How To Start an Email Marketing Side Hustle in the UK 2024

Email marketing is a lucrative side hustle that can easily turn into a stream of passive income. It involves making money by sending out simple emails to a list of customers each day. If done correctly, email marketing can be a great way to make money online from home. However, to achieve good results it is important that you follow the right process.

In this article, we will cover how to start an email marketing side hustle for beginners. Our easy step-by-step guide will reveal the exact process that you need to follow to start making money.

We tried and tested this side hustle ourselves so that we could provide a valuable and realistic guide. However, we cannot guarantee that you will make money. Email marketing requires a lot of patience and persistence. The biggest reason that people fail is that they give up too soon.

The Simple Steps To Starting a Successful Email Marketing Side Hustle

1. Choose your niche: Try to find a niche that has a lot of potential product opportunities. Avoid being too specific as this will make it difficult to build an email list. Successful email marketers sell products by explaining how the products can solve a problem. Therefore, you should try to find a niche that has problems to be sold. Health, fitness, personal finance, and entrepreneurship are good examples.

2. Join an affiliate program: The next step involves signing up to an affiliate marketing program that offers products in your niche. Many of the best affiliate marketing programs for beginners except new marketers that don’t have a large following.

3. Build an email list: This is the most difficult step of the process. The most successful email marketers use paid tools however, it is possible to start building your list for free. We will explain this in more detail below.

4. Create some draft emails: Create an email chain that can be sent out to new members on your email list. Each email should provide value whilst encouraging readers to take action.

5. Automate the process: Overtime, you can use email marketing tools to automate the process. Doing so will allow you to make passive income from email marketing.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a marketing strategy that involves promoting products to an audience through email. It involves building an email list and sending out promotional emails to subscribers. Email marketing is often used by businesses to promote their products or services but can also be used to promote affiliate products.

The process is simple. Marketers build an email list of prospective customers (people who fit their target audience) then, marketers create a string of emails that provide value to the audience whilst promoting products in a way that seems natural and helpful. Follow-up emails are sent out after the initial promotion containing discounts or exclusive offers to encourage readers to take action.

Email marketing is a popular strategy because it allows marketers to target potential customers directly. This allows marketers to create a ‘personalized’ campaign that appeals to the specific email recipient. You can use the recipient’s name to capture their attention and send regular, chatty emails to build a relationship with them. This makes it easier to sell products.

Email marketing facts

- Email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent.

- Half of the world’s population has an email address resulting in over 4 billion accounts globally.

Email marketing as a side hustle

Although email marketing is commonly used by existing businesses to promote their products, it can also be a great passive side hustle idea.

Making money from email marketing as a side hustle involves selling other people’s products or services through affiliate marketing. Every time that you manage to make a sale, you will receive a commission.

Email marketing is an attractive side hustle because it is free to start and requires relatively low effort. In fact, it is possible to run a successful email marketing campaign in just 1 hour per day making it one of the best ways to make money in one hour.

Making money from email marketing as a side hustle requires consistency and time. When we tried this side hustle for ourselves, it took 9 days of regular emails before we made our first sale.

Pros and Cons of Starting an Email Marketing Side Hustle

So, is email marketing a good side hustle idea for you? Let’s take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of this free side hustle idea.

Pros:

• Email marketing requires low start-up costs and only a couple of hours of work per day. We spent about 1 hour each day before making our first sale.

• The business model is transparent and clear. Simply promote products and earn a commission for every sale that you make.

• Email marketing requires no experience or special skills. It is a Greta option for people who want to start a side hustle but do t have time to learn a new skill.

• Building an email list is a great stepping stone to starting a larger business. Over time you could direct the email traffic to your own blog, YouTube channel, online course, or social media.

Our Complete Guide to Email Marketing as a Side Hustle

In the next section of our article, we will share our complete guide to starting a successful email marketing side hustle in 2023.

To create this guide, we tried email marketing for ourselves and have also watched a number of helpful YouTube videos that we will link below!

