Startup Q&A #15: Email Marketing - Getting to Your Customers' Inboxes and Monetizing your List

Hey everybody. Matthew Paulson here. Today we are going to continue to talk about email marketing. We're going to talk about how to make money with your email list, how to sell your products and services to your audience using email, how to stay compliant with the can spam app, and how to make sure that your messages actually get into your subscribers inboxes. Let's do this. This is officially episode 15 of Startup Q and A, the online video show that help small business owners, startup founders and entrepreneurs to grow their businesses faster and achieve their dreams of financial freedom. So whether you're just getting started or if you have 100 employees, this is the show that will give you actionable ideas and advice that you can implement in your business. So today we are going to continue on the theme of email marketing. This is probably the last week that we'll do it, but last week we discussed list building, writing, copy autoresponders and email blasts. Today we're going to continue that conversation and talk about a variety of different subjects. We're going to talk about the legal and technical aspects of email marketing as well as, you know, it's really exciting how to make money with your email list. So again, these aren't questions that anyone has actually asked me, but these are the most common questions that I get about email marketing over and over and over again. So we are just going to answer them rather than trying to fish for a question from somebody. So hopefully you'll find this resource helpful if you want to kind of dig deeper into email marketing. I've written a book called Email Marketing Demystified. I wrote it about a year and a half ago, but everything in there is still very much relevant and modern to what is going on today. Not a whole lot has changed in the last 18 months in the world of email. So let's continue to dive into the topic of email marketing and we are going to dive into the Tip of the week. So the Tip of the Week is a segment where I offer an actionable tip that you can implement in your business to grow your business faster or a resource that you should consume like a book. And this week's tip is to grow your email list with afteroffers.com so what is afteroffers.com? it is a co registration advertising network. So it gives you as a publisher the opportunity to advertise on other websites. Thank you pages. So let's say you go to MarketBeat.com you type in your email address to sign up for my mailing list. On the thank you page there are a Variety of different advertisers there that are advertising on my website that want to get email signups. So if you sign up for MarketBeat, you go to that thank you page, you'll see four or five different offers for other financial products and services that you might be interested in. So if somebody checks that box and it says I want to learn more about this offer and then they click the button at the bottom of the page, it says like submit and continue. That advertiser will pay the advertising network after offers, you know, maybe four or five bucks and I get paid two, three bucks or something like that. I don't know what the exact numbers are. It's something like that. But it is a great way for, you know, you as an advertiser or publisher to advertise and grow your email list. Something that's just not putting an opt in form on your website. It's something where you can invest money to grow your email list now and hopefully get some more customers down the line. Afteroffers only works in a certain number of verticals, but there are other broader co registration advertising networks. So if you are in say finance or health or survival or sports or Internet business, business opportunity, some of those spaces have a strong kind of co registration advertising presence. And you can buy some really high quality email signups from afteroffers for that. What I like about afteroffers is they do a much better job of filtering out bad email signups and junk emails and emails that are invalid. So you really only pay for real people that actually want to sign up for your mailing list or some of the other co edge ad networks. They don't do a good job. You end up getting a lot of bad emails and the quality just tends not to be there. In my experience, at least from MarketBeat, AfterOffers has performed better than just about any other. Actually they have performed better than any other coedge ad network. And they certainly don't pay me to say this, they just have done that good of a job and they've impressed me. We use them certainly as both an advertiser and as a publisher in our business and we can't say enough about them. So we might pay after our first three bucks for an email sign up and then we have a good funnel in place so that over the course of two or three years we make seven to eight dollars off of them, which is a really good return on your investment. So over the course of a couple years we've probably spent about $50,000 in ad spend with them. We'd love to spend more, but we've kind of maxed out their network and we've made about $125,000 off of it. So that has just been a very nice ROI for us. So that is the tip of the week. Let's dive into the questions. Every week we take four or five questions that are submitted through Facebook or through our website. So if you would like your question answered, go to the domain startup Q and A Co and fill out the form to submit your question. Of course, this week we're doing a special episode. So these are questions that are made up and not real