Is email marketing a viable business venture ?

Email marketing is a very powerful tool. I attribute the success of LinkedIn and many other successful start ups of our time  to aggressive email marketing campaigns. How did you join LinkedIn? My guess is through a connection request that came in an email.

But what is email marketing, and can it be a stand alone business venture  ?
Email marketing is where you you promote a product or service by sending skillfully crafted emails to an email list.

It is an undertaking that can be entered into as a full-time occupation. Full-time email marketers have lists of over ten thousand email addresses, which they send promotional emails to.

To undertake email marketing as a stand alone business, you need to have a product that you will promote to your email list.  Your revenue will come from commission  on sales of the product that you are promoting

Where do email marketers get products to promote?

There are thousands and thousands of affiliate networks on the internet that have items that you can promote in an email. A special ID is assigned to you when you sign up,  this ID is included in a HTML code that can be placed in the emails that you will be sending out. You earn if a purchase of the item  is traced back to your ID. The affiliate program on the other hand earns a commission of the sale made, either from the owner of the product, or you the promoter. Some networks earn by  charging  a membership fee.One popular affiliate network is clickbank.com

How do you collect email addresses to market to?

The best way of collecting email addresses to market to, is by giving out something for free in exchange for the email addresses. The free gift could be a simple e book or software. There is several email management programs that will help you place a sign up form on your site, the sign up form will collect the email address of a client and then direct him or her to a free download that is usually promised at the time the client is being encouraged to sign up.
The kind of free gift you give out should target the niche you want to market to. If you are in the internet marketing niche, maybe you could give out a free internet marketing e book, that way, you will know that everybody in the list has an interest in internet marketing.
Once you have the list, the next thing would be to write captivating  sales email  that will sell the products that you are promoting. Seasoned email marketers will tell you that they make an earning every time they send out an email to their list.

For the many brilliant  jobless kenyans searching for a business idea that they could try, Email marketing is one that they can give a go

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