Email marketing is a legitimate side hustle idea that has the potential to be very lucrative. Follow the steps below to start making money by sending emails and build an additional stream of income.

Step 1: Find a profitable niche

Choosing the right niche is one of the most important aspects of a successful email marketing side hustle. The niche that you choose will determine the type of products that you will be able to sell and some products work a lot better than others.

In general, try to avoid:

• Choosing a niche that is too small. This will limit the size of your email list.

• Choosing a niche that attracts a lot of scams or clickbait products (weight loss, Forex trading ect.). Your email subscribers will unsubscribe from your list if they believe that you are promoting misleading products.

• Choosing a niche that is sensitive it contains adult content. Some email providers will send these emails straight to the spam folder.

How to find a profitable niche for email marketing

We have covered what to avoid when choosing a niche but, how can you tell whether or not a niche could be profitable?

Here is an overview of some things to consider when choosing a niche for your email marketing side hustle.

Personal expertise

Try to choose a niche that you have a lot of knowledge or experience in. This will make it much easier for you to create valuable email campaigns that will attract organic subscribers. Your audience is more likely to purchase a product when it has been recommended by an ‘expert’.

Niche, but not too niche!

It is important to establish a clear niche so that you can generate effective email marketing campaigns. However, try to avoid picking a niche that is too narrow. Instead, focus on niches that have a lot of potential angles and products that you could promote.

A good idea is to start broad and narrow down as you build up a relationship with your audience. For example, you could start by creating content about well-being and then narrow it down to a specific mental health condition once you understand what your audience is interested in.

Think about current trends

The most successful email marketers sell products that are trending and current. The reason that these products are successful is that they basically market themselves! If a customer has already seen the product in action or has heard good things about the product through other people who have bought it, they will be more likely to buy.

Try to choose a niche that is trendy. In 2024, fitness, self-improvement, and mental health are all hot topics that you could consider.

Also read: Best side hustles for introverts

Step 2: Join an affiliate program

After choosing your niche, it is time to find some products that you could promote to your email list. The best way to do this is to join an affiliate marketing program that offers a good selection of products in your industry.

Some of the best programs that accept beginners include Clickbank and Amazon Associates. It is a good idea to spend time researching different programs to find one that offers generous commissions, reasonable terms, and a good selection of products.

You could also try finding a product that offers its own affiliate program, rather than joining a third-party platform. These types of programs typically offer higher rates but can be more difficult to partner with.

Also read: How to make money with Pinterest affiliate marketing

Step 3: Build an email list

The next step is to start collecting email addresses that you can send promotional emails to. This is called an email list.

There are numerous ways that you can go about collecting email addresses and some are a lot more efficient than others. Here is an overview of the different methods that you could use to build an email list for free and using paid tools.

Use Facebook groups

This method of building an email list is completely free but a little time-consuming. Join Facebook groups in your niche and use the search tool to search for posts that have asked people to comment their email addresses.

We tried and tested this method ourselves and managed to create a list of around 60 emails from just 5 Facebook groups.

This strategy can be effective because most of the email addresses that you find will belong to people who have an existing interest in your niche.

However, a lot of people ignore messages from email lists that they have not chosen to subscribe to which means that most people will not open the emails that you send.

For this method to be successful, you will need to build a list of hundreds (or potentially thousands) of addresses.

This method of collecting emails works on any social media platform that allows users to comment on posts. You could try searching for emails on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and even Discrod.

Offer an incentive

Another way to collect email addresses for free is to create an enticing post that offers your audience an incentive in return for their email address. Publish the post on relevant social media pages to increase the effectiveness of this strategy.

For example, you could create a simple digital product using software such as Canva and offer this to anyone who signs up to your email list.

This strategy also works well if you have an exisitng blog, website or social media presence. Offer your audience something of value in return for their email.

This strategy works very well because the email addresses are provided willingly, which means that recipients are less likely to unsubscribe. It is always more effective to collect the email addresses of people who are actually interested in what you offer rather than building a list of random emails

The main drawback of this method is that is can take a long time. However, the ROI for this type of email list is around 3600%, according to Yeildify.