people questions, but I think they will be equally valuable to business. So let's dive into the questions. Alright, so the first question is how do you sell your products to your audience using email? So first I'm going to assume that you actually have something to sell to people. You might have an online course, a digital product consulting service, something like that. I'm going to assume that you've got something in place that you want to sell to your audience. So when you're getting ready to launch a new service or a product, you're going to want to do some kind of campaign for that product or service. So let's say you're selling an online course that you want to launch. You're going to want to send probably five to 10 different emails about your new product over the course of your launch period. I typically do five to seven, but for a month long launch we might do 10 emails. So you probably want to have two or three emails kind of before the launch to drive interest in buzz for your product or service. And then you have an email on launch day saying, hey, our product and service is now available. The next day you might have a big FAQ email with a bunch of common questions people have about your product. You might want an email with some testimonials in there about how great your product is, some emails talking about the features and benefits. And then towards the end of the launch, in the last couple of days, you want to have some last chance. The launch period is ending. Tomorrow or today is your last chance to buy during the launch period. And then you really have to have something in some kind of bonus for people that buy during the launch period that will go away after the launch period is done. You might offer a discounted price on your product or service during your launch period. You might offer them some kind of bonus product that they can't normally get, but you have to create some urgency and give them a very Specific reason to buy now and not buy later. You'll find that there's kind of a U shape in your sales during your launch period. The first couple of days, you'll have a lot of sales from people that are interested in your product. These are your early adopters. It'll kind of lower in the middle. And then on the last couple of days, when you send out your kind of last chance emails, you'll find that you probably get as many sales in those last two days as you do the first two days. Because people, you know, people are lazy and don't always take action until they absolutely have to. So by having that clear end year launch period where if they buy today, they'll get the bonus, if they buy tomorrow or the discount, you know, then they won't get the bonus. You got to give them that clear reason to take action today versus taking action at some point in the future. Because if you don't give them a reason to buy today, they just may not end up ever buying. So, you know, have that really big launch period, multiple emails over a period of a couple weeks, you might think that's too much, but you're the one that's paying attention to your product or service every day. Your customers aren't thinking about your business as much as you are, so you might think it's too much, but they probably aren't paying as close of attention. So they actually need that many emails before they become aware of your product, decide that they want your product and then decide that they want to buy it. And then when they actually buy it, there's a lot of steps that they need to go through. And you really need to have multiple touch points to get people from A to B to C to D to where they actually go and buy out your product. If you want kind of an example of this, this launch sequence, you can sign up for the MarketBeat or the U.S. golf TV email. If there's a campaign for something almost every month. So you could do that. Or if you grab email marketing demystify, there is, I think there's a link in there for a launch campaign for MarketBeat for one of our subscription products. We always do a new launch for every product. Every year we improve it, we add some benefits, we relaunch it to our list and say, hey, the brand new version of MarketBeat All Access this year it's got all these great new features. If you sign up today, you can get this discount. So there's a campaign for that in email marketing demystified somewhere in a section that's about writing copies. So go ahead and check that out if you want to grab that book. Or you can just send me an email and I'd be happy to send that campaign copy to you as well if you want to do it that way. This is not about me selling books because I make $2 a book. So I'm happy to give you that information for free if you take the time to send me an email. Next question I guess comes from nobody, but the question is, how do you stay compliant with the Can Spam Act? So the Can Spam act is a piece of legislation that Congress passed the United States in 2003, and it is a piece of legislation that regulates how commercial emails are sent and what the requirements are for sending commercial emails. And one of the biggest misconceptions about the Can Spam act is that you can't actually spam people. So under the Can Spam act, you do not need permission to email somebody. You can send an email to everybody in the world. And that is completely legal, even if they've never given you permission to email them, as long as you follow the other provisions of the Can Spam app. So there's no opt in requirement. There is no double opt in requirement. You can spam the heck out of whoever you want and it's completely legal to do that. Not saying that you