Why The Email List Is Your “Ace” Card

The email list is your “ace” card if you’re an affiliate. Despite what some “guru’s” and marketers will tell you (usually to draw you in to their offers), the email list is still the best way to sell online. Why is the email list so powerful? Well for one thing, as “solopreneurs” we are the unknowns in the online marketplace.

People do buy from well known sites such as eBay and Amazon, but who is going to buy from us? After all, as many statistics show, an online consumer will often need 6-8 touch points with a website/product before they make a buying decision. Why is that? It’s because it’s a buyers marketplace the online world. Pushy sales people have no advantage when someone can Google a product and find a better deal elsewhere.

But the email list gives us, the marketer, a chance to prove ourselves to our prospective clients/customers and gives us a chance to get those “touch points” with prospective customers. Whether we do that or not of course is down to our marketing knowhow and personal approach.

Why The Email List Is Your “Ace” Card

So how exactly do you “prove” yourself to a prospective customer? By offering value driven content without being a pushy salesman/woman. When an email subscriber begins to open your emails regularly because they are valuable to them, you have created trust.

People buy from people, not from websites. By proving to your list of subscribers that you’re honest and trustworthy, they will start to value your email messages and even look forward to receiving them. If you start out with this intention, rather than the desire to make money from your email subscribers, you are treating them as the valued subscriber that they are.

People aren’t going to keep opening your emails if you simply spam them with short fire messages saying “buy this”. It’s a super fast way to turn people off and get them unsubscribing to your email messages. But offer value, a congruent message and authenticity and you stand out as someone of genuine integrity and worth, particularly with so many online marketers pushing their wares in such a desperate fashion.

Why The Email List Is Your “Ace” Card – Targeting, Congruency & Marketing Message

Targeting the right people for your offer and keeping a congruent theme to your messages is paramount. If someone signs up to learn about “affiliate marketing” and you start talking in terms of “online business”, it’s very easy to turn them off.

They might not see them as the same thing, unless you explain of course. “Hang on, I’m interested in affiliate marketing, not “online business“, they might think. This creates a disconnect between the needs of your subscriber and your messaging and can turn them away even if your product is exactly what they need.

When the targeting of your advertising leads the right people to a congruent message which helps them and leads them to the right products (which helps them), you’re on to a winner! All you need then is time and to focus on building your email list to a large enough number to start seeing those sales drop in more and more frequently.

Small Numbers Equals Fewer Sales

It sounds obvious but for a beginner it can seem incredulous that you can build a business through email marketing when nothing seems to be happening early on. That’s because it takes time and effort to learn the skills just to gain that very first subscriber. With less than 100 subscribers you’re going to see very few sales, if any. So at this stage when you’re looking for evidence that your business works, it’s tough when nothing seems to be happening.

Avoid looking for evidence to justify the work at this stage because it will simply hold you back. It’s a self fulfilling loop of depreciating returns when you look for results too early. When you do so, you see zero evidence of your business working and this is demoralising for your motivation. So you stop or slow down your efforts, which leads to similar results. As you look again you become all the more demoralised!

Instead, focus on the activities you are doing every single day and celebrate small wins such as a hit on your website and a lead on your email list. Focus on getting 1000 leads initially before you even look for any “results”. Some affiliates will build email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands. You can image that with even only a small sales rate of 3% for example, a larger list brings about more success. A small list brings a small chance of success.

3% sales rate on the following email lists given the same rate of sales for each:

• 100 email subscribers – 3 sales
• 1000 email subscribers – 30 sales
• 10,000 email subscribers – 300 sales

Grow With Your List

Of course as you get better at communicating with your email subscribers you’ll start to notice the messages/ads/targeting which get you the most traction. You can then push these messages to the front of your queue, or focus on the ads/targeting which works the best.

Some subscribers will purchase from you early on and some later down the road. I recently had an email subscriber purchase from me after being on my email list for 5 years! So never give up hope – your list is a magical way to earn a living if you stick with it and carefully align your value add with your target audience and choice of product/s.

I personally like writing inspiring messages to my email list because it inspires me as I write them! I’ve had some good feedback from them too, which feels good. So if you can find your “angle” for your messages then go with it, however it most aligns with your values and intentions.

Why The Email List Is Your “Ace” Card – Control

If you don’t use an email list, chance are you’re trying some other marketing method such as paid marketing or free, organic methods. Paid marketing is great but it doesn’t give you the 6-8 touch points you need as an affiliate to get your affiliate link in front of a customer multiple times.

If you send paid traffic directly to an offer, they either buy or bounce off the website, at your expense. You’ve then lost them, potentially forever, (or the product owner carefully re-captures them at cheaper cost using a retargeting ad campaign)!

By sending paid advertising to your own email capture page, (or landing page), you ensure you collect their email address and therefore have more opportunity to get your ad spend back through products sales later down the line. You get more opportunity to build trust and get those 6-8 touch points needed for the sale.

If you’re not using paid ads for selling online you’re going to be using SEO (search engine optimisation) or some other organic or free method of traffic generation. This can be tentative, and SEO can change overnight following a Google algorithm update. Posting on any social media site has similar problems and you can easily get shadow banned or lose the ability to generate traffic on the whim of the platform.

An email list allows you much more control of your traffic and ability to communicate with your target audience.

Summary

The email list is super powerful if you know how to use it. For best results you’ll need to align your targeting/customer avatar so that you get the right people who value your message and your product/s.

Write authentically and focus on delivering value (before you consider what’s in it for you). This helps you stand out among other marketers who only go for the sale immediately – often putting off would-be customers in the process. Of course you do also need to ask for the sale or deliver the product. But many marketers (and particularly you’ll be tempted to do this as a beginner affiliate) will simply spam messages with their affiliate link. That’s a big turn off for many who signed up to your list in good faith, hoping to get some actual value from you first – before they decide to buy (and if they do).

Deliver on your promise first with your list by giving huge value. Build authority and speak authentically to the problems of your subscribers. With a good product which does what it says it will do, you should be on to a winner! After that, think in numbers. Small list = few sales, big list = many sales!

Good luck!

If you’re ready to get started online, you can get the free videos to learn more here.