Email Marketing for Beginners (and How to Make Money)

So the first email you want to send out to someone who has just opted in to your email list is your welcome email.

After the welcome email, you send out another 2-4 emails.

This sequence of emails is known as the Soap Opera Sequence.

Why soap opera?

Because these first few emails are written in a way to establish a relationship with your new leads, and the key part here is… each email ends on an open loop.

Exactly like each episode of a TV soap opera ends on a cliffhanger.

People cannot resist to watch the next episode. Or in our case, read our next email.

One thing you don’t want to do in those first emails is to sell something. People have no connection to you yet, so why should they trust you when you tell them right away to buy stuff from you…

Now, everyone has their own style of creating these emails, and this is just the way I do it.

Think long-term. Build a relationship with your audience first.

And don’t worry about people who unsubscribe again right after your first emails.

Probably they only wanted to get free stuff from you and are not really interested in your business and what you do to help them get the results they want.

Connect with like-minded people who are driven and determined. Ignore the rest.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that the welcome email is usually the one with the highest open rate of any email you send out.

So use it wisely to leave a great first impression and hook your new leads so they want to read your next emails…

Let’s have a closer look at the story structure of your soap opera emails…

In your welcome email you first want to thank them for signing up and tell them that it was the right decision.

Excite them for what’s to come and also immediately address any negative concerns, such as that you won’t spam them and are here to genuinely help them.

End the welcome email on an open loop. For example, ask a question that you’re gonna answer in your next email…

The purpose of your second email is to tell your backstory.

And just as the hero’s journey in every movie, this email needs to start at a really low point in your life.

At a time in your life when something bad or sad happened… Something that made you hit a wall, lose hope…

But then you found a new path that changed your life, a solution to your problems… at this point, end the story on an open loop again and tell only in the next email what happened…

In the third email you talk about your epiphany moment.

Emotionally tell your story about the thing or the moment that led to changing your life and finding a new way. This life-changing thing could also be a product, for example.

And again, just hint at what happened next and end on another open loop…

In email number four you talk about what you achieved.

Now, you don’t necessarily have to have reached your big, ultimate goal yet that you set for yourself.

Just share your story, your progress, talk about milestones that you achieved and where you are now…

Also, if you promote a product in your soap opera sequence, which, as I mentioned, I don’t do - this is the email you would talk about the benefits of that product that changed your life.

Again, the purpose of this email campaign is to connect with your audience and build a relationship, not to sell stuff right away.

The final email of your soap opera sequence is about why all of what you talked about matters to them, to the person reading all your emails.

They know by now where you came from, what you went through, and where you are now… and that your are able to help them get to where they want to be with what you do…

Should you promote a product, as just mentioned, this final email is where you would add some urgency and a call to action, for example that they only get a special deal for the next 24 hours and then never again.

Important - never use fake urgency or scarcity. It will backfire on you sooner or later… And you don’t want that.

Once your subscribers went through your soap opera sequence, you start another campaign, which is called the Seinfeld sequence.

Why Seinfeld?

Unlike the soap opera emails that form a complete story, Seinfeld emails don’t follow a journey.

The name comes from the TV show Seinfeld where each episode was just about some random stuff.

Now, your Seinfeld emails serve two purposes: One, nurture your relationship with your audience.

Give them tips, tell them stories, link back to your valuable YouTube videos or blog posts that help them in their business.

And two, send emails to promote your products. This could be your own or affiliate products, which help your audience solve their problem or get what they desire.

Your Seinfeld sequence is built up in a way that you send out these different types of emails alternately.

For example, your first Seinfeld email could be a value-based one, then emails number two and three promote a product.

Always sell products over multiple emails, not only one, to increase the conversion rate and number of sales.

After that, you go back to one or two emails that don’t promote anything. Give tips, tell inspirational stories, link to your helpful YouTube content etc.

Then you go back to promotional emails… Important here, the best case is of course when you use those products yourself and can talk about it first-hand.

Never just promote crappy stuff to make a quick buck. Again, this will backfire at some point and hurt your business.

The greatest thing about this Seinfeld sequence is that you can make it as long as you want…

You can create a campaign that is one month long… or three months… a year…

You can build out this campaign over time as your business grows.

The beauty of this is that you only need to create those emails once. After that, your email autoresponder will send out this campaign automatically, which generates sales for you on autopilot.

As for the interval of sending out all those emails, I use a one-day interval for the soap opera sequence, and afterwards a 2- to 3-day interval for the Seinfeld emails.

But this is up to you and how you want to build and nurture your relationship with your audience…

Also, as mentioned earlier in the video, you can always pause your Seinfeld campaign and afterwards resume it, for example, to send out a short campaign on events such as Black Friday or for a new product launch etc…

So what do you need to set this all up and get it working for you automatically 24/7?

Of course, you should write at least your soap opera emails yourself because that’s your personal story.

As for the Seinfeld emails, if you don’t want to write all of them yourself, there are ways such as using PLR email sequences that you can buy for very cheap and then simply adjust them so they fit your needs.

But be careful because the quality can be questionable. PLR stands for privat label rights.

You could also get those emails written for you by using sites such as Fiverr or Upwork, which results in a higher quality but also comes with a much higher price tag…

Then, besides the opt-in page that I mentioned earlier and also in the previous video, you just need three things to make it all work.

