If you want to have that exact same effect on the people who visit your website and fill your email list with quality subscribers, then you’ve come to the right article.

That free resource that was given to you as soon as you signed up for their email newsletter is called a lead magnet. That’s usually the term you’ll hear in the Internet marketing world. So for the sake of this article, I’ll use that term throughout the rest of this article.

Have you ever come across a website with an email signup form and it has some text below it saying,

“Join our newsletter to receive updates about the business”?

Did it make you want to subscribe to their email newsletter? I’m willing to bet the answer is no.

And if you think that’s just the way things should be and you have that exact same signup form on your own business website, then you’re losing out on a lot of potential customers.

So then, let’s start with this.

What Is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is a free (Or low-priced) digital resource that’s given out to the website visitor when they sign up for your email list.

And depending on how your business set it up, the lead magnet will either be delivered via email or through a link on a redirected page.

A lead magnet comes in many forms. The most common ones are PDF files, an email series (Usually they’re called an email course), a mini digital course, and videos.

The main purpose of it is to help that new email subscriber solve a specific problem he or she is facing relatively quickly.

Here are some examples of some good lead magnets I personally came across and used.

Leah Gervais’ Seven Days to a Side Business

As far as I know, she doesn’t offer this anymore. But when I first came across her business in 2018, her website had a lead magnet that offered a seven day email course that guided new subscribers to build the foundation of their side business. And each email had a call to action to book a strategy call that led to a coaching program offer. Not only did the email course provide valuable and actionable information, but each email promoted her high-ticket services, which is a smart move on the business side of things.

Ben Settle’s Free Email Players Newsletter

This lead magnet is a special one. Before I explain why, a little bit about his business. In short, his main product is a monthly print newsletter subscription where he teaches his knowledge of email copywriting and other marketing related subjects. At the time I’m writing this, he has already published over 100 issues.

When people join his email list, he’ll deliver the first issue of his newsletter for free in a PDF format. And I say this is a special lead magnet for two reasons:

1. He’s giving away a product that has a real price tag on it for free, which makes it a lot more valuable right off the bat.

2. When his subscribers see the extra sales they made by putting the information in the newsletter to use, that is rock-solid, right-in-front-of-your-face proof that his product actually helps businesses multiply their sales. And that will make them a lot less skeptical when they decide if they want to invest in his newsletter subscription.

Justin Goff’s Private Email List

So far, this is the only case where I’ve seen someone set their business up in a way that in order for people to join their email list, you have to submit an application. Even though, technically, there is no lead magnet, the value in joining his email list is the emails themselves.

Some people might say that’s a dumb decision on his part, but I think it’s genius because he’s filtering out the people who join email lists just to get free resources, which automatically increases the quality level of his email list.

I also like how that sets up a boundary of some sort between him and his potential customers. It’s similar to how I set up my freelance business, where I take people in as clients, but only if they’re on my email list because I share my application link with my email subscribers only.

So then, let’s get into the following question:

Why Is It Important to Offer a Lead Magnet?

Think about it this way.

Data privacy is something that’s being taken much more seriously now. And when it comes to email, people are very protective of their inboxes, they don’t want to receive any unsolicited emails. So to them, their email addresses are valuable. They’re not willing to just give it away to anyone (Unless it’s a throwaway email address).

So your lead magnet is something of value that you give to your soon-to-be email subscriber in exchange for their email address. It is their very first transaction with you. Even though it’s not a monetary transaction, it does serve as a gateway to build a relationship with them. And if you do it right, it’ll eventually lead to future transactions.

So in short, it’s important to offer a lead magnet because…

1. It sets that foundation of trust with your email subscriber.

2. It serves as an introduction to your business world and brand.

3. It’s simply an incentive for people to sign up for your email list.

Creating Your Irresistible Lead Magnet

Now let’s get into the good stuff, creating your lead magnet. Before you do though, there are things you need to keep in mind and some homework you need to do beforehand.

Do Your Market Research

Aside from making profits, the main goal of all businesses is to help solve their customers’ problems. So no matter what you provide, no matter what you do, it all has to go back to your market research.

And with the existence of the Internet, doing market research is so much easier now. In my book, How to Become an Email Titan, I have a chapter dedicated to teaching you how to market research along with three effective and reliable methods. But that’s not included in the sample chapters.

However, I will give you one tip right now.

When you do your market research, there’s no better place to get your information than from the source itself, your target customers.

Find them, talk to them, and pick their brains. Ask them questions that’ll guide you to creating the most attractive lead magnet.

Some of these questions can be along the lines of…

“What do you secretly want the most?”

“What makes them frustrated?”

“Who or what are their enemies?”

“What similar products or services have they tried, but didn’t work?”

Keep digging out the information from their brains until you have an extremely detailed target customer profile.

Focus on One Thing

This is marketing 101. I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying, “If you try to help everyone, you’ll end up helping no one.” It doesn’t just apply to life, but in business as well. More often than not, focusing on one thing will get you better results than if you were to focus on multiple things.

