In this lesson we take a look at an introduction to email marketing.

How important is email marketing?

We just can't emphasise enough just how important newsletters are to email marketers!

Although you can still make good money simply by 'traffic brokering', that is: promoting a product, earning a commission on a sale and leaving it at that, we can tell you that you've seen nothing like the profit you could be making with a newsletter.

To give you an idea of the power of email marketing: most marketers find that adding a newsletter series automatically doubles their income; in fact, it's not unheard of for people to increase their income by up to five times!

Mark Ling says that one newsletter email he sent out recently made him a quarter of a million dollars in 4 days flat; for regular promotions, he'll easily get $10,000 in sales from a single email.

Another prominent internet marketer, Frank Kern claims to have earned over $1 million in less than 4 hours from a single email.

If those figures don't grab your attention, then nothing will.

Why is email marketing so immensely profitable?

Email marketing is so immensely profitable because, in effect, it allows you to make ongoing sales to proven buyers.

You've worked so hard to get visitors to your site, it seems a pity to let them walk out the door just like that! A newsletter list enables you to keep in touch with a huge proportion of the visitors to your site. And it allows you to continue to sell to them for months, if not years, down the track.

Another enormous benefit of a newsletter is that you can also use it to promote new products about to launch. This is a highly effective way of building up enthusiasm to a fever-pitch, so that on launch day, your subscribers are falling over themselves to buy. A live launch can be extremely lucrative but, without a list, there's no way you can get a share of the pie.

Types of newsletters: online vs email-only

The products you are promoting will determine what type of newsletter will work best. There are two types:

1. The online newsletter - this is where you send out a very short email newsletter containing a brief introduction followed by a link, which the reader must click to read the rest of the content. The advantage of an online newsletter is that you can make it look good with nice graphics and layout. And more importantly, it allows you to host videos and audio, which is very important for topics such as 'learn guitar' or 'learn spanish'.
2. The alternative is the email-only newsletter - email-only newsletters mean that the full text is contained in the email. In general, we prefer to use this style of newsletter simply because otherwise, with every action you ask people to take, you lose people - when you come right down to it, people are lazy! The more effort they have to go to, the less likely they are to bother. So, as a general rule, email-only newsletters get more readers.

In saying that, some subjects are better suited to online newsletters, as we've mentioned, particularly topics that require multi-media to be most effective.

Finally, there's also a third type of email, which is kind of a hybrid of the online newsletter and blogging. If you have a blog, you may wish to run a 'live newsletter', where the newsletters are your blog posts and you send out a short email containing a teaser and a link whenever you add a new posting. This is what we do for Affilorama and we've found it an effective way of getting more readers to our blog.

Lesson Summary

In this lesson, you've learned how immensely profitable email marketing is for affiliates, and why the type of email you send out will depend on whether or not you are promoting multi-media products.