Is it possible to make money sending emails? Yes, but it’s a bit more complicated than it sounds. Many of the people who make money sending emails make their earnings because they have cultivated an email list that they send out regular or semi-regular “email blasts” to; if you want to make money by sending emails you will need to be prepared to do two very basic things. One of them is potentially free (from a cash perspective) and the other requires some upfront spending.
Make Money by Sending Emails: Be Targeted
To earn money with email, you need to be promoting something, selling something, or otherwise have a focus. Look at any successful Etsy seller, professional blogger, artist, or musician and you’ll find them using email campaigns in specific, targeted ways.
The musician version of this is the easiest to understand–they want to sell their new single, album, concert t-shirt or other band merchandise. Using an email list to market these items to people results in a certain number of sales if your audience is statistically large enough (assuming your emails are not spammy, annoying, too frequent, or not frequent enough).
A professional writer or blogger would operate in the same way. You send out the email campaigns to remind people you are still in business, let them know what you are selling, and ideally–if you want to make money doing this–your email will offer some kind of perk or incentive to people to get them to consider buying.
It is highly advisable to have a website or retail portal of some kind you can encourage people to use in your email marketing campaign, as you want them to be more than one-off customers in most cases.
Making Money With Emails: Buying Email Lists
Musicians and artists know the score on this one–you do a show and 25 people show up. Out of those 25 people, a whopping whole TWO attendees sign up for your email list. You can do as many shows as you like in a full year and still not get enough signups to get much out of an email campaign. That is why people invest money in purchasing email lists to send their campaigns to.
There are mixed opinions on buying email lists–some believe buying an email list is a terrible idea and that all your email recipients should be “organically” generated, meaning they have signed up for your campaign specifically.
But some newcomers to email marketing don’t want to wait–they want to start their campaigns as soon as possible. These business owners purchase email marketing lists from “lead generation” companies which provide targeted lists to those willing to buy. “Targeted” is the key–you don’t want to be pestering an email list of 30-something do-it-yourself home repair buffs when you are really after people who are interested in purchasing home theater gear. Targeted lists are key to making money sending emails.
When it’s all said and done, the lists you have and the approach you use won’t be able to make up for poor quality products or services, so if you decide to invest the time and money to create an email list and a campaign it is crucial to have something people want to buy or pay for at the end of your sales pitch. As legendary director Alfred Hitchcock once said, and we paraphrase, eventually you have to sell some steak along with the sizzle.
Joe Wallace specializes in personal finance, military affairs, and consumer protection topics. Since 1995, his work has appeared on Air Force Television News, The Pentagon Channel, ABC and a variety of print and online publications. He is a 13-year Air Force veteran and collects unusual vinyl records, which gives him an excuse to write the vinyl blog Turntabling.net.
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