The 12 Essential Steps for Monetizing and Growing Your Email Marketing List

Create a Profitable Promotional Calendar

Small business owners and solopreneurs that are seeing success with email marketing don’t wing it with when it comes to publishing emails.

Instead, what they do is plan things out months in advance. This sort of planning lets you sync your email publishing calendar with things that are happening in your business, other events in your industry, and even holidays, and relevant seasons.

The key is, though, that you don’t just plan individual emails. Instead, you plan email sequences of varying lengths, depending on what you’re promoting or trying to accomplish.

Here are some of the most popular types of email sequences:

• Indoctrination - this is a welcome series (particularly for prospects).
• Onboarding - this is what you send to new customers to encourage them to use the product they just purchased, which in turn boosts customer satisfaction and creates repeat business.
  
• Ascension - This is the series you send after a purchase to persuade a buyer to purchase more offers from you.
• Special promos/sales sequences - This includes sequences for things like launch week specials, flash sales, holiday sales and similar events.
• Fear-Logic-Gain - This is a three-part sales sequence, where each email appeals to a different emotion or rationale.
• Objection handling - Here’s where you raise and handle common objections to close the sale.
• Social proof sequence - This series is all about sharing case studies, testimonials and other proof.

Here’s the next piece you need to snap into place in order to create a big, responsive list…

Build Your List Every Single Day

You're not going to build your list in one big step (Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say).

Instead, it’s about consistently taking small steps every day, which eventually lead to big results.

Here are some examples of what I mean by daily small steps... you may:

• Create a new email to add to your autoresponder.
• Send a live broadcast to your list.
• Analyze your campaigns to look for ways to improve them.
• Design a new lead magnet.
• Do something to send traffic to your lead page, such as write a guest post.

These are just a few ideas of ways to do something every day. If you take these sort of steps consistently, then you’ll start seeing good results.

Next…

Look for Ideas and Inspiration All Around You

One problem many entrepreneurs that use email marketing run into is running out of ideas to write about. But that shouldn’t be a problem for you… IF you know where to look for inspiration.

One quick and easy way to get inspired is by looking at the sales letters and tables of contents (TOC) for popular products in your industry. Each benefit listed in a sales letter is a potential topic for you to write about, and likewise each section or subsection in a TOC is a potential topic idea for you.

Increase Your Open Rate

It doesn’t do much good if you craft engaging emails but no one is reading them. That’s why you need to put in place a strategy for increasing the number of people who open your emails.

Part of that strategy should include creating high-quality email sequences that your subscribers can’t wait to read, especially those that create quick wins and results.

For example, if you're in the weight loss niche, you might create a two-month (8 emails) sequence that shares your top tips and strategies for losing weight. 

If your readers follow along in real time, they will lose weight during those two months – and you can bet that any subscribers who get great results are going to open your emails every time!

Next up is a related tip...

Create Subject Lines That Get Attention

One really big component of running a successful email list is to learn how to create subject lines that get attention and get people opening (and reading!) your email.

One way to do this is by creating benefit-driven subject lines that also arouse curiosity. This can be as easy as using the word “secret,” like this:

The #1 secret for managing diabetes…

Or you might use a question mark to arouse curiosity, like this:

Stop taking Metformin for good?

Either way, you’re sharing a benefit in both cases, while arousing curiosity about how people will get this benefit.

Learn How to Craft Effective Email Messages

As mentioned in the previous tip, you need to craft subject lines that get people opening your email. And once they open it, then you need to hold their attention.

How do you do that?

Here are two good ways:

Empathize with the reader - Many people tend to think that people really don’t understand their problem and how painful it is to them. If you can show them you truly understand by empathizing with them, not only will you hit the right emotional chord in your emails, you’re also going to get the reader’s full attention.

Example, “It’s frustrating when you spend 12 hours a day in front of your computer, yet you really don’t have anything to show for it. And yet other make it look soooo easy to make money online…”

Tell a story - Ideally, this should be a story about how someone like the reader overcame the same problem the reader currently possesses. Again, this will hit the right emotional chord.

Example, “Jane didn’t always weigh 125 pounds. In fact, there was a time when she weighed double that…”

Now the next piece of the email marketing puzzle…

Get the Clicks

At this point, you’ve created an email that has people hanging on your every word. Your subscribers are reading right to the end of the email.

Now you need to persuade them to click on your link, otherwise your whole email becomes, well, worthless.

Here’s a key to remember: you need to give your readers a good reason to click on your link "now". If you don’t do this, people will close the email with the intention of getting back to it “later.” But of course life gets in the way and later never comes – and you lose a sale.

For example, “Check out this page now while you can still take advantage of the 50% off discount! Hurry, this special offer ends soon…”

Segment Your List for Bigger Profits

Segmenting is all about organizing your list into small groups based on what you know about these groups. This lets you send out highly targeted messages, which in turn boosts your conversion rates and profits.

One of the keys to this strategy is to segment your list in meaningful ways. For example:

• Keep your prospect list and customer list separate.
• Segment based on how a prospect entered your sales funnel (lead magnet, contest, webinar, etc.).
• Segment based on what products a customer purchases.
• Segment based on behavior, such as not opening the last email.

For example, if you have a group of people who clicked on your blog link about Facebook marketing, then you can have that action trigger a sequence of follow up emails with additional information and offers on the topic of Facebook marketing.

This will result in more engagement and sales because you’re emailing a very interested, targeted segment of your list.

Creating Your Own “Set It and Forget It” Sales

The dream is to set up an autoresponder sequence full of emails that get your subscribers to know, like and trust you, and is filled with offers, and that runs by itself and puts money in your pocket 24/7.

Here’s a big key: you need to create evergreen content. 

This is content that doesn’t get stale, even if it’s been many months since you wrote it. Evergreen content avoids language that dates itself and it avoid promoting untested content and offers.

For example, you don’t say things like, “I’m loving spending this summer at the beach” or “The Olympics are almost here” or “Look at this new product.”

All those things date the email, which can create an immediate disconnect with readers. End result? No clicks, a bunch of unsubscribes, and a drop in profits.

Build Loyalty by Creating Emails People Love

Another big key to profits is subscriber retention. If readers remain loyal, then you’re going to have a very profitable list.

One way to help build loyalty is to humanize your content. Let people know there is a real person on the other side of your email. A good way to do this is by sharing niche-relevant stories.

For example, if you’re writing to people who are remodeling their homes, then share a story about a costly and embarrassing remodeling mistake you made.

This builds rapport with people, and the good information you provide about preventing or fixing that sort of mistake builds loyalty.

Boost Your Email’s Deliverability

We want every single email we send to land in the intended recipient’s inbox. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes they land in the spam folder, and sometimes they seem to just completely disappear.

If you want to boost your profits, then you need to also boost your email deliverability. One good place to start is by checking your Sender Score, which helps determine if your emails land in the spam folder or the inbox. You can do this right now by clicking here:

https://www.senderscore.org/

Improve Your Results by Tracking Your Campaigns

Once you have your email campaigns up and running, then you need to optimize them in order to be sure they’re as profitable as possible.

While you can test just about everything, the key to this strategy is to focus on those factors that will have the biggest impact on your bottom line. These factors include:

• Lead page headline
• Email subject line
• Overall offer
• Overall design (mobile responsive)
• Call to action

For example, one small tweak to a subject line could double the number of people who open your email! That’s why it’s well worth investing some time into tracking and testing your campaigns.