I’ll give you an example: Selling through email.

I’ll explain this with a case study. Neville Medhora, who’s the face behind Copywriting Course, used to own a dropshipping business called House of Rave, and it was pretty successful. Before he sold it, it was generating enough income to pay his bills, grow his savings, and he still had enough money leftover to splurge on whatever he wanted.

He also had an email list of over 7,500 customers, but he’d never send a single sales email out until a friend of his told him to start doing it.

He’d start sending out a monthly email newsletter that showcased a bunch of his products in a catalog. He got high open rates, but little to no sales.

After seeing those poor results, he tried a different approach.

With the help of his friend, he wrote a long plain text email promoting only one product. When he pulled up the results, he saw that he made 120 sales in just two hours.

That’s one example of the power of focusing on one thing at a time, or in this case, selling one thing at a time.

Now, how does this apply to lead magnets?

You want to make sure your lead magnet is focused on solving one specific problem your target customer is facing. I’ll use myself as an example. I’m in the email copywriting and email marketing world.

I already have a lead magnet, which is the sample chapters of my book, How to Become an Email Titan, which lays out the framework on getting started on building a robust email marketing system. Overall, it’s a topic that’s more on the broader side.

But I can dive deeper into one of the topics I talk about in the book and make that my lead magnet like: Building a quality, responsive email list, how to write eye-catching email subject lines, or how to plan email launch sequences.

First Impression Is Everything

Let me start this part of the section off with an instance that you may, or may not, have personally experienced.

I recently, at the time I’m writing this, joined somebody’s email list. This particular person is a coach who helps freelancers get more high-end clients.

After being on this person’s list for a good while, I looked back at the emails and noticed some things that were off-putting. The two big things were:

Seeing words in the subject line that weren’t separated by spaces.

And when the person would manually send out a reminder email for a webinar, they would cc every single person’s email on the registration list.

Those may be minor things to you, but to me, it says something about the person’s attention to detail and their knowledge on email etiquette.

There was another case where I was on someone’s privacy policy page (For absolutely no good reason at all). When I clicked on their website hyperlink, it directed me to a completely different person’s website, which led me to believe that this person copied someone else’s privacy policy and pasted it on their own website. That made me question the website owner’s attention to detail.

So here’s what I’m trying to get at.

It’s important to give your new subscribers your best first impression because it can really make the difference between the new subscribers becoming your new customers and dead leads. It’s really no different than meeting a new person. If you meet someone new who gives you a bad gut feeling, you may decide right then and there that they’re unfit to be a new friend, partner, business partner, acquaintance, or whatever.

So make sure the subscriber’s journey from opting into your email list to receiving your welcome email(s) is clean and as close to perfect as possible.

I personally made a mistake of not making sure my optin journey was free of mistakes.

When I promoted my opt-in page using Facebook ads, the page wasn’t mobile friendly. When people clicked on my ad and scrolled through the opt-in page, the email sign up form wasn’t placed correctly, which made it impossible for people to join my email list. I didn’t realize until about $30 in and somebody posted a comment pointing out the mistake.

As a result, I made a terrible first impression, lost a handful of potential leads that time, and wasted my ad spend. So don’t make the same mistake I did.

Always Include a Call to Action

This is arguably the most important aspect of a lead magnet. If there’s nothing for your subscriber to take action on, then the lead magnet is useless.

Now when I say to include a call to action, there are two parts to this.

The first part is to include a solid piece of actionable advice that your subscribers can take to improve or solve a certain problem in their business or life. After all, you want your lead magnet to actually help them and not just let it be a useless bargaining tool to get them to join your email list, right? The last thing you want is for them to get your lead magnet and let it sit in their hard drive collecting cyber dust.

Another thing I’ll say about this is that you want to give advice that’ll help solve only one problem. I know I mentioned this earlier, but it’s that important. It’s almost impossible for you to solve every single business problem your subscriber is facing. And even if you did, it wouldn’t make sense from a business perspective because then your subscriber wouldn’t need any further help from you, and your lead magnet would have way too much content in it, which your subscribers wouldn’t have time to go through. That’s why I believe the mindset of giving away all your best knowledge is flawed. 

Now, the second aspect is to include a call to action that’ll give your new subscriber the opportunity to do further business with you. That can range from directing them to a page where you sell your paid products, booking a sales call with you, or taking them to a webinar registration page. Basically, you’re doing an upsell, or cross-sell depending on what your business is.

I know the people who complain about info products always saying things like, “This product has zero helpful information, it’s just fluff!” or “This is basically a sales pitch” will not like what I wrote. They’ll think that it’s unethical or shady.

No my friend, that’s business, and let me tell you something about business.

Upselling and cross-selling is done all the time!

Yes, that includes at the restaurants you eat in. Does “Do you want fries with that?” sound familiar to you?

It’s also done in online stores. Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” section is a perfect example of cross-selling.

A lot of times, you probably don’t even know you’re being upsold or cross-sold until you realize you spent more money than you intended.