should do it, I'm just saying it is legal to do that. If somebody tells you that it's not, they don't know what they're talking about. So let's talk about what the actual requirements of the Can Spam act are. First, you need to have a clearly visible unsubscribe button on your website or on your email that if user should be able to click on it unsubscribe. And that unsubscribe request has to be honored within 10 days. So have an unsubscribe button. It'll be good for your deliverability. You want people to unsubscribe, otherwise they're going to press the spam report button and that's going to hurt your deliverability. Second, you can't be deceptive with your from name or any other information in your email. The subject line has to be fairly representative of what the email is about. You know, you can't say you're from Microsoft and you're not from Microsoft. That would be a violation of the Can Spam law. You should include a physical address at the bottom of your email with your actual company's physical address. So in every email that MarketBeat sends out, it's got our mailing address on there. That way if somebody really wants to unsubscribe for whatever reason or they want to contact us, their mailing address is there. And I've actually gotten a couple of unsubscribed by physical mail letters from people saying, hey, please stop emailing me, here's my email address, unsubscribe me. I've actually gotten a couple letters like that in the mail. So that does happen every now and then, but it's really just more about identification so that people know who is actually sending the mail. Next, you're not allowed to do any email harvesting, so you're not allowed to scrape a list off the Internet and send that list an email. Theoretically that is a violation of the Can Spam Act. If you're going to send out porn, I don't know why you'd want to do that, but if you did, you'd have to label that as adult content. And then finally, if you have affiliates that are sending out email before you, you can be held responsible for that act, their action. So if they're spamming for you, you kind of have to keep an eye on what they're doing because if they're doing nefarious things over email, you could be held responsible for that. So the requirements aren't that complicated. They're not that hard. Just be honest about who you are, have that unsubscribe link, have your mailing address and just be clear about the content of the message of the email and you probably won't have any problems. The FTC actually hasn't been very good about enforcing this piece of legislation. There have been some big name penalties. Not lately though, but for people selling Viagra and stuff like that and just sending out millions and millions of emails, those are the types of people that tend to get prosecuted for this. It's not for some guy with a website that's gotten emails for a thousand people. You're probably never going to hear from the FTC on that. Not legal advice, by the way. There have been some civil penalties as well. So like if somebody just gets really pissed off at a spammer, you can sue them and probably federal court and say this person is violating the Can't Spam act and get a penalty against them. That's happened a few times. That's probably more what the risk is than the FTC coming down on you. But I really wouldn't worry about it. We send out, you know, 20 million emails a month. And we've never had any serious issues because we comply with Can Spam Act. But you know, we've had, you know, there's a website, so there's a website called danhatespam.com and this is a guy that sues spammers for a living. And I had one guy to say, hey, I'm going to call Dan from Dan hate spam and have him sue you because this guy couldn't find the unsubscribe button. So that is the one time where it's actually been close. But the guy never followed through and called that guy and had him come after us. So despite the fact that we have a single opt in, have 20 million emails a month that we send out, it's never been an issue for us yet. Fingers crossed. I don't think it comes up very often. We just try to stay compliant with can spam and it just hasn't been an issue. And I don't think it will become an issue. Next question is, how do you make sure that your messages don't end up in the spam folder? So each email service provider uses their own proprietary factors to determine whether or not a message is spam. So you might find that your messages are getting through an aol, which doesn't do a good job of filtering spam, but they might not be getting through a Hotmail, which does too good of a job of filtering spam. So we find out maybe 90% of our Gmail messages get in the inbox, 100% of our AOL messages get into the inbox, and like 50% of our Hotmail messages end up in the spam folder. And that's just how Hotmail does it. They think pretty much anything financial is spam. So that's what their spam filter does. And there's just not a whole lot to do about it. So every ISP does something different. But there are some kind of basics that you should do to make sure that your messages don't get stuck in a spam folder. First, be compliant with the Can Spam Act. We talked about how to do that. You know, ESPs will check for a physical address and an unsubscribe button. Make sure to have that next, set up your DNS verification records. So these are the SPF and DKIM and DMARC records that basically say that this web server has permission to send email for this domain name. And there are lots of technical guides in the Internet and how to set these up. But just make sure that you look into it, research how to do that