Email marketing has to be one of the best business models out there for anyone to start. It requires very little upfront costs while the profit you can make on the backend is basically infinite. Many entrepreneurs use email marketing as a means of scaling their business and there’s one good reason for this: it gives you direct contact to your customer base. Why go spend hundreds of dollars on ads when you already have a high converting email list of thousands of people?

1. Know the niche you are entering

First things first, you have to understand the niche you are entering. It’s pretty hard to market anything if you don’t understand what you’re marketing. For example, a doctor wouldn’t get into the make money online niche just like an obese person wouldn’t get into the health niche. When choosing a niche, pick something that you are passionate about and have a strong knowledge base on. This will make it easier to sell certain products as well as keep you motivated in the beginning stages of your business.

2. Provide value in that niche

Once you’ve identified what niche you’re going to dive into, it’s time to start providing value in that niche. On your website, you can create multiple blog posts and articles targeting a specific audience. Also, make sure you use all social media platforms and have them lead to your site. I’d suggest you create multiple YouTube videos, Instagram posts, and have a Facebook page that will provide immense value for your customers. This will create a lot of engagement surrounding your brand which will ultimately lead more followers to your site. You can use sales funnels to make this process more efficient and effective, but we’ll stick to email.

3. Create a high converting optin on your webpage or landing page

Once you have your followers on your site, now it’s time to capture their emails. You can do this through many processes like quizzes, freebies, or valuable download offers. For example, a marketer in the health niche may have a free pdf that a customer can get if they put in their email. This offer also provides value to the customer, making them more willing to optin. They can also place a free “two minute health quiz” on the side of their webpage that will ultimately email the quiz taker their results. In the end, it’s all about giving value first then obtaining the email. Also, make sure you only have the email field on your optin page. Multiple fields are unnecessary and will lower your optin rate.

4. Build an email marketing list around your niche

One of the worst mistakes marketers make is getting people on their site but not getting any optins. When you get people to optin, it gives you direct access to your customer base. Customers opting in show that they are interested in what you have to offer. In order to capture these emails, you’re going to need two things: Clickfunnels and an autoresponder of your choice. Clickfunnels is a platform that allows your to easily create optin pages and sales funnels which ultimately help capture emails. Once you link your autoresponder to your optin page, customers who optin will automatically be placed on an email list on that autoresponder platform. Common autoresponders include MailChimp, AWeber, and Market Hero. All in all, these platforms will help you with email automation in the future.

5. Do not spam!

This is probably one of the biggest marketing mistakes committed by most email marketers. Just because you have a list doesn’t mean you can bombard their email with offer after offer on a daily basis. In fact, they will probably unsubcribe from you email list if you commit this marketing crime. Instead, you want to set up a sequence of emails that will be sent from your autoresponder. For example, you can set up your autoresponder to email your list 7 days week. On two of those days, you can give your customers an offer to a problem they have. This could be through an affiliate offer or better yet, your own product. Once they have been on your email list for a while and you have built solid trust with your customer base, you can then work your way up to more expensive offers. Because your email list is basically all warm or hot traffic, conversions with this offer will be more significant than they would be if you didn’t build the trust. Overall, don’t spam in the beginning stages. Instead, provide as much value as you can for the cheapest price possible. This will build a personal connection that will last a lot longer than your impatient spamming.

6. Continue getting leads

The worst thing you can do in marketing is get comfortable with what you already have. You should always be striving to grow your business and serve as many people as possible. Digital marketing is evolving so fast these days that if you don’t stay up with the trends, you may fall behind. You should be focusing on getting as many leads as possible especially in the beginning stages of your business. Hit up Facebook groups, forums, and YouTube videos related to your niche and find people who have a problem you can solve. The more leads you get, the better off you’ll be in the future.

7. Automation

Email automation a fairly straightforward once you’ve had a good amount of experience marketing through email. All you have to do is set up the email that you want sent, pick a list, and determine the time you want that email sent. All of this can be done through your autoresponder. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

In the end, email marketing can be a very lucrative business model if done correctly. It’s a business model that anyone can start will little startup costs. There are many great free or low cost tools available like Mailchimp to help make your email marketing efforts effective. Remember to provide value, capture emails, and then market to those emails.