I’ll stop there before I go on a long rant.

So before I end this off, I’ll just say one last thing.

Once you follow what I said in this article and set everything up correctly, you should start getting some new subscribers onto your email list (Assuming you’re driving traffic to your opt-in page). Once they’re on your list, it all comes down to building that relationship with them.

In my admittedly biased opinion, the best way to do that is to write engaging sales emails that I teach you how to do in my book, How to Become an Email Titan.

To get the sample chapters of the book, click the link below.

https://EllisenWang.com/email-titan-sample

Some examples would be:

Podcasting

Social media influencer marketing

Certain social platforms like TikTok or even matchmaking apps.

Naturally, when people are obsessing over the new things, they tend to forget the old. In the marketing world, email marketing is one of the older marketing channels and I know people who are neglecting that part of their business because social media marketing and SMS marketing are the current trends.

For some people, it even got to the point where they think email marketing is going to be obsolete or is already dead.

Don’t believe me?

Just go to the DuckDuckGo search engine and type in “Email is dead.” You’ll find plenty of articles from people on why they think email is going to die in such-and-such year, or why they think it’s already dead.

To be fair, I can understand why they think email marketing is dead. There are reasons like:

1. A lot of people don’t even bother opening their emails.

2. It’s too saturated.

3. Response time is too long which is why more people are transitioning to instant messaging platforms.

But you know what I think?

Just because you’re impatient to receive a response or you’re inbox management is terrible doesn’t mean it’s dead. And it’s too saturated? Yeah, but so what? It’s still possible for you to stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes.

But that’s not all.

We’re now living in a time where social media is becoming less and less reliable.

With their algorithms changing, the organic traffic you spent months building up will get wiped out overnight.

Privacy policies are getting stricter, which means paid targeted ads are becoming less effective.

There are more and more cases of people getting banned from social media platforms, putting all the hard work of building up their audiences to waste.

In other words, it’s time to start relying less on social media and go towards platforms we have more control over, i.e. email marketing.

So with that being said, let’s jump into…

Why Email Marketing Is Not Dead

Here are some things you should know to show you that email is certainly not dead.

According to a report from a technology market research firm, The Radicati Group, they laid out some statistics that show why email is still one of the most popular forms of digital communication till this day.

You can click on the hyperlink to read the executive summary, but I’m also going to summarize the main points below.

1. In 2019, there were a total of 3.9 billion active email users worldwide, and they expect that number to increase to 4.3 billion by the end of 2023. That is about half the population. 

2. In 2019, there were a total of 293 billion emails sent out by both businesses and consumers. And they expect the number of emails sent to increase to 347 billion by the end of 2023.

Also, according to Statista, about 24% of workers in the United States never checked their emails in 2019, but that’s still a large percentage of workers that do check their emails. That statistic alone proves that email is far from dead.

And let me just say this.

If you’re a business owner who’s thinking about using email as the primary way to sell to your audience, and you’re worried, for whatever reason, about how you can sell to the 24% of the people who don’t use email, don’t. It’s not worth trying to turn them into your customers in the first place. If they don’t even read emails in the first place, then they’re going to be nothing but a waste of space on your email list and a waste of money (Because depending on how big your list is, it’s going to cost a pretty penny to maintain it in your email marketing software).

With that said, let’s get into…

5 Reasons Why You Should Still Use Email Marketing

1. Email Marketing Still Gives the Highest Return on Investment

Statistically, for every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. Of course, that return is going to be different from business to business. It depends on how big your email list is (The bigger it is, the more it costs to maintain it), and how much profit you make from selling your products or services. If you’re losing money, then obviously you’re going to have to make some changes.

2. You’re More Likely to Get Your Audience to Take Action

Nowadays, people are very protective of their inboxes. When they see an email that they don’t remember subscribing to, chances are, they’re going to unsubscribe from the mailing list and delete your email on sight. So when people are subscribed to your email list, that most likely means that they already trust you to some degree that you’re not going to send them useless emails. And if they already trust you, chances are, they’re more likely to get involved in whatever you’re selling them.

3. Email Marketing Is a Great Relationship-Building Tool

To expand on the last point, email is a great way to build trust. People have told me that you need to show your face, you need to create videos for people to trust you more. While I do agree with putting your face to your business, creating videos is not necessary. I’ve witnessed business owners create highly profitable businesses solely from email. From my personal knowledge, Ben Settle, Justin Goff, and Chris Orzechowski are one of the few people who have been able to do so.

How did they do it?

They write interesting, engaging, and persuasive sales emails using the same email copywriting methods I teach in How to Become an Email Titan. And when they do that consistently, what happens down the road is that their subscribers are conditioned to open their emails as soon as they see their names because they trust and know their emails won’t be a waste of time to read.

4. It’s Less Time-consuming to Use Than Social Media

Especially if you’re on platforms like Instagram, you’re going to be spending a lot of your time creating content. I talk a little more about it in the cons section of social media in my Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing article, but basically, you have to spend time posting content multiple times a week (Which can be time-consuming if you need to design images or edit videos), learning how to take advantage of their ever-changing algorithms in order to stay relevant.

