A Dummy’s Attempt At Email Marketing – Part 1 – An Optimistic Beginning

To start this off, let me confess:

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING…

but I know email marketing is important because that's what all the important people say…

Me trying to figure out what to call this series of posts…

Ok, now that we cleared the air regarding my complete newbie-ness in the realm of email marketing, I want to tell you that email marketing is exactly what I'm going to be spending a lot of time on in the coming months. And, I'm going to document the entire process for you, my valued readers!

My whole philosophy with Kirby's Marketing is to be a completely open book in regards to everything I am doing to make money from my online business. (Check out my income reports to see just how far I've come)

Should my journey into email marketing be any different? I think not!

Note: from now on, I'll be referring to email marketing as “EM”…my fingers are already getting tired of typing it so much!

My Failed Attempt At EM

I'll be the first to admit, I've been putting EM off for quite some time. From the very beginning I knew it was important, mostly because it's what all the big online successes said was most important, but I just kept it on the back-burner because I didn't know much about it.

I created my aWeber account a couple weeks after starting this site and have been passively collecting emails since. I have amassed about 50 or so in 18 months…haha, not too impressive.

The only opportunity my readers have to subscribe is either the ugly sign-up in my sidebar, or a simple sign-up at the end of each post. I always make a brief call-to-action to register at the end of each post, but it obviously doesn't work too well.

Also, I have nothing to offer my readers for signing up, or what the experts call a lead magnet. I used to do a blog blast, which would automatically send out an email every Monday morning summarizing the new posts I published from the week before, but that's not interesting.

That's pretty much all I've done in the last 18 months in terms of EM. It's time to get my butt in gear!

Why is EM important?

I think talking about why EM is important is a good place for us to start. I'll do this in my language, aka dummy-speak, mostly so I know what I'm talking about, but for your benefit as well.

Long-Term Relationships

If you give me your email address, I am able to pursue our professional relationships forever…well, until you unsubscribe, which hopefully won't ever happen.

The longer you are receiving emails from me, and opening them, the more you will trust me. The more you trust me, the more likely you will be to follow my advice and, ultimately, buy things I create or recommend. In the end, that's what it's all about, right? Making money from you, my subscribers!

Direct Access To Personal Space

Think about this for a minute: How often do you give someone your email address? For most of us, it's not very often. Usually, we only give our email addresses to our closest friends, family, and/or businesses that need it to keep us informed and do business with us. It's not something you just hand out whenever or wherever.

Why is this? Because, in the modern era, our email addresses are one of our most sacred personal spaces, and we don't want just anybody having access to our accounts.

Free Advertising

Let's face it, if I have your email address, I can advertise my personal brand, website, products, etc. to you completely for free. I don't have to pay Google for you to see my advertisement. I don't have to snail-mail a flyer to you mailbox. I don't have to knock on your door. I can simply press send and my message will instantly be delivered to, right you in your inbox!

And More…

I'm new at this, so I'm sure there are many more important aspects of EM I'm missing. I'll be sure to mention them in future updates. Speaking of that, you don't want to miss any future updates…so, make sure you sign up to my list here:

See what I did there?!? I just got one more subscriber…hehehe

The Money Is In The Banana Stand…

Oops, I mean The List…The Money Is In The List. Ok, that was a lame Arrested Development reference. I'm sorry.

I'm no mathematician, but let me do a little algebra to show you the power of email marketing. Let's hope this makes sense.

Dream Scenario

I see this as a dream scenario for me; however, for the big shots, I think this is fairly normal.

Let's imagine you have a site that draws 1000 visitors a day and 4% opt-in to your email list (about the industry average). This means you will have 40 new subscribers each day. After one year, you will have 14,600 subscribers to your email list.

Now, imagine you send an email to all 14,600 subscribers with an offer for a product worth $75. After opening it, just 2% of the subscribers to your list purchase the product. That means 292 pay a total of $21,900 from ONE EMAIL!

