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Important Email Marketing Concepts / Fundamentals#

When it comes to email marketing, most beginner affiliates are confused.

For a good reason: There's plenty of outdated, wrong, and sometimes even outright dangerous advice out there.

To avoid the biggest pitfalls, you can find the most common email marketing mistakes here.

Let's take a look at a few general practices and concepts:

At It's Core: Relationship Building#

Email marketing - at it's core - is all about relationship building.

It doesn't have to be complicated, but lots of low-quality products and unethical marketers want to make you believe that, when it comes to email marketing, to be a total jerk.

That's absolutely NOT the case!

In fact, it can easily harm your business if you treat your (email) list wrong.

Whenever you're in doubt about email marketing, think about life & relationship building.

I know this sounds extremely vague, but it's true:

Think about the way you'd behave in a social, real-life environment like arriving at a garden party or barbecue with friends.

Really think about it.

If you spot only new people who are unknown to you, how would you behave?

You'd probably introduce yourself briefly, right?

Maybe you have some common friends that you can refer to.

You'd probably listen to the person you're just getting to know for the first time, and try to find commonalities and "shared experiences".

A very similar approach would be great for...

The Welcome Email#

  • Thank them for subscribing to your list!
  • Briefly introduce yourself
  • Give a few pointers (URLs) where they can find out more about you
  • Deliver your lead magnet (if you promised one on the opt-in/squeeze page)
  • Set the stage for the coming emails
  • Keep it short and to the point
  • Offer your help, a way to contact you, be human
  • Share (again) your affilaite core offer with them

What follows after the "welcome email" is usually a series of emails...

Value-Based Follow Up (Daily To Weekly)#

This will become your "bread and butter" to make money online.

After your initial setup, you'll have two daily tasks as an affiliate:

  1. Driving (more) traffic to your opt-in page
  2. Sending out an email every day (see frequency below)

And that's it.

These two tasks will be at the core of what you'll continue to do every day.

That way you'll grow your email list every day and send out valuable emails, including promotions.

Frequency - How Often Should You Mail Your List?#

We don't want to make this part of the training longer than needed:

At the very minimum send out a weekly email. (1 email per week, absolute minimum)

It's recommended to send out 1 email every day. (2 emails per day in exceptional situations, but make sure to communicate with your list that this is an exception!)

You can create your own schedule like sending out an email every other day. (bi-daily email)

As long as you continue to mix valuable content (entertaining stories, actionable advice, industry news, new blog posts/podcast episodes/videos) with promotions you're fine.

Not every email has to contain tons of value. A short, quick promotional email from time to time is ok.

Not every email has to contain an offer. Your CTA (call to action) could also be to reply to your email.

This will help with your engagement score, too.

Segmentation - Keeping It Relevant For Everyone#

In short: You don't want to send irrelevant content to your list.

Sometimes it makes sense to segment your existing list, for example:

  • People who want to hear about free traffic methods exclusively
  • Subscribers who want to hear about any traffic method, free or paid
  • Subs who want to hear about PLR offers, or have zero interest in those
  • etc.

List Cleaning & Deliverability#

Frequent/regular list cleaning has become an extremely important job for any email marketer.

To sum this huge topic up and simplify it radically:

Remove anyone who didn't open any of your emails in the last 4 weeks.

I know this looks overly simplistic and in different situations you want to adapt this rule.

For example, if you're sending out just one email per week, you might get away with cleaning your list every 12 weeks.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you send out one email per day, you might want to consider cleaning your list every 2-3 weeks.

So the honest answer is "it depends", but if you're doubt or really new to list building and email marketing:

Remove any subscriber from your list who didn't open any of your emails in the last 4 weeks.

Closing Thoughts#

We'll add more content to this section over time and go much deeper into professional email marketing in the Secret Affiliate Insider.