How to Make Money with Email Marketing in 2024: 9 Expert Tips

W ant to learn how to make money with email marketing?

I know from experience that it can be frustrating to work hard at something only to never make a sale. But don’t worry, there’s hope! Over the years I’ve developed a strategy for making money through email marketing that I’m excited to share with you.

I’m going to tell you step-by-step, how to run a successful email marketing campaign that actually converts by following just 9 easy tips.

And if you’re in a rush, please feel free to use this table of contents to jump ahead to the section that interests you or the key takeaways section 😉

Before we jump in to the email conversion optimization tips, let’s look at some background info to make sure we’re on the same page.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a strategy in which you reach out to a large group of targeted audience via email to promote your products and services. Your emails may be about an upcoming sale, a new launch, a special offer or anything related to your online business.

The idea mainly is to create brand awareness and build loyalty and trust by reaching out to people via email.

In the section below, I’ll tell you how to make your email campaign a big success, even if you’re just getting started with email marketing.

Key Takeaways For How To Make Money With Email Marketing

• Email marketing can be a powerful way to make money by promoting products or services to a targeted list of subscribers.
• You’ll want to build your email list using an awesome lead generation tool like OptinMonster with advanced targeting features as the foundation for successful email marketing outreach.
• Set a clear goal for your email campaign, such as increasing sales, nurturing leads, or re-engaging inactive subscribers.
• Craft an attention-grabbing subject line and engaging email copy that persuades readers to take action.
• Use psychological principles like urgency and scarcity to boost clicks and conversions.
• Offer rewards or free email content to incentivize subscribers and build goodwill.
• Use an upselling and cross-selling email marketing strategy to increase revenue from each subscriber.
• Follow up with subscribers who didn’t initially take action to give your campaign another chance.
• Use effective design, calls-to-action, and reputable email marketing tools to optimize your campaigns.

1. Start With a Targeted Email List

Your campaign should begin by building a targeted email list. Without a list, you can’t even start your campaign.

The best way to collect emails is to convert your visitors into subscribers. But how do you do that? Because not all your visitors may be willing to sign up and become a subscriber.

Many successful email marketers have used and achieved great results by using an exit-intent popup to turn abandoning website visitors into subscribers. Exit-intent popups are strategically designed to appear on your user’s screen as soon as they try to leave your site or open a new tab.

For example, this simple popup generated 967 new leads for Singularity University:

Here are more email popup examples for your inspiration!

And the most powerful email popup tool is OptinMonster. It’s used by over 1.2 million websites to grow their list of leads with highly targeted and personalized offers with all sorts of behavior automation.

Here are the key features of OptinMonster

• 400+ templates
• Drag and drop builder
• Dozens of campaign types
• Powerful targeting rules
• Onsite retargeting
• Email intefrations
• A/B testing
• Built-in analytics

Get started with OptinMonster!

To help further illustrate the ease for which you can grow your list with OptinMonster, check it out being used in action:

2. Set a Goal for Your Email Marketing Campaign

Do you know why you are running this campaign? Because if you don’t have a specific goal in mind, then stop right now. Take a break and think about what action you want your subscribers to take.

You might set a goal to…

• Increase sales by promoting a product or service
• Nurture existing subscribers by offering them something they would love
• Attract your existing subscriber’s attention after long inactivity
• Segment your subscribers to send out more targeted emails

You don’t necessarily need to have the exact same marketing goals. You can have your own list based on your conversion goals. But regardless, you’ll want to make use of email as a marketing channel – as it is one of the very few channels you’ll actually own (without relying on a third-party platform).

2. Work on Your Headline Email Copy

Once you have figured out why you want this campaign, it’s time to draft your email. The first thing that users will notice about your email is your subject line.

That’s where the actual game begins. The subject line is how they’ll decide whether to open your email.

So, you’ll want to draft a headline that is so powerful that people just can’t ignore it.