But when it comes to email, it’s a different story. You can write and send out a newsletter in as little as 30 minutes. And if you want, you can only send one newsletter per week. Or if you’re like me, send out emails everyday (excluding weekends). It can be as simple as a plain text email too, so you don’t ever need to worry about designing templates. Just write the email on a word document, open up your email marketing software, copy and paste the text, and send away.

5. Email Marketing Is a Platform You Own

Yes, you read that correctly. The moment when someone enters their email address into your opt-in form and it’s added to your email list, you own that piece of data.

To put it in a more simple way, let me share this saying with you.

“If you’re able to export your data, then you own it.”

That’s another downside of building a following on social media. You can’t export the data of your followers on Instagram or Facebook. That’s why it’s important to funnel as many followers as you can into your email list because if, for whatever reason, you lose access to your accounts, then all the work you’ve done to build your audience will be wasted.

When you get those followers to sign up for your email list, you can (And should) export that list and store it as a backup in case you lose access to your current email marketing software. So if you need to switch to another software, you can easily import your list and continue business as if nothing happened.

Hopefully after reading all that, you understand how important email marketing is for your business. Not just from a profitability standpoint, but from a security standpoint too.

So if you want to learn more on getting started, I suggest you pick up the sample chapters of How to Become an Email Titan. I handpicked specific chapters throughout the book to give out for free to help you get started with building your own robust email marketing system.

You can get the chapters using the link below.

https://EllisenWang.com/email-titan-sample

Email marketing or social media marketing?

This is no different than arguing which is better, old or new? Some say “old is gold,” but others will counter-argue, “old is not always gold, sometimes new is what to do.”

This reminds me of a video I recently watched from a content creator named Dhar Mann.

Long story short, it was about an interior design company figuring out how to better market themselves. They had a long dry spell of inbound sales calls, their rent was 30 days past due that they couldn’t afford to pay, and if they didn’t come up with the money to pay it, they would have to close down. The company’s back was literally against the wall.

One of the marketing executives, Barb, came up with a new old-fashioned idea to rent a whole page newspaper ad space, but the head of the company shot the idea down and thought it was time to try something new. So she hired a young popular TikTok user, Allison Day, to help out.

She wanted to promote the company with a TikTok video, but the marketing executive ridiculed the idea and thought Allison had no idea what she was doing simply because she was young and didn’t have decades of marketing experience under her belt.

The head of the company made a compromise to try Allison’s idea first, and if it didn’t work, they would go with Barb’s idea. So Allison published the video on TikTok, and all of a sudden, multiple phone calls started coming in.

I know what you might be thinking.

That wasn’t exactly an email marketing vs social media marketing story, but you get the point. It’s a story of old vs new.

So how do we determine which one is better?

When it comes to email marketing, there are so many marketing experts going around the Internet and publishing articles saying that “email is dead.”

On the other hand, the world of social media has been getting a lot more crazy too. I’ve personally heard stories of people getting screwed over by social media.

For example,

Earlier 2019, I met another fellow copywriter who introduced me to a creatives network called GFTD.

Usually, the members would meet every Monday evening at a bar in New York City.

But during the COVID pandemic, we have group Zoom calls where people from all over the world join in.

There was one day where we were discussing how artists can get more eyes on their work through Instagram.

One woman, who’s an artist (or graphic illustrator, I don’t exactly remember), shared her experience on Instagram with everyone.

Basically, she spent countless hours building up her profile page to get thousands of followers and over one thousand visitors per week.

Then one day, Instagram decided to change their algorithm (again).

Did that affect her Instagram presence?

You bet it did.

Nowadays, she no longer gets over a thousand visitors a week. It dropped down to only 200 a week.

Was she frustrated?

Of course.

Can she do anything about it?

Well, yes. If she still wants to showcase her work to the Instagram community, she has no choice but to play by their rules and spend time rebuilding her traffic until Instagram changes their algorithm again. At that point, it just becomes a vicious cycle.

So with that being said, let’s dive deep into email marketing and social media marketing, and come up with a verdict once and for all.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is exactly what it sounds like, sending (Mainly) sales emails to a group of people that have voluntarily signed up to receive your newsletters.

According to trusty ol’ Wikipedia, the first email marketing campaign was sent in 1978, back when the Internet was known as the ARPANET, by a person named Gary Thuerk. He sent 400 emails and claimed to have made $13 million. But back then, people sent emails that would be considered as spam today. It used to be a channel where businesses can make blatant sales offers to their potential customers, but now it’s more about building relationships with them.

So even though it’s one of the oldest forms of marketing, it has evolved so much over time making it one of the most effective ways of marketing. As of the date I’m writing this, email marketing continues to deliver high return on investment, $42 gained for every $1 you spend.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is also exactly what it sounds like. It’s the act of consistently creating and publishing content on one or multiple social media platforms to promote your business, your products and services.

