One of my favorite speakers from Affiliate World in Barcelona was definitely the dynamic, energetic and extremely talented Gabriella Rapone of Email Maverick. Despite having the highest ROI of any form of digital media, email marketing is still constantly overlooked for its significance in eCommerce, so I was excited that Affiliate World offered me the chance to link up with this titan of the inbox. Also as a quick side note – make sure you grab your tickets to Affiliate World Asia before the early bird sells out!
Gabriella ended up in email marketing almost by accident after a terrible experience with a drug addicted scum bag boyfriend led her to starting fresh and taking a job at an ESP. This led her to the world of affiliate marketing and she quickly learned the power of email in exploding a company’s revenue and launching products.
She fell in love with the industry, quickly realizing that it wasn’t just about the medium of communication as it was about understanding people and how to communicate with them. This holds true for things like Facebook advertising too and is what separates the great from the mediocre – The message. She also sees stats as a beautiful work of art and sees all of the opportunity, rather than something to be anxious or overwhelmed about.
At this time, people were making $30k-100k per day with email marketing…it was the wild wild west. The power of this sales channel, especially today with the advanced segmentation capabilities of even basic ESP’s is absolutely incredible to create targeted messages and offers that convert extremely high…and most people are completely under utilizing it despite it being ripe for the picking! Before we throw around too many numbers, Gabriella and I got down to some strategic opportunities for you right now with email.
It seems like eCommerce is charactarized by a short-term thinking model whereby we all seem to want to straight for the sale as opposed to building relationshiups, generating leads, and closing people over a longer timeline. By far the lowest hanging fruit is the people that have already visited your site and entered their email in some way (especially those who abandoned their checkout process). You’ve paid for the traffic and the data, so its paramount that you use it to cash in and make your business far more profitable.
One of the most important lessons Gabriella has ever learned was not to ever assume that people are like you and let the data you collect speak for itself. This is partiularly relevent to people that are afraid to send emails because they dont want to bug people who come on their list. You want to make a plan, test it, and optimize it until you find the things that resonate with your audience best, and are profitable as hell. Again, data doesn’t need to be scary, and email doesnt need to be seen as annoying.
What’s ironic is that entrepeneurs are scared to send emails, but will serve the same ad to someone agian and again and again at nauseum.
Setting up an email sequence for your lead nurturing or abandon carts can be as simple as one well-written email. Gabby spoke about one case where one of her clients went from $22k in 30 days to $164k with the same investment of time and money. This took no ad spend, and just printed profit for this business. That is the potential that getting better with email can hold for you!
Not only is email marketing crucial to tapping into repeat buyers (the true measure of your brand), but they form a big part of your business when framing it as an acquirable asset.
One of the many great things about email is that there is always room for improvement and optimization. It’s also an incredible testing grounds for things like ad copy, content marketing, new products, and more.
Although this is hard for many companies to conceive, you should be emailing every day. The content part is simple, everyone always has the content they need… it’s just the muscle that you need to develop and the commitment to making this a part of your strategy. Companies that email every day, make more money and build more relationships, even if a couple of people unsubscribe here and there.
Many companies will partner up for shared social media giveaways and campaigns together but cast aside the opportunity to collaborate on sending out affiliate offers. When done tasttefully these can be an incredibly successful boost to profitability and can even provide a lot of value to your list. Buying space in other email lists is just as valid of a form of media as buying space in a social feed, and sometimes more profitable.
Testing out affilaite offers is as simple as grabbing a basic partnership that’s readily available on the market to test it out. Once you see some positive results, then you can approach more reputable brands and larger deals with a bit of data and confidence that you will really open up the flood gates.
Gabriella has moved away from the affilaite space and most client work entierly to scale her knowledge to the masses with teaching, where she sees the biggest opportunity for her skillset to create a massive ROI. To get started tapping into Gabriella’s deep knowledge for free today, head over to Facebook and join her group.
No matter where you lie on the spectrum of using email marketing, there are plenty of opportunities for you to do even better. If you haven’t even started then there is a MASSIVE world of cash for you waiting to be taken in, and tons of relationships with customers to be built. If you are quite advanced you can also get excited knowing that even simple tweaks can sometimes 7x your revenue as Gabriella has proved. So yeah…Get more excited about email!
Video Highlights
00:40 – Gabby’s introduction to internet marketing
02:44 – Marketing is about the people
06:15 – The lowest hanging fruit with email
07:48 – Don’t ever assume your customers are like you
10:50 – There’s no plateau with email
12:54 – Activating affiliate partnerships
