No matter what industry you’re in, even a small email list of relevant and engaged subscribers can earn an income. And no, you don’t have to completely sell out or frustrate your subscribers to start making a profit from your email list.
After all, you’ve likely spent plenty of time and money creating your list. Isn’t it time you made a return on your investment?
Knowing where to start can be difficult. Will you make enough money to make this endeavour worthwhile? Have you tried and failed to make an income from your email list before? What if you don’t have a product or service to sell?
These are all hurdles you’ll overcome by the end of this article, as we bring you tips, tricks, and 17 specific ways to monetize your email list. Read on to learn more about finally creating an email list that’s profitable.
Adopt a Marketer’s Mindset
Before ploughing headfirst into monetizing your email list, you need to adopt a marketer’s mindset. This is to be distinguished from a sales mindset, as well as from a content producer’s mindset.
A sales mindset in this context is all about trying to extract money from your subscribers. There’s no surer way to make readers unsubscribe than by pushing one cold sales pitch after the next onto their screens. No matter how subtly you try to do it.
The content producer’s mindset is about letting people know you’ve published something new. There’s nothing innately wrong with this. But if you want to make profit from your email list, you’re going to need to shift to a marketing-centric mindset.
A marketing-centric mindset is about getting into the mind of your ideal reader, then consistently providing content that offers real value.
By consistently offering your subscribers value, you build a trusting and loyal readership. It’s only by building and relentlessly protecting that trust and loyalty that you can start to sustainably make a profit from your email list without crossing ethical boundaries or becoming a leech in your subscriber’s inbox.
Keep this in mind as you go forward, and you won’t go far wrong.
How to Start Earning From Your Email List — 20 Methods
Now let’s delve into some ideas on how to monetize an email list. We wouldn’t recommend using all of these methods. Those you choose to experiment with will depend on the type of list you’re building, and what products and services you have to offer (if any).
Remember, this is a matter or patience and persistence. Monetizing an email list requires trial and error. Tweaking settings. Keeping a close eye on the numbers. And adjusting constantly. Keep with it, and nurture that strong, loyal relationship with your readers. Before you know it, you’ll be reaping the rewards.
1. Offer Exclusive Discounts
Try offering exclusive discounts that are available for a limited time, to encourage readers to buy. Craft your sales pitch carefully and make sure that you have earned your audience’s trust. Maintain this by not overwhelming them with too many offers. Promote only products and services that offer true value and are high quality. You can do this through discounting your own products, or by offering exclusive discounts that you’ve negotiated with other companies.
2. Make The Most of Tripwire Marketing
Tripwire marketing is where you make an affordable offer very soon in the relationship with your subscriber. This is usually low cost: in the range of $5 to $50, offered shortly after them signing up to your mailing list. The purpose is to establish a buyer-seller relationship as soon as possible. To accustom the subscriber to the quality of products or services you offer to your list. This can be an incredibly effective monetization strategy. According to Digital Marketer, customers who bought tripwires areten times more likely to become repeat buyers.
3. Upsell With Similar Products
When a subscriber makes a purchase, set up an email autoresponder that offers an upgrade to that purchase. You see this working during so many day-to-day transactions, especially in restaurants and fast food chains. You order a burger, and you’re asked if you want to “make it large”. This is upselling. Offering a lot more, for a little extra money. No matter what industry you’re in, if something is being sold, there’s always the possibility to upsell. Think about this creatively, but logically, and you’ll be sure to come up with some valuable upsell ideas for your own products.
4. Downsell When They Want to Cancel
Sometimes customers will want to cancel a subscription or an order they’ve recently placed. Instead of letting this revenue completely disappear, set up a simple autoresponder that offers a lower-priced option. This is downselling. Where you offer a cheaper product with similar features, or a discounted package to try and sway the buyer’s decision. To give the customer piece of mind, always offer a generous returns policy or warranty. The last thing you want is for a subscriber to feel like you’ve caused them to waste their hard-earned money.
