You may have heard the saying “the money is in the list”. By “list” I mean e-mail list. Depending on the resource, the average return on investment (ROI) for all email marketing is north of 3,800% . Of the eight major types used by marketers, email marketing is, by far, the best performing – this is in spite of the world's 4.3 BILLION email accounts being blasted with 143 BILLION emails a day.

With such huge numbers it appears that all a savvy business owner needs to do is get a subscriber on their list and stand by while the money rolls in! Unfortunately, that is not usually the case. Most new email marketers have just the opposite problem. They say “I have a new email list subscriber…now what?” For those of you that could use a little help, we are going to tell you the top 3 ways we made money from our list last year.

First, a quick back story.

About 15 months ago we took a hard look at our online marketing model. We had almost half a million followers and fans on Facebook and Twitter and several hundreds of thousand more between the other social media sites. The issue was we weren't able to turn those community members into paying customers. That's a real problem if you are in a “for-profit” business and have things like payroll and rent due.

Then we read several of the same type of stunning statistics I just told you about, including the most stunning one of all…

If that were true then we just needed to add 83,333 new subscribers to our email list and that would result in an extra $1 million a year in revenue.

So, we did exactly that! In fact, we added 84,300 subscribers to our email list and pushed our count to 117,779 total. We also added MORE than $1 million a year in revenue to our business.

There is one HUGE caveat, though, that nobody tell you about.

Just getting them to your list is worth absolutely NOTHING. We didn't figure this little gem out for about the first 3 months and 25,000 email list subscribers from which we made roughly ZERO additional dollars.

So, instead of just letting you struggle with how you do it, we thought we would just tell you the top 3 ways we made money from our list last year.

3 Surefire Ways to Make Money With Your Email List

#1 – Sell them more of what you know they already like.

Our average email list subscriber gets 3-5 emails from us a week. Usually, only 1 of those emails will have anything to do with buying a product or service from us. When we do ask people to spend money with us it is usually just the people who have already expressed an interest in the product or service we are asking them to buy.

Think about that for a second and make sure you understand what I am saying. We do NOT email all of our email list subscribers every offer we have for every product we sell every time we sell it – just the ones that have already told us they are interested in what we are selling.

How do we know they are interested? Lots of ways. Maybe they opted in for one of our guides, or opened an email and clicked a link or attended a webinar we did on the subject. We recently released our new Facebook Ads Success Blueprint  course and did very well selling to the people on our list who had opted in for our Facebook Ads Jumpstart Guide or purchased our Facebook Ads Launch Pad mini-course.

#2 – Invite list subscribers to webinars. 

Last week we did a webinar called “7 Ingredients for Creating GREAT Facebook Ads”. We had 2,947 people register for the webinar of which 80%+ were email list subscribers. We knew one thing about the throngs of people who made the event live or watched the replay in the 2 days after, they were interested in learning how to do Facebook Ads. As mentioned above, it was no coincidence that we had recently released our new full Facebook Ads course. To the people who attended, offering them a chanced to buy our new course wasn't a sales pitch, just an opportunity to learn more and better apply what they had attended the webinar to find out more about in the first place.

We used this list/webinar invitation strategy to fill over 12,000 FREE webinar seats last year and sell multiple six-figures in products.

#3 – Get repeat buyers 

Around 12% of the 84,300 new email list subscribers bought one of our upsells immediately after joining our list, usually from one of our ebooks, guides or checklists. That is a little over 10,000 new paying customers. Almost 21% of those 10,000 new buyers immediately bough the second upsell. That's 2,000+ multiple product buyers! How many of those multiple product buyers went on to buy other products we were offering?

A lot, a whole lot!

The biggest lesson we have learned from our incredible email marketing journey this last year is this.

The easiest dollar to get them to spend in the second and every dollar after that.

THAT, in my opinion is the real magic with email marketing. If you do it right (lead with value, don't spam the snot out of everybody and create quality products that you stand behind), the people who know, like and trust you – your email subscribers will reward you handsomely for your hard work.

Those are the top 3 ways we made money from our email list last year. What do you think? Is it time for you to jump into the email marketing world? For those of you already in it, how did you make most of your money from your list last year. We would love to hear your comments below.

About Author

Kim Garst

Kim Garst is one of the world's most retweeted people among digital marketers. She is a renowed business strategist, keynote speaker and an international best-selling author of Will The Real You Please Stand Up, Show Up, Be Authentic and Prosper in Social Media. Kim helps business owners grow their business using social and digital media.

She is the founder of KG Enterprises, LLC, a business strategy consulting company that helps business owners create more sales using the power of digital and social media.

Kim is also internationally recognized as a thought leader in the social media space. Forbes named her as one of the Top 10 Social Media Power Influencers. Her blog is one of the top social media resources in the world.

You can find more great content from her at www.kimgarst.com/blog.

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