While some businesses do sell their products and services directly, the main goal (In my eyes) is to build brand awareness while building relationships with your audience, just like how you would in email marketing.

The one big difference is that when it comes to social media marketing, you can really take advantage of visual content, especially on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, where it’s heavily centered around pictures and videos. So you’re able to share certain things about your business in a much more effective way than you would be able to through email.

So now that you’re familiar with both marketing channels, let’s analyze the pros and cons of each.

Email Marketing

Pros

1. Email Is Direct

Email is very personal and is one of the easiest (And fastest) ways to contact your potential customers. You can write emails that are tailored to their personal interests, and that helps build your relationships with them.

2. Higher Impressions

Your readers are more likely to see your emails than to see your social media posts. According to Forrester, an American market research company, 90% of emails get delivered to your reader’s inbox, whereas only 2% of them see your posts on their social media news feed.

Yes, I’m especially talking about the people on Twitter or Instagram who follow thousands, or tens of thousands of people’s content. What do you think the chances are of them seeing your social media content?

3. Your Email List is an Asset You Truly Own

When people willingly add their email addresses to your list, that information is rightfully yours to keep. And you can contact those people whenever and (For the most part) however you want. In other words, you have more control.

4. It’s Completely Free to Start

A lot of email marketing softwares offer free plans for those who are just starting off. The way their pricing model works is that the cost increases based on how many subscribers you have in your database.

To show you what I mean, here’s a screenshot of Mailerlite’s pricing model:

I highly suggest using Mailerlite as your first email marketing software. It’s very easy to use, provides a generous free plan, and has inexpensive pricing as you grow your email list. But if you’re looking for more options, check out my Email Marketing Strategy blog post.

Moving on.

5. It Can Be As Personalized As You Like

Most, if not all, email marketing softwares have a segmentation feature, which allows you to categorize your subscribers into different groups based on their actions and behaviors. And then what you can do is send emails to a specific group. In other words, you can send out personalized emails which means your subscribers are more likely to take action (AKA buy from you).

Cons

1. Risk of Being Thrown Into Spam

Nowadays, spam filters are getting a lot stricter and a lot smarter. There are hundreds of words they look out for in your emails. Hubspot actually made a huge list of spam words that you should avoid using in your emails, just click the hyperlink to check it out.

2. Email Is Extremely Abundant

People receive hundreds of emails everyday, and depending on how well they manage their inboxes, they may not even get to open your emails at all. That’s why generally the email open rates float around 10 to 20%. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make your emails stand out, not necessarily graphics-wise because graphics heavy emails may be mistaken for spam emails too, but in terms of unique, engaging content. Not only that, but it’s important to be consistent with your emailing as well.

3. It May Take Time Before You See Results

Whenever you hear people make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars from a single email, it’s not really because the email they wrote magically persuaded people to give their money. What they don’t share is how much work they put into building the relationship with their customers first, and that takes a lot of time.

There’s an e-commerce email copywriter and agency owner I follow and he once shared that he had a customer that stayed on his email list and didn’t buy from him until four years later. That, in my opinion, is a more realistic situation and is what you should expect when you start email marketing too. So don’t get discouraged when you see no results at first. If you stay consistent and properly build the relationship with your subscribers, the results will eventually come.

Let’s stop here, I think we’ve covered everything about email marketing. With that said, let’s revisit social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Pros

1. Easy Exposure

With social media, it’s relatively easy to get your content and your business in front of a new audience, especially on platforms like Instagram where you can take advantage of the hashtag system, and I heard on the social media grapevine that organic traffic on TikTok is extremely powerful, at least at the time I’m writing this.

2. Instant Interaction

People are always active on social media, so when they see your content, they react to it however they want to, whether it be liking, commenting, or following your content. Not only do you get instant feedback on your content, but you can also reach out to them, get to know them more, and get them more involved with your business.

3. Free Quick Traffic

Building your social media platforms doesn’t have to cost any money. You don’t necessarily need to throw money into sponsored ads, and you certainly don’t need fancy graphic design software to create attractive images. You can always use free tools like Canva, which is my personal favorite.

Plus, you can get free traffic as soon as tomorrow. Someone can see your content and if they really like it, they’ll most likely check out your website. The results can come much faster than other organic marketing efforts like search engine optimization.

4. It’s a Good Relationship Building Tool

Unlike email marketing, you have the ability to interact with your audience in a more involved fashion like going live on Facebook or Instagram, posting stories, and sharing videos. It always feels more personal when your audience sees your faces and hears you talk, it feels way more personal than just reading text from you.

5. Your Content Can Go Viral

People love to share content on social media, especially other people’s content. Although it’s rare, your content may go viral, as in, it gets millions of hits within 24 hours. That’s a massive amount of exposure for your business and can potentially be game-changing.

Cons

1. It Can Be Difficult to Maintain

Social media platforms are designed to keep you on it for as long as possible, whether you’re just consuming content or creating content. If you want to stay relevant on social media, you have no choice but to constantly post new content while satisfying their ever-changing algorithms. Like they say about muscle, use it or else you’ll lose it. If you’re good at creating content, then that may not be an issue. But it can still take up a considerable amount of your time not only from creating and posting content, but also from interacting with your audience, which ultimately can lead to burnout.

