We are often asked ‘how much money can you make with email marketing?’ The answer really is ‘how long is a piece of string?’
If you are unsure as to what that answer means, it means that the question is an open question which cannot be truly answered because the answer itself depends on a lot of different variables and factors.
Just as the length of string is determined by the length it was cut at, which doesn’t govern each individual piece of string… how much money a person can make with email marketing is also governed by many personal factors.
Such as:
- How many people you have on your email list.
- What kind of products you sell or promote.
- The quality of the products you sell or promote.
- How many times you promote your products or affiliate products.
- The price you sell your products for.
- How much affiliate commission you are paid for products you promote.
- Whether you own the products you sell or whether you have to buy them.
- How much it costs to have specific products created.
- Whether you are adding new people to your email list regularly.
- What kind of traffic you are sending to your email list.
- How long you use email marketing.
- How good your relationship is with your email list.
- How responsive and suited to your products your email list is.
- How good your emails are.
- How many emails you send.
The list of variables can be as long as your arm.
You see, every business is different, every product is different and every customer is different.
- Selling vegan burgers to vegans via email can make you money.
- Selling vegan burgers to meat eaters may make you some money.
- Selling meat burgers to vegans will not make you any money.
- Selling vegan burgers to a list of 20 people may result in a sale or two, but selling vegan burgers to a list of 20,000 people should result in more sales making you more money.
- Selling a $5,000 product to a list of 20,000 people will make you a lot more money than selling a $20 box of vegan burgers to a list of 20,000 people.
You would need to sell 250 boxes of vegan burgers to make $5,000, whereas you only need to sell one product at $5,000 to make $5,000.
If customers bought 2 boxes of vegan burgers you will need 125 customers. Whereas you only need 1 customer when selling a $5,000 product.
If that $5,000 product was an online course where the product was delivered online, the cost of delivering that product is far less than having to package up boxes of burgers to go in the post.
Also, if you create the $5,000 online course yourself, you do not need to purchase materials or ingredients to make the product like you would if you were supplying vegan burgers.
You see what I mean when I say that the answer to ‘how much money can you make with email marketing’ is relative?
I have worked on a project which generated around £4,000 (roughly $5,491 at time of writing) promoting a product which had yet to be created.
The product required one password protected page on a website, one newsletter sent out each Monday with a password and a few tips, and four tips added to the password protected page every day between Monday and Friday.
The work was minimal and the cost of delivery for that product cost nothing because the page was added to an already existing website.
That one project made tens of thousands of dollars over a six month period. It still makes several hundred dollars today.
That project made a lot of money yet the product and audience was completely different to those which other businesses work with.
Statistically, studies show that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you should see a return of $38 which is a return on investment of 38000%.
That in itself is pretty amazing, but what is unclear is which industries, what products and at what prices they were researching.
With information marketing, the returns on investment can be a lot higher.
People are selling information products using email which lead on to more expensive back end products pushing profits up astronomically.
Spending $1 to add a person to your email list who then buys a pair of trainers or a shirt at $38 is good… but what if that $1 added a person to your email list who went on to spend $997 on an online course?
The return then is far greater than $38.
Obviously, you are averaging out the earnings from sales across the size of your list and then deducting the cost of building that list.
Not everyone is going to spend a lot of money with you, some may not spend any money after the initial purchase of a cheap front end product.
Selling an eBook or even a physical book for just $5 is not going to build you a six-figure a year business alone… unless that book is the first part of a well crafted funnel which takes the reader to more expensive products such as a coaching course or a done-for-you product costing several thousand dollars.
All you need then is a few customers a year to really push up your profits.
Email marketing is the tool.
You don’t have to create your own products to sell, you can easily sell other people’s but you get less money.
It can be easier to build an email business where you only sell other people’s products because there is less work involved, but you cannot scale your business as you can when supplying your own products.
The great thing about an email marketing business is that it gives you complete freedom. You can make money using email from anywhere in the world, at any time without needing any staff or premises.
It is a true freedom business.
For more information and ideas, listen to the podcast below:
How Much Money Can You Make With Email Marketing
If you would like to learn how to make $500, $5,000, or more each month sending out just one simple email a day, check out our course Email Freedom here:
Email Freedom
