I think the maximum you should email your list outside of campaigns or launches is twice a week. Once a week is a sweet spot, but that is your newsletter. But then you have automation emails for onboarding and you may want to do a few of those just to give them the best content that you have so that they can feel like they're in the right place and they're getting great value just by being on the list. Then they're gonna get your normal weekly newsletter, for example. And I say normal, but it should be extraordinary. Again, we talked about the high quality content that you want to have that they can't wait to open up this email. And of course the newsletters can be scheduled. So you can write a newsletter and schedule it to go out six months from now, okay? So you can have all six months of your newsletters written in advance so that you don't have to sit there and send an email every single week, you know, hours before it's due. Now what goes hand in hand with automation is tracking your stats, right? You want to see what's going on Every time you send an email out to a group or you send out a newsletter. You want to see what are my open rates, what are my click through rates, how many people are maybe replying to the email, how many people are clicking on a particular link. You want to compare and contrast. You want to see a trend moving up where actually you're getting better and better at this email thing, that more people are reading your emails, more people are engaging with your emails. You don't just want to send out emails that do nothing. If you just do that over and over, you're never going to get better. You want to look at the data and see where you can get better, see what you can do so that you can be able to Have a more engaged email list that loves your content. And sometimes it's just small tweaks like changing your subject line or the preview text or your opening paragraph on your email. You want to see what you can do to optimize a B test. I like to ab test emails all the time, especially with subject lines, to see what gets people to open. Don't be scammy. Do clickbait subject lines that have nothing to do with the email. I hate some of that stuff. It says like, you know, final notice and it feels very urgent when it's not urgent, okay? So make sure that you're ethical, but at the same time being creative with your subject lines so you get them enticed to open up those emails. Lastly, monetizing your emails. How do you promote your products and services with email? I want to step back for a moment and remind you that your job as an entrepreneur, as a business builder, is to sell products and services. That's what you're doing there. This for. This is why you're building the email list in the first place, okay? So don't be too shy not to make an offer, because that's the whole point of the email list. This is not a charity organization where you're just sending out emails for free, right? It's costing you money to have this service, right? Email marketing and have all these emails on your list and to market and all that kind of stuff. So you want to make sure there's an exchange here. But at the same time, you need to understand that not everybody's going to be ready to buy at the same moment, right? Some people are going to buy within days of learning of your existence, and some people are going to buy within months or even years, okay? And that's why segmenting your email list is very important to know who's warm, who's cold, who's clicked on things, who's ready for an offer, all that kind of stuff. And the reason why this is important is because I rather send, you know, say, for example, my email list is 10,000 people and I know that there's maybe about 800 people that are really warm and ready to buy and clicked on my emails and clicked on my free content that's related to the offer that I'm about to send, right? And I send that. I know that my ability to convert those 800 people are going to be much higher. My conversion rate is going to be much higher. I might get from those 800 people 200 people to buy, right? And that's going to be a lot more effective for my conversion rates and my overall understanding of who is buying and who's not, who's ready to buy and who's not buying. Instead of me just sending 10,000 emails to 10,000 different people that are on the different, you know, levels or the different stages in the buying journey. No, you don't want to do that, okay? You got to treat people like people. My personal opinion is the best way to sell is to be transparent. People know what's going on, okay? So what I like to do is I like to give them a chance to learn more. Remember when I talked about how to sell without being salesy, that your job is to educate the customer so they can make a decision. This is where the sales strategy comes in. So I don't just say, hey, everybody, on this email list we have an offer, buy this product. Here's a link. You know, thanks for your money. No, I don't do that because I'm not even giving them a chance to learn more. So it's a no brainer for them. So my first step is I say, hey, we have a product for sale. We have a product that we've created that we just launched. We think you'd be interested in it based on, you know, what we've learned since you've been on the email list. Right now we want to show you a demo of this product. We want to show you what problems it solves, how it can make your life easier, better, more