14 Clever Ways to Make More Money From Your Email List

Every morning’s the same. You wake up, take a big yawn, look around for your phone, open up your laptop and check your emails.

And thus, begins your day.

Email is an indispensable part of our life. It is where all forms of communications take place; personal and work life, both. The number of e-mail users in the US has grown to 248.7 million by the end of 2018.

Do you want to grow your email list with LeadQuizzes?

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Do you want to grow your email list with LeadQuizzes?

Grab your 14-day FREE trial now!

Everyone is increasingly using emails and you need to learn how to make money with email marketing.

When experts say, ‘money is in the (email) list‘, they’re absolutely correct. But how? Is it really possible to make money through an email list?

Definitely.

Neil Patel for example created a quiz to capture leads on his health website Nutrition Secrets, grow his email list and consequently, grow that company to over $100,000/month in revenue in under a year.

According to some stats, email marketing has an ROI of 3800%.

How can you make money with an email list, you ask? Let’s discuss the 14 ways.

Sell your own product

Unbounce’s email list is the biggest asset we have for driving new acquisitions. Why? Email marketing consistently generates 80-90% of our landing page traffic when we launch a new campaign, piece of content or product feature. Email allows us to engage our audience in a creative, personalized way that blog posts or tweets can’t.

– Corey Dilly, Unbounce

Listed below are 14 different ways you can sell your products via an email list.

1. Sell a product on the thank you page of your optin

The very first place to monetize your email list is on the Thank You page of your opt-in.

When people opt in for your offer, they’re interested in your brand and your services/products. So turn these interested subscribers into customers right away.

Add snippets of your product and add links to the ‘BuyShopProducts’ page. To sweeten the deal and convince subscribers to purchase right away, you can even add testimonials and raving reviews. This is exactly what Fizzle does.

thank you page example

2. Replay Promotions

Was one of your previous email campaigns wildly popular? Did you offer a 2 hour flash sale on your products and people went crazy?

Well then, do it again.

Monitor all your previous campaigns and replay promotions that did really well before. People perk up at the sight of special promotions and discounts anyways. So leverage that and make money instantly.

However, don’t overdo promotions as that gives a bad vibe. Limit them to a couple of times a year.

3. Segment

As Campaign Monitor reported, ‘There was a 760% increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.’

When you segment your list, you get a clear idea of who your potential customers are and who’re mere lurkers. You can segment your list according to their demographics, their open rates, their interest in your different products, past purchases, and so on. This way you can focus on selling different products to buyers who’re truly interested in purchasing them.

Here’s a great article to get you started with segmentation.

According to MailChimp, this strategy increases open rates, click-throughs, and boosts engagement with your subscribers.

Email Segmentation Benefits

Emarketer also reported, “39% of email marketers who segment their email lists see better open rates and 28% saw better email deliverability and earned more revenue.”

So, segmenting your list pays off big time.

4. Use a Tripwire

What is a tripwire?

A tripwire, also known as a product splinter, is an affordable offer (usually in the range between $5-$50) that is pitched to a potential customer immediately upon their sign-up. It’s intended to speed up the creation of a buyer-seller relationship.

It’s also a textbook example of how to make money with email marketing.

According to Digital Marketer, people who bought tripwires were 10x more likely to shop again and eventually buy your core offer.

email marketing tripwire stats

The main reasoning behind using a tripwire is that somebody is more likely to purchase from you again than they are to become a customer in the first place. Once they’ve become a customer (after buying something cheap BUT valuable), they are much more likely to consider your higher-priced future offers.

5. Up-selling

‘Would you like some fries with that?’ This is upselling.

When your email subscribers purchase from you, you offer them more expensive products from your brand or an upgrade with that purchase.

It doesn’t matter which industry you belong to; if you sell products, you can always find a way to upsell. Even the travel industry report states that 48% of airline passengers and 59% of hotel guests are interested in upgrades and additional services.

6. Down-selling

When a potential customer is trying to back out of purchasing your product, you offer them a lower priced product with similar features or discounts. This is downselling.

Down sell example

Source: Marketing Profs

7. Cross-selling

When users buy a product, you show them a great add-on product or additional products that will compliment it. Amazon, the eCommerce giant, reports that as much as 35% of it’s revenue is generated through cross-selling.

Travelocity frequently uses cross-selling in their email campaigns offering car rentals or hotel stays.

Cross sell example

Source: WhatCounts

Since your customers are already in a buying frame of mind, you can use that to sell them more and increase your revenue.

