How To Become Filthy Rich With Clean Email Marketing

We know there are dirty ways to make money in email marketing. However, the CANN Spam act made it more challenging to get into email marketing. In fact, Top 10 email spammers are now being put in jail.

But not all email solicitation is spam, and there are ways of email marketing that are not only legal, but extremely profitable.

To examine this topic, I interviewed Jeff Random:

QuadsZilla: Hi Jeff, For our readers, who are you and what do you have to do with email marketing?

Jeff Random: I’m Jeff Random and I’m a principal in (THROB) 3ob.com where we do Digital Media Business Optimization. We help several of our clients with their email marketing, and it can be one of the more cost effective tools. Much of our work is in the adult entertainment industry, so as you can imagine deliverability (getting through filters) can be even more tricky.

QuadsZilla: If someone wants to get into email marketing but doesn’t want to be fined or sued out of existence, where should they start?

Jeff Random: A great place to start is by only emailing the people who want to hear from you. One way to ensure this is to only use names that you have collected, instead of buying lists. When you are collecting names it’s a good idea to use a ‘double opt-in’ collection process. Double Opt-in is where not only do they have to enter their email, but also clicking a confirmation link in an email sent to that account to confirm that they want to join the list.

QuadsZilla: From what I’ve heard, the list business is pretty shady and, unless you know what you’re doing, you can really get burned in more ways than one - is that right?

Jeff Random: We generally steer people away from using lists that they haven’t collected themselves. Not only are there potential legal troubles, but as you mentioned buying lists can be pretty shady.

QuadsZilla: So first step is to start collecting names and email addresses as soon as possible using the double opt in method

Jeff Random: Yes, with a clearly defined privacy policy linked to right from the collection form. Spell out exactly what you will and won’t do with their information.

QuadsZilla: Do you have an example of a good privacy policy our readers could use?

Jeff Random: Privacy policies should be written to match the tone of your site and the taste of your audience. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/privacy.html has a pretty good one for their audience

QuadsZilla: Great - Now could something like that be added to a wordpress member signup page?

Jeff Random: You could put it on the signup page, but you might want to embed the form in the sidebar, and have with a link to the mailer benefits page and a link to the privacy policy. It’s also usually effective to mention

QuadsZilla: Creating a reason for people to sign up for your lists is definately a must. I’m sure we could do a few posts on that topic alone. but let’s say we’ve got 50k or so double opt in emails, what’s the next step?

Jeff Random: Depending on the reason people signed up to your list, then usually the most effective approach is developing an email or series of emails the bring value to them.

If they signed up for coupons/discounts then send them coupons/discounts - if they signed up for a newsletter then send a newsletter. Honesty is one of the most effective tactics

QuadsZilla: How do we keep it clean - meaning how do we make sure we are complying with CANN Spam and other laws?

Jeff Random: Let’s not get into specific legal advice which is going to vary by country, industry (especially adult) and offer.

In general though, Honesty & value are the watchwords for a whole host of reasons. Being honest about who you are (including address), about what you are offering such as labeling things sexually explicit

QuadsZilla: in the subject line?

Jeff Random: depending on the factors (content, country etc) yes

QuadsZilla: There are obvious things you want in your mailer like directing to action (click this link), but what other things do you want to make sure to include?

Jeff Random: You always want to make sure that you have very clear and easy unsubscribe options in the email. You only want to mail the people who want to keep hearing from you. The main thing that you want to include (besides the most compelling offer you can) is something of value to the subscriber.

Whether that’s information about the latest at your site, some educational or otherwise valuable content or just the special offer you promised.

QuadsZilla: People always want to hear about numbers - about how much can someone really make from clean emailings? Like a quarter million double opt in list that someone cultivated themselves, how much could they monitize that for with offers?

Jeff Random: Whether it’s emails, uniques, foot traffic or anything else - the short answer is it depends. What kind of emails, how old, what kind of deliverability are you getting, what kind of open rate, what kind of CTR, what kind of conversions are you getting on the landing page … etc etc

Although it can be tough to compare apples to apples in different industries or payout models many people use ECPM to measure relative value.

QuadsZilla: ECPM?

Jeff Random: ECPM is the total earnings divided by the total number of impressions measured in thousands (mil). This can help you to compare things that aren’t that similar It’s not uncommon to see $30 ECPM and we (with testing & refinement) have seen ECPMs of $40, and even higher. However, often ecpm drops as list size grows and ages.

QuadsZilla: So for a hypothetical 250k Self Cultivated, Honest, Double opt in list, one might expect to make how much per month . . . in the adult space?

Jeff Random: per month get’s trickier … let’s get to that in a second. Basically if you are doing back of the envelope calculations it goes something like this:

List size of 250k … depending on age, frequency of mailing, content of mailer (explicit, html, keywords?) and a bunch of other factors deliverability is going to vary pretty widely. If we take a hypothetical deliverability rate of 70%

then it’s 250k X .7 which is 175K

Then depending on more factors (such as subject line etc) let’s assume a hypothetical open rate of 40% which brings us to 70K

Now depending on things such as your creative and offer let’s assume a CTR of 20%, so now you just got 14k visitors.

14k visitors X conversion ratio or percentage.

(While we are on the subject email is a great way for you to split test different landing pages to determine which is more effective. You can use this split test sample size calculator to determine how much traffic you need to send to show each creative based on how confident you want to be in the results.)

Let’s say you have a well tested & tuned landing page so a hypothetical 5% conversion ratio would = 700 sales

sales * average value (call it $80 for the adult space) would be $56,000 if it was your offer (otherwise multiply X affiliate comission %)
That would be for one mailing.

QuadsZilla: Wow - that’s pretty impressive!

Jeff Random: Many sites email their list weekly with news of the latest updates. Of course the more you mail a list the more it shrinks, and the less effective offers become, unless you are really offering value to the subscribers. That’s true for mainstream as well as adult.

QuadsZilla: Still, it’s easy to see that if we have a user base, we should be Cultivating double opt in lists.

Jeff Random: Forming a relationship with your audience and engaging them in conversation is good in any form - email marketing, blogging, chat, message boards etc - as long as you make sure to be honest and provide value.

Thank you Jeff for that Interview. If you already have a self cultivated double opt in list in the adult space and want someone to help you get the most out of your list, you can contact Jeff at jeff@3ob.com

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