Now, imagine you send one email a month. $21,900 x 12 months = $262,800 PER YEAR, simply by sending a single email each month of the year.

I know these numbers seem too good to be true, and they may very well be for some of us, me included, but I'm sure they're definitely not unrealistic for some.

My Site's Potential

Let's take a look at my site as it currently stands and it's conservative EM potential.

I am currently getting about 200 unique visitors a day. If I update my opt-in forms and come up with a good lead magnent, I hope I can achieve a 3% opt-in rate. This means I would be getting 6 new subscribers a day. After one year that would be a total of 2,190 subscribers in my list.

With that many subscribers, if I send an email in which I am promoting one of my products for $75, and I have been doing a good job building trust with my subscribers, so 3% of them purchase the product, that means 66 of them will purchase the product. 66 x $75 means I just made $4,950 from that one, single email.

If I send one email a month, that comes to $59,400 PER YEAR, simply by sending one email a month from a site that has a below average opt-in rate and only 200 unique visitors a day.

Moral of the story: Even if I do just a less-than-average job of getting new subscribers, I can still make a boat-load of money with just 200 site views a day!

Ideas For Going Forward + Action Steps

Content

I'm not exactly sure what my plan of action will be in terms of the content I pass along to my subscribers, but here are some ideas I have in mind:

• Notifying them of special offers, bonuses, industry news, etc.
• Sharing valuable content from my website, and others as well
• Introducing products I deem worthy to be purchased by my readers (will never sell anything of poor quality)

Carefully Compose Each Email

I am done with the lazy way of doing things. I will personally compose each week's email and ensure it is high quality and worth reading. If I can do this, everyone on my list will feel valued and, ultimately, more likely to trust me and take action when I put offers in front of them.

I am going to use the following format as a guide for most of my emails:

1. Greeting: Obviously I have to start off with some sort of greeting. I will most likely use the subscriber's name in the greeting, just to make it a little more personal.

2. Personal Story/Anecdote: I will start by telling a short story or anecdote about myself, my job, my life, etc. It can only be a few sentences, so it's not going to be some deep journal. Just something funny or interesting to show my list that I'm an actual person with a real personality. Ideally, this story will allow for a smooth connection to part two.

3. Link to Content: In the second paragraph I'll briefly chat about a piece of content on my site. This could be a product review, or a piece of evergreen content !!LINK TO EVERYGREEN CONTENT DEFINITION WITHING WA!!, or my next edition of A Dummy's Attempt At Email Marketing.

4. Link to More Content: If I have any content that goes well with the piece previously linked to, I'll talk about it here and provide a link as well. This should work well as I'm starting to conduct interviews with the creators of the products I am reviewing. Seems like a natural fit to share them both in the same email right?

5. Closing: I'll try to come up with some sort of clever closing related to what I've discussed, but if I can't think of anything I might just say a simple goodbye.

Update/Add Subscription Boxes

I really need to update my signup forms, both on my sidebar and at the end of each post. Now that I have a much better idea of what I'm going to do, I will be able to make a better call-to-action to get people to sign up. I can tell them I will be providing value.

I am also going to start using a lightbox/pop-up subscription box. I've heard these are super effective, even if they are super annoying. Hey, if it grows the list it's worth it right?!?

Create A Lead-Magnent

Do you know what a lead-magnet is? I don't really either, but I know it's something you're supposed to have to offer your readers for free in exchange for their email list. I'll be sure to learn more about this and pass all of my future knowledge along to you!

I Can't Think Of Anything Else

Well, I feel like this is about it. I've run out of things to say about my new epic adventure into email marketing. I hope I can provide some valuable insight into this whole genre of internet marketing to you as I venture ahead.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, ideas, suggestions, or concerns in the comments below. And…of course…SIGN UP FOR MY EMAIL LIST NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

CAN I MAKE IT ANYMORE OBVIOUS…JUST SIGN UP ALREADY!!!

Overkill?!? Yeah, I was afraid of that…

Until next time,
Dustin “Kirby” Garness