and get those set up so that you're not sending out unsigned messages. That's almost a certain way to get your messages in the spam folder. A lot of ESPs will do this for you because they send from their mail servers and not yours. So sometimes you don't have to think about it, but you should check into it at least once in your life and make sure those are set up properly. Next, remove any balanced users or users that file spam reports from your mailing list. So ESPs will look at the percentages of messages that you send to invalid email addresses and the percentage of spam reports that you get back on your messages. So for spam reports, you want less than 0.1% of people that receive your email to press the spam report button. So that's really like one out of a thousand and you really want to get to lower than that. So if anybody ever presses the spam report button on your email, that's an instant unsubscribe right away, because if they press it once, they press it again. And they obviously don't want your mail. So you should unsubscribe them from your list. Bounced emails, most ESPs will handle this automatically, hopefully, so hopefully you won't have to do that manually. But if somebody's email bounces, hard bounce, the ISP says that this email isn't good ever. You should just take them off your list right away. You really want to keep your list clean, and that's one of the best things you can do to maintain your deliverability. Along that same line, you want to remove anybody that hasn't open any mail from you within the last 12 months. So anybody that's really unengaged, not opening your mail, not clicking on any links, their emails aren't bouncing, but there is no signs of life from them. If they haven't opened a single email from you in the last year, you should probably go ahead and remove those people from your list as well. One thing that email service providers, and I guess Internet service providers, I'm using these terms interchangeably they look for is kind of your engagement rate. So if they say, you know, Matt sent out 100,000 emails, but only five people looked at it, you know, probably nobody wants his mail so that they'll take that as a sign that your messages are spam. So if you remove those people that are never going to open a message from you, your engagement rate will go up and that will be a positive sign of life for Email service providers. So let's say, you know, I have an email list of 100,000 people, but 50,000 of those people, big number, are totally inactive, are never going to open an email from me again. And I say I get 5,000 opens. If the list is 100,000 people and I get 5,000 opens, that's a 5% open rate. If I remove all the inactive people and only email the active people, that's a 10% open rate, which is a much better sign of life for the email service provider than a 5% open rate. So if you make it a habit of removing inactive people from your mailing list, ESPs will see that people are engaging with your content better and that will definitely help out in terms of deliverability. Email service providers love to see signs of life. They love to see people interacting with your email. They want to see opens, they want to see clicks, they want to see people replying to your messages. So I got a welcome email. You can get people to reply to you. That's great. I can't do that because we have 20,000 opt ins a month and there'd be too many emails. But for a smaller list, if you can say like and you're welcome email, hey, thanks for sending your list. I'd love to hear from you. Send me a reply and let me know what you'd love to learn about. And that will be a good engagement metric for email service providers to look at. Next thing, use Mail Tester, which is the tip from last week to check your emails. That will tell you if any of your content in your messages are going to set up Spam Assessing, which is a very common spam filter that email service providers use. And it will also check your SPF and DKIM records and do a bunch of stuff like that. So use it on one email at least. If not every email, which you probably should do anyway. We do it for every email, but definitely use mailtester against your messages. Finally, regularly check the major blacklists to see if any of your domain or the IP address that your domain emails from is on a blacklist. So there's a website called Multirbl. We'll put the link below here. It's multirbl valli.org and that will test your domain and your IP address against a couple hundred different blacklists. It's got every major one on there. So that will kind of show you if you've got a problem that you need to address. With a blacklist, it's really easy to get off a blacklist. Usually you just have to fill out a form saying hey, unlist me. Because they really, they're not trying to like stop you. They're trying to stop the people that are horrible spammers and are never going to take the time to get themselves removed from a block list. So definitely check for block lists, you know, every month or so. So those are the tips be can spam compliant set up your SPF and DKIM records Remove bounced, unsubscribed or bounced spam reporting and inactive email addresses from your list. Use mail tester and then regularly check your domain and sending IP for blacklists. The last question is what are some different ways to make money with your email list? We love email as a monetization tool at MarketBeat and we make money from our mailing list in a lot of different ways. So one newsletter ads. We use a company called Power Inbox to place just buy ads inside of our newsletters. That's kind of a 5 to $10,000 a month