Buy an email list

If you want to build your email list quickly and have some cash to invest in to your email marketing side hustle, you could buy an email list. This involves purchasing valid email addresses from a third-party platform.

Popular platforms to use include Emaildatapro.com, for business email addresses, and Uplead.com, for active email addresses.

Buying email lists is a quick way to start an email marketing side hustle. However, it is not the most effective strategy to use. Generally speaking, people do not like their emails being given away without their permission. This means that many of the email addresses that you buy will likely unsubscribe from your list or send emails straight to spam.

Step 4: Create an email marketing campaign

Once you have built a list of email addresses, it is time to create your first email marketing campaign. A campaign usually consists of between 3 - 10 emails that build trust with your audience, establish your authority in your niche, demonstrate the product you would like to sell, and provide your subscribers with an easy way to purchase the product. Campaigns also include follow-up promotions and offers to encourage your subscribers to take action.

An email affiliate marketing campaign might follow a structure like this:

1. Welcome email. This is your chance to build trust with your audience and to catch their interest. Introduce who you are and explain why your emails will be valuable. If you have offered a freebie incentive, you should include it in this email.

2. Valuable content: The following email should contain some valuable information or advice that will keep your audience interested and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

3. Promotion email 1. Now that you have built some trust with your audience, it is time to send the first promotional email. The email should offer value to the reader whilst encouraging them to take action.

4. Promotional email 2. Send a second promotional email a few days after the first to encourage recipients who may not have taken action the first time round.

5. Follow up offer. There will be some email recipients who still haven’t taken action. A good way to encourage them to purchase is to send an email that contains an exclusive offer. Mist affiliate programs will provide discounts or offers to encourage people to buy.

It is a good idea to draft the entire campaign at the same time, so that you can make sure that each email follows on naturally from the first.

You could use ChatGPT to create an effective email campaign. To do this, simply prompt the bot with your email marketing goals, target audience, and niche.

Also read: How to make money with ChatGPT

Step 5: Implement email automation

The final step is to start sending your emails to your email list.

As your email list grows, it can be difficult to keep track of which emails need to be sent where. To make things easier, it is a good idea to use an email automation tool. These tools automatically send out emails to your subscribers on your behalf, making it easier to stay on top of things.

Automation tools make sure that emails are sent out at the best time and in the right order, to ensure that your email affiliate marketing campaign is as effective as possible.

Automation tools cost money so this is something that you might not want to consider until you have made your first sale.

How To Make Money with Email Marketing - Our Tips for Success

We tried and tested email marketing ourselves to find out what works and what doesn’t. Hee are our top tips for making money with this remote side hustle idea.

• Understand your audience: The first mistake that we made was not understanding our subscribers. This meant that the first emails we sent out weren’t engaging and didn’t encourage readers to continue subscribing. You should spend time understanding what you’re audience is looking for so that you can send emails that contain real value.

• Layout matters: The most successful emails that we sent out were the ones that we spent time formatting. Don’t just write a huge chunk of text and press send. Instead, take time to make each email look engaging. Use spacing, punctuation, bold font, italics, and capital letters to highlight important aspects of each email.

• Use catchy subject lines. The subject line is the first part of your email that subscribers will see. Therefore, you need to make it count. Craft subject lines that are appealing and encourage subscribers to open the emails that you send. However, avoid using clickbait language that could send your emails to the spam folder.

Conclusion

Email marketing is an excellent side hustle to consider starting in 2024. Not only is it free to start but it can become passive over time which means that it is perfect for busy professionals or parents.

In this guide, we have explained in detail how to start an email marketing side hustle. We have used our own experience and the experiences of others to offer advice that is realistic and attainable, even for beginners.

While email marketing has the potential to be a profitable stream of income, there is no guarantee that you will make money. Earning money from these types of side hustles requires persistence and patience.

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