5. Cross-Sell
Cross-selling is similar to upselling, but instead of offering an upgrade, you offer something different, but loosely related. For example, a customer books a flight to a certain destination, and you offer them hotel deals or car rentals. Someone orders a burger, and you offer them a drink. This is another way for you to continue selling your products, especially those that don’t often get seen.
6. Pre-sell Your Upcoming Products
Set up pre-selling campaigns for products or services that you will soon launch. Offer discounts, freebies, or upgrades for early-bird customers. One of the best ways to do this is to release valuable, relevant content every couple of days to your subscribers in the lead-up to your launch. Don’t approach this as just a cold-selling exercise. Use this opportunity to explore the pain points your product will solve. Tell stories. Make the content personal. This builds hype before the launch, and will engage your subscribers, leading to more buzz, and more early-bird signups.
7. Segment Your Email List
Segment your email list according to valuable metrics. For example: by previously purchased products, purchases within the last 30 days, high spenders, most active subscribers, etc. With niche segments like this, you can tailor content to the subscribers who are most likely to engage with it. You’ll see your open rates and click rates increase. Unsubscribes will decrease. And yes, monetization will be improved.
8. Don’t Forget Abandoned Carts
Abandoned carts are a common problem for online businesses. According to World Pay, the top 5 reasons for cart abandonment are:
- Presented with unexpected costs.
- They were just browsing.
- They found a better offer elsewhere.
- Overall price was too expensive.
- They just decided against buying.
To reduce the amount of money lost through abandoned carts, set up automatic emails for customers who didn’t complete the purchase. Remember, you will need the visitor to provide their email address at some point to make this possible. This is your chance to make them an offer they can’t refuse. For example, “20% off your abandoned order for the next 24 hours”. How about a $10 voucher if they complete their purchase in 48 hours? There are tons of options.
Even if you can’t get the sale this time, you’ve still discovered the kind of products this visitor likes. This means you can segment them into relevant groups of subscribers, so you can offer more valuable, focused content in the future.
9. Monetize Your Thank You Page or Welcome Email
When people sign up for your newsletter and click to confirm their email address, they will be sent to a thank you page. Use this page to draw attention to an unmissable offer (such as a good-value tripwire offer). If you don’t want to use your thank you page for this purpose, you could use the same tactic in your Welcome email, which should be sent immediately after a new subscriber clicks the confirmation link.
10. Display Ads in Your Newsletter
If you have at least a couple thousand subscribers, you could start selling advertising space on your newsletter. Companies such as LiveIntent and Paved.com are examples of tools that allow you to include ads in your newsletters without needing to actually sell the ad space yourself. That being said, selling ad space yourself is usually more lucrative. This won’t make you rich, but it’s an additional, automated way to monetize your list. However, remember to use this tip sparingly. People don’t like having content broken up with too many ads. Be tactful with your ad placements.
11. Sell Sponsored Emails
Another way to monetize your email lists is to approach companies to ask them to sponsor one or more of your emails. One example could be that a company pays you $1000 to send out an email offering advice on a certain topic, with a link or two to their product or service. Another example could be that you’re going to send out 10 emails on a specific topic, and a company pays to “sponsor” these messages, in return for their logo being displayed in a prominent position. Be open minded about this, as there are many ways it can work. The agreement you make with a sponsor will be different depending on what you and your sponsor expect to get out of the arrangement.
12. Affiliate Marketing
There are tons of brands that are happy to pay you commission for any sales you help to generate. All you have to do is pick products and services that you genuinely value, and which your subscribers will value, too. Check they have an affiliate program. If they do, sign up, and start selling with the links they provide you with.
You can find and set up affiliate accounts through several sites such as JVZoo, Clickbank, Rakuten, and Amazon Associates Program. This works best if you have already gained a following, but can work at any level to monetize your email list. Be sure to read the terms of all affiliate programs before signing up.