You need an email autoresponder tool. There are many free and paid options out there, but the one I’ve been using for years now is called AWeber.

You need your own domain. This could be your own name, the name of your business, or whatever you want it to be.

You can search for and buy your domains on Namecheap. I’ll leave links to everything I’m talking about down below in the description.

You need a professional email address with your own domain. The easiest way to do this is with Google Workspace.

Once you have these three things ready, you need to link and verify your domain and email address across those tools so that your domain ownership is confirmed.

Don’t worry, this process is simple and straightforward once you start setting up your accounts.

A bit more complicated but very important is the topic of email deliverability. Now, I can’t go into the details here because then this video would be much, much longer…

But I will leave two links down below about this if you’re interested. One is to a YouTube video and the other one to an excellent blog post that helped me setting this all up.

Speaking of tools and software…

In the next video I’m going to show you my top tools that I use to run my online business as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

I’m gonna explain why I chose exactly those tools and services and not any others… and how they now save me a lot of time and money and increase my productivity.

You definitely don’t wanna miss that! Please subscribe and turn on notifications so you know when the next video is up!

An important point that I mentioned as an extra tip in the previous sales funnel video is that you always should tag every person that opts in on any of your landing pages or funnels.

But not only should you tag from which page each of your subscribers came from, you can assign other tags as well.

For example, let’s say a subscriber clicks on a link in one of your emails in which you talk about a specific product.

So that person signals their interest in that product. Therefore, you could assign an appropriate tag to that person.

Now why would you want to do that?

The whole purpose of tagging your subscribers is so that you can create sub-segments of your subscribers that have the same tags.

For example, you can then search for all subscribers who signaled their interest in the same product, or create a segment of all subscribers who opted in on your special Black Friday landing page, and so on…

Adding a tag to a subscriber can also automatically trigger a different email campaign if you want them to go through another journey through your email automation setup…

This segmentation of your entire list of subscribers allows you to send more targeted emails to your audience.

You don’t want to send out all your emails to all your subscribers, even if they’re not interested in a particular topic or product.

Those untargeted emails may at some point annoy a part of your audience so they unsubscribe and leave. The more targeted emails you can send out, the better.

Now, while this whole tagging and segmenting is a bit of a more in-depth email automation technique, it’s very quick and easy to use tags in AWeber.

What is not as easy, on the other hand, is that you should come up with a tagging system that works for you. Think about what and how you want to tag your subscribers in your business.

Create a system with meaningful tags and stick to it from the beginning.

If you don’t do that, you might over time end up with dozens or hundreds of different tags that after a while don’t say anything to you anymore.

Which would make the whole thing pointless.

Now on to the last but most important point of email marketing.

Imagine you spend months or even years building your audience, your loyal following on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or any other 3rd party platform there is…

You put all your time and effort into creating your own business. You finally make some good money, and then…

All of a sudden, your account gets suspended. Without reason or warning.

This happens every single day.

Maybe you can get it back online again. But usually not.

You have now lost everything. Your business, your income, everything.

You have lost access to your entire audience and you need to start from scratch.

Why? Because the platform your business was built on was always in full control, not you.

If you don't have a way to contact your audience directly outside of a 3rd party platform, you have no business. Or you can lose it in the blink of an eye…

Your business assets are your products and your customers. But your products are useless if there is no one to buy them from you…

Now imagine you’re an affiliate marketer, which means that you don’t sell your own products but promote products and services of other people and companies.

In this case, if you lose your audience, you have literally lost everything.

So what do you do to prevent this from ever happening to you?

Build your email list.

Your email list is your most important and most valuable business asset because you own it.

You can download all the contact information of all your subscribers from your autoresponder and keep it safe.

And even if now all your social media accounts or ad accounts get shut down, you still have access to your audience that you've built up over the years.

As long as you have a way to directly contact your audience, your followers, your customers - you can get your business up and running again in no time.

Why do you think companies pay billions of dollars to acquire other companies? For their technology? For their smart algorithms?

No. The big players could easily spend the money to hire the best people if they wanted to develop those technologies themselves.

What did I just say is your most valuable asset?

Companies spend billions of dollars to get their hands on the customer base of another company.

That’s where the money is.

So, build your list of leads and loyal customers and keep it safe.

While we have already covered quite a lot in this video that certainly helps you move ahead with email marketing - we can dive much deeper, should you be interested…

At the time of recording this video, my free “Succeeder Secrets” Email Marketing course, which is one of a series of four free courses, has not yet been published, BUT…

There is a link down below where you can sign up for the waitlist!

In return for joining the waitlist, you have the chance to complete a short questionnaire and express your wishes regarding the topics you would like to see included in this free course…

Depending on when you watch this video in the future, all the “Succeeder Secrets” courses will already be live and the questionnaire is no longer available.

So check it out, it’s free.

Also, please check out the previous video about Sales Funnels that I mentioned a few times...

Thank you so much for watching! If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

Please like and subscribe and hit the bell notification so you don’t miss out on future videos about starting and growing your successful online business.

In the next video, we’re gonna talk about the top tools and services I use to save time and money.

I’m Sascha Meier. Helping you succeed smarter.