2. Oversaturation

Older platforms like Facebook and Twitter that were once great sources of traffic are getting more and more crowded every year, which means it’s a lot more difficult to attract quality traffic. And with the algorithm changes, it may eventually get to the point where just posting consistently may not be enough, and if you want to get better results, you may be forced to throw some money into paid traffic.

3. You’re Under the Control of the Platform

As I mentioned before, the thing that ultimately controls if your content is going to be seen is the algorithm. You have no choice but to be under the mercy of the social media algorithms and play by their rules. That means one day you could be getting tens of thousands of profile visitors per day on Instagram, and the next day it’ll drop down to one thousand visitors per day. If you don’t believe me, scroll back up to the story of the artist’s Instagram experience.

Verdict

Now that we examined both marketing channels, let’s go back to the million dollar question, which one is better, email or social media?

Well unfortunately, there’s no easy way. Like everything in life, they both have their pros and cons, so it’s hard to determine that one form of marketing is truly better than the other. Both channels can produce amazing results for your business, it really comes down to taking the time to learn how to use them and being consistent.

If you want my biased opinion, I’d say email is superior simply because I chose to be an email copywriter, not a social media specialist.

But if you want my real opinion, why not just use both?

You can actually create a funnel system and it can be as simple as this:

1. Use social media to introduce your business to new potential customers.

2. Funnel them into your email list by promoting, ideally, a lead magnet.

3. Consistently email them to build the relationship, which will basically “condition” them to buy your products and services down the line.

If you want to read about this funnel system in more detail, check out the sample chapters of How to Become an Email Titan.

It goes into the basic fundamentals of building your own email marketing system and then goes into great detail on how to write engaging sales emails.

Just click the link below to get your free copy.

https://EllisenWang.com/email-titan-sample

But look at where we are now:

I still use email, the people on my email list still use email (Otherwise they wouldn’t be reading my emails, you know?), the business owners I know and follow still use email. Are you starting to get what I’m trying to tell you? If not, it’s that…

EMAIL IS NOT DEAD

Not even close.

Even though we have a lot of popular social media platforms at our disposal like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the newest platform (At the time I’m writing this), TikTok, email still trumps them all at the end of the day.

Why Is Email Marketing the Best?

Here are a few good reasons why email marketing is the best:

1. Email Is Direct

Email is very personal and is one of the easiest (And fastest) ways to contact your potential customers. You can write emails that are tailored to their personal interests, and that helps build your relationships with them.

2. Higher Reach

Your readers are more likely to see your emails than to see your social media posts. According to Forrester, an American market research company, 90% of emails get delivered to your reader’s inbox, whereas only 2% of them see your posts on their social media news feed.

Yes, I’m especially talking about the people on Twitter or Instagram who follow thousands, or tens of thousands of people’s content. What do you think the chances are of them seeing your social media content?

3. Your Email List Belongs To You

When people willingly add their email addresses to your list, that information is rightfully yours to own. And you can contact those people whenever and (For the most part) however you want. In other words, you have more control.

Now let’s compare that to social media and search engines. Depending on your following, your social media content may be seen by hundreds or thousands of people in a rather short amount of time. When you work hard to optimize your website content to have it rank on the first page of search engine results, you’re going to have consistent traffic being directed onto your website.

Now for the bad news:

Social media and search engine companies can change their algorithms whenever they feel like doing so. And when they do, your social media exposure will most likely drop as well as your search engine rankings.

So what I’m trying to tell you is, it’s a terrible idea to rely on building your business on platforms you don’t have control over.

Here’s a true story where someone experienced this firsthand:

There’s a YouTube content creator I’ve been following for almost 10 years. In one of his podcast episodes, he revealed that at the peak of his career, he was making over $10,000 per month. After YouTube changed their algorithms multiple times, demonetized a bunch of his videos, and made their policies more strict after they got fined for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, his income dropped to under $2,000. 

And that’s just one real example. I’ve heard multiple stories about businesses and influencers getting screwed over by social media algorithm changes, even as far as getting completely kicked out of the platforms, which caused their income to completely disappear.

So When Should I Start Planning My Email Marketing Strategy?

You should’ve started yesterday, but that’s not possible now, huh?

So the next best thing to do is start today.

Without further ado, let’s get into the step-by-step strategy guide to help you set up your cyber bulletproof email marketing system.

Get Started With Email Marketing

STEP 1: Create a Lead Magnet

Most, if not, every single time you see a business ask for your email address, they’ll give you something in exchange. That’s called a lead magnet. When you do that, you’re basically giving them access to your inbox so they can send you newsletters and promotional emails.

But the lead magnet they gave you in exchange for your email address isn’t useless either. They’re supposed to give valuable information that’ll solve an immediate problem you’re facing and/or improve your business, lifestyle, or whatever it may be.