enjoyable, whatever it might do, Right? So join me for my next live webinar where I'll show you all about this product and how to buy it and how to get started. I like doing webinars to sell my products because it gives that step of education. I don't need to sell on the email directly, but the email is going to get me them to the webinar. I invite them to my webinar, I get to give them a full demo and they get to ask questions. I get to show them the answers to those questions and the solutions via my product or service. Now, the reason why I do this is because when I run webinars, I want buyers on my webinar and that's why I phrase it that way in the email and say, hey, we have a product that we are launching or this product that you might be familiar with. If you want to learn more about this product, how it can help you with xyz, I'm running a live webinar and a demo to show you everything about it. I'M going to show you how to get started to show you a special offer. If you want to throw in that as well, join. Here's a link, right? And they sign up for the webinar and that's really cool because now everybody on the webinar is a buyer. They're not there and feeling like okay, this is some sort of workshop and then they get hoodwinked into a sales pitch later on. How many you've been on a webinar like that? Plenty of us, right? So I like to be transparent. Just say, hey, this is a sales webinar, right? You're gonna learn about this product that's for sale and if you like it, you can buy it and there's gonna be a co offer for you. So that's how I like to use email marketing. Now those who actually signed up for the webinar, they know what I'm talking about. They know that this is a product that's for sale. And even if they don't attend the webinar, if they don't buy in the webinar then I send emails, right, telling them how to buy, giving them the reasons why to buy, giving them the benefits of the product or service, showing them the solution, showing them testimonials, show them case studies, that's the follow up email sequences I do and those are the sales emails I do. But only for those who have shown interest. So if you do these five things. Okay, let's recap. Build a quality list, okay? Two, you focus on great quality content and send that quality content to your email list subscribers on the regular number three, you segment your list. You identify people and where they're at in their journey. Not everybody's the same for what's for automations. You email automations onboard your customers, give them a great value, right? I should say onboard your email subscribers. Give them a welcome series, right? And give them your best content so they know that they didn't sign up and it was, you know, a mistake, you know, it was a good investment. By giving their name and email address and your attention or their attention I should say part of the automation is to analyze and optimize. Number five, monetize. Educate your customer on your product or service before you start selling to them. Those who are interested in buying the product or service, give them the sales emails that you want. And if you rinse and repeat this enough, you will see the power of email marketing. I have grown two multi seven figure businesses. This business, the 100 MBA and Webinar Ninja a software company that recently got acquired by Proprofs because it was incredibly valuable to many companies and we were very happy to be acquired by them. But the point here that I'm making is that this works, okay? I was able to grow these, these self funded bootstrapped companies by leveraging the power of email marketing. And by the way, email marketing, this is just relationship building. I'm building relationships one on one with many people through email, through software, through technology. So it's all about building relationships. We build relationships through email. And I like email because it's so intimate and you have access to, to the last sacred place in the digital world. So as you can see, email marketing is a powerful tool. But I want to leave you with some advice as you're going on your journey now to build an incredible machine to help email marketing make you money. Okay? This takes time and you don't want to rush yourself by providing bad quality content. You want to make sure the quality of the content is high and it's better for you to grow an emails with 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, slowly, slowly number of emails and give them quality content. Because if you have a great newsletter, a great sequence of emails that they get, they're going to tell other people, they're going to say this is a great newsletter, you should check it out. I just told you about three other people that I love their newsletters as examples, you know, Tim Ferriss and Mark Manson and Ryan Holiday and all these great newsletters because good quality stuff gets shared and if you keep the quality up and you're patient, you will win eventually. Business is not a sprint, it's a marathon. It's actually a lifelong marathon and you just get better and better and better. Thanks for tuning into the Hundred Dollar MBA show. I hope you found this episode valuable. If you did and you want more valuable lessons, hit subscribe on whatever app you're on. Spotify, Apple, YouTube, we're on them all. And you can go to our website, 100nba.net to check out all our episodes. 2,500 episodes counting. I'll see you in the next episode.