Remember, it’s your headline that’ll decide whether your email will be opened, deleted or even worse, land in the spam folder.

You can use IsItWP’s Free Email Subject Line Analyzer to make sure you’re crafting eye-catching headlines that increase your email open rate.

Simply enter your subject line, and the email marketing tool will score it based on factors like title case, word count, numbers, power words, and more.

3. Write an Engaging Email Campaign

So your title convinced your follower to open the email. Now what? If they don’t read something persuasive, you might lose their attention.

To prevent that from happening, you can follow these tips:

• Use persuasive writing. Make sure to ask the reader to take one specific action.
• Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. That way your readers will find it easy to understand your message without losing interest.
• Build a connection with the readers. You can do that with the tone of your writing. Always make use of first-person when you are writing your emails. This lets your readers feel that you are having a conversation directly with the reader.
• Use email personalization techniques like using their name. This is optional – and kind of an oldie but a goodie. Using their name in the email can make them feel like the email was written specifically for them. This can help you grab their attention really quick. And somewhat surprisingly – opt-ins with 2 fields (name and email address) convert slightly better than those with just the email field.
• Finally, be relevant and precise. People don’t have time for long emails. Plus, they are boring. So don’t waste time talking about unnecessary things. Stick to your point and pass the message quickly.

4. Use Psychology to Boost Clicks

If you want your email marketing copy to convert, try using the game of psychology as part of your strategy. You don’t need a psychology degree for this. Just make use of basic psychology to predict your user’s behavior.

You can make people take quick action on your site by using urgency. For example, you can use a countdown timer to make them feel that their time is running out and the sale will end soon.

Or you can use time-sensitive power words that grab quick attention.

Another way to draw attention is to show that your product might run out of stock. So here, you can use scarcity to promote action. People will take quicker action rather than waiting for later because they don’t want to miss the chance.

5. Use an Email Marketing Platform With Effective Design

The next important step to consider is the design of your copy. Do your best to make it look professional.

The best email marketing providers, such as Constant Contact and Brevo offer beautiful professionally-designed email templates that convert well.

Thirdly, pay attention to your CTAs. Choose the right words, color and size for your buttons to make them appealing and actionable.

6. Reward Your Newsletter Readers

Sometimes it’s good to give away free stuff instead of selling all the time. It can be a free download, free tips, advice or anything of that kind.

This encourages the reader to take action. Because naturally, we are all fond of free stuff.

Check out this guide to running a successful online giveaway to get started.

7. Try Upselling

A great tip for making money online with email marketing is to upsell your products or services.

This is a popular method that allows you to persuade your user to make an additional purchase very smartly.

For example, you are selling out a product for $20. You can convince your user to spend JUST an extra dollar to get an upgraded quality of the same product.

8. Cross-Sell Related Products or Services

Another effective way to earn money with email marketing is to cross-sell related products. By using this technique you can convince your user to spend some extra money by purchasing an additional product of their interest.

For example, let’s say you are using your email marketing campaign to sell lip balm to your users and have successfully convinced them to make the purchase.

Once the payment is done, you can set up email automation that recommends a related product that you’re selling, like a hand lotion. Because the buyer is interested in the lip balm, chances are that they will be interested in buying lotion, too.

9. Send and Follow-up

The final step is to hit the send button. But that’s not it. Sometimes your followers will not take action just by reading your email. So don’t forget to followup.

Wait for a day or 2 after sending out the email. After that, you can send a quick follow-up to your email subscribers. With many email marketing services, you can set up follow-up emails to send automatically and resend the email to people who haven’t seen it yet. This acts as a gentle reminder and it increases the chance of people actually taking action.

Monetize Email Marketing Today

So there you have it.

Those were some quick tips for your next email marketing campaign. Do let us know if there’s something else that can be useful to our readers.

Meanwhile, you may want to check out our guide on how to create an email course to boost subscribers.

And don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter for more helpful blogging tips!