As an example, my personal lead magnet is the sample chapters of my book, How to Become an Email Titan. You can click on the hyperlink to check out the landing page.

The last thing you want to do is ask your potential customers for their email addresses in exchange for nothing. When you go to those websites and read something along the lines of, “Enter your email address to get biweekly or monthly updates,” it doesn’t really make them want to opt in.

Think of it from the potential customer’s perspective.

Assuming their inboxes are already bombarded with hundreds of other emails, it wouldn’t make sense for them to allow another person to send them newsletters. And if their inboxes are too busy, the chances of them reading your emails are very unlikely.

So the key is to give them a reason to look out for your emails.

One of the ways to do that is to send the lead magnet to their inbox as soon as they opt in.

But how about every other email you send after they get your lead magnet?

Slow down, we’ll get into that in a later section. But first, we go onto step two.

STEP 2: Create an Opt-in Page

So after you created your lead magnet, it’s time to create a page where people can get access to it.

This is going to be your opt-in page, or landing page.

Think of it as a shorter version of a sales page and that you’re selling your lead magnet instead of a paid product.

There are two ways you can do this:

1. Built-in Landing Page Builder

The first way you can create a landing page is by using a built-in landing page builder provided by email marketing softwares.

Every single email marketing software that exists should have a built-in landing page builder that you can use so people can sign up for your email list.

Even if you don’t want to use this method and want to use the second method that I’ll talk about later, you’ll still have to sign up for a software anyway otherwise, how else are you going to send out emails?

Despite what people in the Internet Marketing community say and what the expert articles say, all email marketing softwares function the same, they just have their own unique flaws. Assuming you’re just starting out, you’re going to want to sign up for a free email marketing software. As far as my knowledge goes and at the time I’m writing this, the following softwares have free plans:

Heyluu.com

Mailerlite.com

Convertkit.com

Aweber.com

Sendinblue.com

Mailchimp.com

I suggest you sign up for at least two of these in case one of them stops working for whatever reason, or they kick you out of their platform.

Once you sign up and finish setting up your account, you can use their builder to create your landing page, publish it, and start building your email list.

2. Create a Website

The second way you can create a landing page is by starting up your own website, which is what I personally did obviously, because you’re on it right now.

In order to do that, you’re going to start off by signing up for a web hosting company. I personally suggest using Bluehost because they’re inexpensive and very reliable in terms of keeping your websites up at all times.

Now, you don’t have to build a whole website. I’ve seen people’s websites where it’s nothing but just a landing page. If you want, you can start your website off with something as simple as that. Then later on, you can slowly expand it and turn it into a full website.

STEP 3: Set Up a Welcome Sequence

So after you get people to sign up for your email list, it’s time to set up an automated sequence, or workflow, in your email marketing software so that it will automatically send the lead magnet to your new email subscriber.

There are two reasons why you’d want to do this.

The first reason is to save yourself time. Setting up an automated system to send out welcome emails to every new subscriber that signs up for your email list will make your life a whole lot easier than if you were to do all manually.

The second reason is to kickstart the relationship between you and the new email subscriber, with a huge emphasis on relationship. As you read further and learn more about email marketing, you’ll start to understand that email marketing is not just a way to sell your own products and services, but it’s a way to build strong relationships with your subscribers as well.

Now, there are two ways you can approach setting up your automated sequence:

1. The Simple Welcome Sequence

The Simple Welcome Sequence is exactly what it sounds like. A short and sweet welcome email. It can basically consist of something like a warm welcome, a link that directs your new subscriber to your lead magnet, and things to expect from now on.

For example:

At the time I’m writing this, when you sign up to get the sample chapters of How to Become an Email Titan, you’ll get a simple welcome email that’ll say…

Welcome!

It’s good to see you on my list. As promised, here’s the link to the sample chapters of How to Become an Email Titan.

(Link to the lead magnet)

Just to remind you once more that I send emails everyday. If you ever want to leave, the unsubscribe button is down below.

Talk to you later.

-Ellisen

Some people could say it’s a bit too simple, and sometimes, I agree. Your welcome sequence is going to be one of the most-opened emails you’ll ever send, so take advantage of that attention.

If I really wanted to, I would add a little more content to my welcome sequence, but that’s not really my priority (Though it might be in the future). My main focus is on the daily emails I send to my email subscribers afterwards, but that’s a whole different topic I’ll get into later.

2. The Less Simple Welcome Sequence

If you want to put more effort than I did into your welcome sequence, that’s fine too.

The other way you can set up your welcome sequence is to create a whole email series where you just give a lot of value.

For example,

One of my former business coaches had an old opt-in where her lead magnet was the email series itself. The lead magnet was called “Seven Days to a Side Business,” and it was a seven day email series (One email per day) that taught you how to start up your own side business.

I did something similar with my old blog, EZPC Building. For that blog, my lead magnet was a computer building checklist PDF, and I would include the link in the welcome email that my new subscribers can access and download. After that, I would talk about myself and the story behind EZPC Building. For the next few days, they would get an email series that went into more detail about computer building.