13. Create a Paid-For Newsletter
Consider setting up a paid-for, subscription newsletter, where subscribers pay for exclusive content, one-on-one coaching, AMAs, etc. You will, of course, need to make sure you’re offering tons of value to paying subscribers, so being an expert in your niche will help. Offering free or discounted membership on the first month or two will give potential subscribers peace of mind. The real beauty of this option is that the results really start to add up. 1000 subscribers each paying $10 per month is $10,000 recurring monthly revenue. Not bad at all.
14. Promote Your Webinars
Webinars are fast becoming extremely popular. So if you’re able to create one that’s particularly valuable to your audience, this could be a great way to generate revenue by promoting the webinar to your list. Viewers have a high chance of converting into customers since they have already shown an interest in what you have to offer. And while they’re watching your webinar, you have plenty of time to showcase your expertise, and explain what you can do for them.
Try it out. Send out invitations to your email list and have them reserve a spot in the live webinar. You can then use a recording of the webinar as a lead magnet to get more people to sign up to your mailing list in the future.
15. Share Free Ebooks, Magazine Subscriptions or Whitepapers
What’s great about this option is you get to share top quality content without needing to create it yourself, and get paid for doing so. Platforms we’re happy to recommend include RevResponse and TradePub, as they offer a large amount of content covering a wide number of niches. You simply have your readers fill in a form to access the download. If they meet a certain criteria, you get paid for each lead. This is one way to offer your subscribers some real value, while also monetizing your list.
16. Send Dedicated Emails/Solo Ads
Instead of sponsorships, companies might pay you to send dedicated emails to your list to promote their product or service. These are often called “Solo Ads”. This is another way of selling advertising space, only instead of selling a display ad, you’re selling an entire email blast. This can either be to your entire list, or to a segment of your list. Remember that you’re putting your name behind these companies, so only work with trusted and reputable organizations.
As a list owner, you could charge based on the number of emails that will be sent, or the number of clicks you generate for the advertiser. If you don’t want to sell solo ads personally, check out platforms such as Clickonomy, Udimi, Safe Swaps, and The Traffic Source. These do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
17. Resend Promotions
If you’ve had one of your promotions do well previously, why not resend it at a later date? Just be sure to leave enough time between the original send and your resend. And don’t send the same promotion out to the same people too many times. You also can resend the campaign to those who didn’t open the email the first time around, just in case they missed it by accident.
The 75/25 Rule of Monetizing an Email List
Although there are plenty of ways to monetize an email list, you must resist the urge to simply see email as one more sales channel in your arsenal. Sure, you can pitch a product or service to your subscribers occasionally, and you can monetize elsewhere if it’s not too intrusive. But most of the time you should be the giver in the relationship, not the taker.
A good rule of thumb we use here at CampaignSpike is the 75/25 rule. At least 75% of your email content should provide value without asking for anything in return. And a maximum of 25% can be used for selling to your readers.
And if you’ve never tried to make money from your email list before? Don’t worry. So long as you follow the 75/25 rule, there’s a high chance that your readers will accept this transition without much fuss. You have to put food on the table somehow, right?
When Can You Start Monetizing an Email List?
You can start monetizing lists with just a few hundred subscribers, so long as they are engaged, the newsletters are relevant, and you have something decent to offer subscribers. Ultimately, your first motivation should be providing value, and the money will come as a byproduct of this.
You can start selling ads to lists that are only a couple of thousand strong. But if you want to make any decent money from ad networks that populate ads automatically, you’ll need a much larger list. Even a list with 100k subscribers and a healthy open rate won’t make you rich from ad revenue.
Also, if you’re going to rely on affiliate marketing, you probably want at least a few thousand highly targeted subscribers, and only promote products and services you love. This is the best way to gain the most money from this effort.
It’s Time to Monetize Your Email List!
And there you have it. 17 different ways to monetize your email list. Remember to keep testing, experimenting, and improving your activities. Keep an eye on key metrics. Keep building and nurturing your list. And most importantly, keep providing value. This is a game of patience, and riches won’t come overnight. But you will be rewarded for your persistence.
Let us know in the comments if you’ve found any other ways to monetize your email list!
