By Paul Leslie
Email can be a powerful tool for building an audience, sharing your expertise, and promoting your brand. But for those in business, the ultimate question is, “How do you make money with your email newsletter?”
Whether you have a large or small subscriber base, there are several ways to monetize your email list. This article will show you how to make money with your email newsletter and share tips and best practices to ensure success.
Can you make money with email?
There’s no doubt that email is more suited for revenue generation than any other channel. A ZeroBounce report shows that 40% of people check their email daily to look for coupons and discounts. Think about it: they could be looking for exactly what you have.
There are companies whose core business model relies on email marketing, but virtually no industry is excluded from making money with email. Even if your business is a service that requires an in-person visit, like a carwash or restaurant, email can play a huge part in boosting sales.
If you haven’t monetized your email list, it’s not too late to start. There’s tremendous potential and a relatively uncomplicated startup. Here is how to do it.
Audit your strategy
You can’t go forward unless you can measure how you’re doing. So, start by assessing your metrics. If you think the emails you craft are excellent, but people aren’t opening them, it may mean your subject lines need work.
In your email service provider (ESP) dashboard, you should be able to easily access open rates and other engagement metrics:
- click-through rates
- click-to-open rates
- bounce rates
- spam complaint rates
- unsubscribe rates.
Auditing your strategy alerts you to potential issues preventing you from making money with email. Also, it shows you what emails perform best so you can double down on that approach. Whether your metrics are encouraging or indicate issues that need addressing, you should still strengthen your list with validation, which we will address next.
Validate your emails
If you want to monetize your email newsletter, you need a list of real, valid email addresses. When your emails bounce back, you miss an opportunity to connect with those subscribers. Furthermore, a bounce rate higher than 2% affects your ability to reach the inbox in the future.
The email addresses on your email list aren’t guaranteed to stay fresh. That’s because email addresses are not permanent for many people. They may abandon their Gmail account to get ProtonMail. They may have had an email address through their workplace but changed jobs. Some people check their emails rarely and jump ship when their inbox piles up.
You can’t expect to continue sending emails to your list and get good results without cleaning out the bad data. That’s what email validation is all about. An effective email validation service identifies email addresses that aren’t valid or may be destructive to your list.
For example, some email addresses are recycled by anti-spam organizations and Internet service providers (ISPs) as spam traps. These are set up to lure and trap spammers in order to block them. The downside is that even legitimate email senders like yourself sometimes wind up with spam traps on their list. If you send an email to them, you’ll be perceived by ISPs as a spammer.
Without consistent email validation, your email list starts to unravel. Your emails may be great, but if your list isn’t in good shape, you may as well not do it. Fortunately, verifying your email list is easy. You can even set up an email validation API at the source to keep bad data off your list from square one.
Authenticate your emails
Many email marketers must familiarize themselves with this aspect after Google and Yahoo implemented strict rules on email authentication. So what is it exactly?
Email authentication verifies the source and legitimacy of email messages. The end goal is to help prevent email spoofing and phishing attacks. The three main methods used for email authentication are:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF): Validates if an email was sent from an authorized IP address. SPF goes on your DNS and lists the domains or IP addresses that you send mail from.
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM): This is a digital signature found in the header of all emails you send. Its purpose is to ensure that the message in the email was not modified.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC): DMARC tells email receivers how to handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM checks and where to send reports about these failures.
Implementing these methods helps protect your credibility and is key to getting your emails in the inbox. Email authentication ensures ISPs recognize your emails as legitimate. You need email authentication to improve email deliverability and protect the reputation of your domain.
Is email authentication complicated?
Although sophisticated, the process doesn’t have to be for the user. If all of these concepts are new and sound like a lot of technical know-how, you can set up a DMARC monitor to ensure your email security is not in danger. A reputable platform should be able to help you with these processes.
Optimize your sending schedule
There are plenty of misconceptions people have about monetizing their email newsletters. You’ll get different answers to the question “When do you send your emails?” Some people think you send emails when you have something to sell or want to promote a particular item.
That can certainly be true, but sending emails irregularly and disappearing could actually cause a downgrade in deliverability. You can’t increase conversions unless your emails show up in the inbox, and sending your emails sporadically sends a message that you’re a likely spammer.
Here’s what to do: determine the right sending frequency for your audience. That will depend on the type of business you run and the types of emails you send. Then, find the ideal days of the week or month and stick to that schedule.
You can retain more of your audience by allowing subscribers to decide how often they’d like to hear from you. Once you determine the sending schedule, coming out like clockwork not only helps your email deliverability but also gets your subscribers to anticipate what you send.
Experiment with your content
When you consider that people regularly get more than 10 dozen emails a day, it’s clear why you must send emails that qualify as one of the three E’s:
- Enticing
- Educational or
- Entertaining.
Humdrum is lethal to email marketing success.
One of the best ways to craft great emails is to experiment with your content. If you pause and think, “Yeah, but I never saw this in an email before,” that can indicate that you’ve got a good idea. You don’t have to be a follower; you can lead the way.
Also, you can sometimes refresh your email design. If you don’t have a designer on your team, make the most of the beautiful templates your email marketing platform provides. Moreover, you can even test and see how your audience takes text-only emails.
Make sure your design is on point
We live in an age where notifications are sent multiple times per hour. We hear beeps, bells, and vibrations. We’re dealing with notification overload, and many people toggle between multiple browsers on their computers or jump from app to app on their phones. Keep that in mind when you design your emails – you’ve got to create emails that people want to focus on. The layout and presentation have to be pleasant and easy to digest.
So learn about colors, fonts, proportions, and symmetry. Pick good graphics and make sure you’re not conveying an amateur image. You want your visuals to be excellent. Always remember that people can look at lots of things. You want them to look at your emails and absorb your messages.
Get feedback from those you trust
There is a great resource that many email marketers neglect: all of the people around you. When you’re trying to grow and monetize your email newsletter, get feedback from the people you trust.
It’s especially helpful to loop in people outside the team working on your emails. In a webinar ZeroBounce held with Email Marketing Manager Tracie Pang from Litmus, Pang stressed the importance of quality assurance (QA).
Having multiple checkpoints can save you a lot of hassle, and also prevent costly mistakes. Pang explained: “Recently at Litmus, we started looping in folks outside of our email team. These were our designers and our content marketers. We wanted them to also be involved in QA, just so we can get fresh eyes on our emails.”
What if something you wrote insulted your readers or made them feel like you took them for granted? Or imagine if you crafted an irresistible email, but one little error negated everything. It could be as simple as a link not working.
So, get your team involved and double-check all the aspects of your emails. Make sure the emails render correctly on a variety of devices: smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Are there any broken images? Also, ensure the size of the email isn’t so large that it causes loading issues. When you finally let your email out into the world, you want to feel confident about it.
Confidence is a key component
That brings us to our last point: confidence matters so much when your goal is to grow your email newsletter. If subscribers sense that you’re sheepish, they won’t in turn have confidence in what you’re offering. Always think about how to serve the people on your email list and then make it happen.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of competition for who gets attention in the inbox. So, where does your confidence come from? Covering all of the bases listed here. Not addressing one facet, like list quality, can cause the whole house of cards to implode. The more boxes your emails check, the more your chances of a high ROI are.
About the Author
Paul Leslie is a content creator and writer with ZeroBounce. As a researcher and interviewer, he has recorded over 1,000 interviews distributed via radio and podcasts. In addition, he likes watching and rewatching movies.