8. Email abandoned shopping cart

Cart abandonment is a real problem for online retailers and businesses. Your potential client is on the verge of buying your product and at the last possible second they decide not to. It could be any of the following reasons why they abandoned their cart and didn’t buy from you.

shopping cart abandonment

So what do you do?

You re-target them through a series of emails and convince them to complete their checkout process and buy from you. And don’t delay this process. Have an email autoresponder ready to target users who abandon their shopping carts.

SmartPak Equine earns an average of $4.80 revenue per email and earns a 50% conversion rate among readers who click through in their abandon cart email campaign. How? By starting a ‘Recover abandoned shopping carts’ email campaign.

Shopping cart abandonment example

9. Create a Paid Subscription Model for Premium Content

If you’re an expert in your field and have tons of hands-on knowledge, you can create premium content for your subscribers. Create a monthly/yearly/one time fee membership club with content your audience would happily pay to access.

Email monetization example

Even a small fee like $7 or $15 will help you make a lot of revenue in the long term. Offer your membership free or at a heavily discounted rate for the first month and at regular price from the next month. Here’s a great example from CooksIllustrated.com

Email monetization

10. Start Coaching

Another great way to monetize your email list is to offer paid coaching/consulting to your email subscribers.

Nagina Abdullah, the owner of Masala Body, made a whopping $20,000 in one of her best months by offering one on one coaching. And all this with an email list of less than 5000 subscribers!

Amazing, don’t you think?

Email monetization example

Source: GrowthLab

11. Rock Your Webinars

An important difference between promoting something on your website or social media and doing so via email is the fact that with email you’re certain it will reach your customers.

People check their email regularly, several times during the day, while they may not visit your blog or social media at the exact time you publish (or in time for your offer). This is particularly important when it comes to time-sensitive offers such as webinars, which can present a great opportunity to monetize your email list. How?

wistia-webinar-invitation

Whenever you’re preparing a new webinar, the first thing you should do is email the registration page to your contact list. This way, you’ll get more sign-ups (in some cases 80+% comes from email list subscribers) for your webinar, where you can pitch and sell your product/service.

Now, we’ve discussed 11 ways you can make money via your email list by selling your own products. But what if you don’t have your own products to sell? How do you make money with your email list then?

Below are 3 additional ways to make money through your email list even if you have no products.

12. Affiliate marketing

Several brands and companies will happily pay you commissions on any sales you generate for their brand. This is affiliate marketing. Instead of selling your own products and services to your email list, you sell someone else’s products that are a great match for your audience and get a commission.

LeadQuizzes Affiliate Program

Using affiliate marketing software to generate revenue from your email list is a fairly simple process. You find brands or advertisers in your niche who have affiliate program and sign up for them. The key is choosing brands that your audience will likely buy. Promoting makeup products to digital marketers may not work that great. So, choose wisely.

Here are 6 of the best affiliate networks you can look into.

1. ClickBank

2. Rakuten

3. Amazon Associates

4. eBay

5. ShareaSale

6. CJ Affiliate

Remember, it’s important to continuously measure and improve activities to maximize channel revenue. Keep track of key email metrics to monitor campaign performance. This data will provide valuable insights that can help optimize your affiliate efforts in the future.

13. Rent or sell your email list

Renting or selling email addresses is not the best option for monetizing your email list, but a great way to make some quick money. Businesses are always on the lookout for email lists with legitimate subscribers to purchase or rent, and that’s where you come in.

How do you sell email addresses? Here’s a great article to help you get started on how to sell emails for money.

Renting or selling email addresses can be a good fit if you can pair up valuable audience and high-quality partners, in order not to dilute your brand. This approach can bring you opportunities for attractive rates, but be aware, as renting or selling mailing lists can also lead to complaints and unsubscribes.

Also, before you even start thinking about selling mailing lists, you should consider the legal implications of doing so.

14. Sell ads in your email newsletter

If you have a big email list, with 2,500 subscribers or above, you can sell advertising space in your newsletter and charge big bucks for it.

In your emails, add a couple of lines reviewing a brand’s product or service with a link to their page and get paid.

This is how much Practical Ecommerce charges brands wanting to advertise in their newsletter.

Email list monetization

Starting out, you may not get this much or even close to this much. But, if you build your list and keep them engaged, you can earn a decent amount of money through this process.

Making money via your email list is not hard.

Build an email list, nurture them through free valuable content, and use one of the ways mentioned above to earn.

Of course, before you even start thinking about how to make money with email marketing, you have to build an email list. In order to do so, you have to choose an adequate lead generation method – which leads us to online quizzes.

Due to their ever-increasing popularity on social media, online quizzes are the next big thing in the lead generation game.

If you’re looking to take your leads to the next level, you should try to create an online quiz right now.