revenue source from us. We also do cost per click ads from financial advertisers through Investing Media solutions. That's probably 15 to $25,000 a month revenue stream for us. And these types of cost per click ads in a newsletter have been just a very nice way for us to make money. We probably make between 15 and $20 for every thousand people that open a message from us. Next is co registration ads. We've talked about this a little bit today, but you can run co reg ads on your thank you page as publisher, make some decent money that way. So if somebody sees an offer on your thank you page, they check it, they click the button that says I want this offer. They'll make $1.50 to kind of $2.50 depending on probably the industry you're in and what types of information they'd fill out. So name and email might be in that $2, but if they type name, email, phone number, mailing address, that could be a five dollar lead on co registration ads. You can sell your products. We talked about this a little bit. You have your own products and services. You can do a campaign to your mailing list saying, hey, go to this website, buy my products and services. Your email list is probably the best way to sell anything that you have built and want to sell to your audience. Arguably the best way to do that. You can do affiliate ads. So you go to Commission Junction or there are just products and services that are a natural fit for your audience. You go talk to those companies, you make an affiliate arrangement, you Kind of endorse those products or services. You have a link that goes to the advertiser's website, somebody buys something, then you get a commission for that. Lots of people do that with Amazon. A good example of this is like bookbub ads or Bookbub. It is a newsletter for, I guess, cheap and discounted books that a couple only people subscribe to. And every link, I think, I think I could be wrong. But every link in their emails that they send out with these free and discounted books to Amazon has their affiliate link in it. So they end up making quite a bit of money just in commissions from Amazon that way. We do this at MarketBeat a little bit with like TD Ameritrade and some brokers. Hasn't been a great revenue stream for us because it just hasn't worked out well. I don't know why, but you know, some people that do quite well with, you know, doing affiliate marketing over email. Finally, you can work with an agency to kind of rent your email list. So if you have at least 50,000 subscribers or so, you can go to any number of different advertising agencies that represent email list in the financial space. We work with Investing Media Solutions and StrikePoint Media, they sell for us. You can do this yourself too by going out and approaching advertisers that do email sends. But my experience, it's better to work with an agency because they already have all the relationships that you need in place and probably going to sell a heck of a lot more than you could on your own. So if you can find a good agency that represents mailing list in your space, not always the easiest thing to do, but they are out there. You can really make some decent money by renting out your email list to advertisers. The way this works is you should never actually give your mailing list to anybody else. But they'll give you the copy for their email. You put in your email service provider, you send it out on their behalf and that way your audience gets their message. But the advertiser should never get a copy of your mailing list. That's bad news because then they can just take it and spam it. You don't want that to happen. So those are some different ways to make money with your mailing list. Do newsletter ads, do co reg ads, co registration ads, sell your products and services, do affiliate marketing and rent out your email list. So hopefully those will give you some ideas to make some money with your email list. And those are the questions for today. So if you would like to subscribe to Startup Q and A and get next Monday's show delivered. You automatically go to the domain Startup Q and A co and there are links to subscribe via Facebook, RSS, iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher, and who knows what else. We really try to make this show everywhere so that you can consume it in whatever format that you want to. So go ahead and subscribe some way and that would be a nice help for us that you can always make sure that you get next week's episode sent to you automatically. If you want to follow me on Facebook, it's facebook.com MatthewPaulsenpage if you want to add me as a friend On Facebook, it's Facebook.com MatthewPulsen Fair warning. I will only accept a friend request if we have at least one mutual connection between us. If we do, I'll probably accept you, but if we have none, then it probably won't. So there's that. If you want to follow me on Twitter, my user ID is MatthewDP. D as in dog, P as in pony. And if you enjoy the show, go on itunes, take a few minutes and leave a review. Itunes reviews are really a good way for us to kind of get higher in the itunes charts and kind of spread this message of building businesses so that you can achieve financial freedom through the power of entrepreneurship. That is the message we believe and that is the message we want want to share with the world. So if you believe in that message as well, please take a minute, write us a review, and that will help us get better exposure on itunes and help us share this message with the rest of the world. I think that's it for this for today's show. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.