So the checklist basically helped people make sure they have all the essential parts they need to build their own computer. At the same time, it helped them make sure all the parts are all compatible. Then, the email series went into more detail about every single part. On the first day, I would talk about what you need to look for when you shop for your processor. On the second day, they learned what they need to know about when it comes to their graphics card. And it kept going on until I covered all the essential parts. So overall, the email series would last over one week.

My whole intention was to build on top of the value of the checklist with the email series teaching.

So take note of that and keep it in mind.

STEP 4: Write Nurturing Emails

And now for, in my opinion, the most fun part of email marketing:

Writing and sending your nurturing emails.

These are the emails that are going to get you the results that you’re hopefully looking for, which are sales.

Now, one mistake I’ve seen people make is getting too caught up in the small details of this step.

They ask questions like:

What are the best times and days to send the emails out?

Should I make it look flashy or plain?

Why are my open and click rates so low?

Or, how many times a week should I send emails out?

For the last question, it really depends on what you’re comfortable with. Though, I will say that you should email at least once a week. From my experience, that is the bare minimum frequency where emailing doesn’t take up too much of your time and your subscribers will somewhat remember that you exist. Ideally, you want to send an email everyday, and there are actually a lot of benefits to doing so.

Besides, even if you don’t send emails everyday and you write the way I’m about to teach you, then you’ll build stronger relationships with your email subscribers, which means you can make a lot more sales too.

Let’s start, shall we?

First off, let’s go over how you shouldn’t be sending emails. Take a look at these two email newsletters below.

 

At first glance, they look pretty good. Their design is very clean and they are informative. However, there are a couple of things I don’t like about it and would do differently.

1. Personalization

Just by looking at the emails, they look like the type of emails that would be blasted out to an entire audience. But the people receiving those emails most likely already know that they’re on an email list, however there are still simple ways to personalize the emails.

You can include their name, which you should be able to do on your email marketing software only if you collected their first name. Personally, I only require people to type in their email address so it’s not possible for me to do this. To take it one step further, I would also write the emails as if I’m only writing to one person.

2. Include Only One Call to Action

These types of newsletters tend to have multiple calls to action. In the case of Ben & Jerry’s and General Assembly, their newsletters have four to eleven different things for their subscribers to click on. I believe that when you write emails, you should include only one call to action for the sake of keeping things simple. When you give people multiple options, they’re much less likely to take action. If I were in their position, I would break the newsletters down and write one email for each call to action.

3. More Text

The last major thing I would do is write more to the point where their email newsletters are almost entirely text-based. And the reason why I say that is because it’s the words that create the connection with your email subscribers. It’s the words that build relationships with them. I would have no problem keeping the pictures in there as long as they support the text. The point is to write something that’ll further the relationships you have with your subscribers. Have a conversation with them, tell a story, share something interesting that happened in your business. Get them involved in your world.

Here’s an example of an email that does just that. This is one of the emails I sent to my subscribers that they particularly liked.

Subject: The case of booty calling your subscribers

In April of 2019, I purchased an affiliate marketing course from a rather nice New Zealander.

Very useful course back when I worked on my old blog, EZPC Building.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here.

I was going through my inbox and I looked at all the emails he sent me from April 2019 and on.

This man has been emailing me so inconsistently that I almost forgot I was on his list. Let’s just say, the number of times he emailed me is less than the number of toes I have.

And when I looked through the content, everything started to make sense.

You see, there are two types of people in the email marketing world:

1. You have the people who email you consistently and want to build a solid relationship with you.

2. There are the, what I like to call, “email booty callers.” You barely hear from these people. And when you do, it’s when they come across an opportunity to make money off you.

The New Zealander is a great example of an “email booty caller.”

Looking through his past emails, all he did was promote his affiliate offers to me and everyone else on his list (Blatantly too, I should add).

There was zero relationship building.

Zero useful or entertaining content.

It was just pure promotion to the point where he might as well send me emails that look like the newsletters that big corporations send out.

It would’ve been the same difference.

You don’t want to be like that. It’ll do you nothing but give you a one way ticket to the trash bin and your subscriber’s exiled newsletter list.

No, you want to be #1. Pun absolutely intended.

It all starts with learning the ways of email copywriting taught in How to Become an Email Titan.

Link is below.

(Insert Link)

-Ellisen

If I were to guess, there were several reasons why my subscribers liked this particular email.

1. I kept the email fun to read. I poked fun at the way this person was emailing me and everyone else on his list, but not to the point where it’s considered slander.

2. It starts off with a short story to pull their attention in.

3. There’s a learning lesson that my subscribers can take away from the email.

If you want to read more emails like this, you can go over to my blog.

And if you want to learn how to write emails like these for yourself, you can pick up a copy of my book, How to Become an Email Titan. However, I suggest you check out the sample chapters first to see if it’s right for you.

Here’s the link to get it.

https://EllisenWang.com/email-titan-sample