How To Make Email Marketing Your Side Hustle? (9 Essential Steps To Set Up for Success)

How to make email marketing your side hustle:

1. Understand how email marketing works.
2. Focus on an email marketing niche.
3. Develop your email marketing workflows.
4. Create a website for your email marketing brand.
5. Build an email list of potential clients.
6. Choose an email marketing platform.
7. Craft your email marketing content.
8. Launch and optimize your email marketing campaigns.
9. Monetize your email marketing list.

The key factors necessary for aspiring email marketers include using the right resources, following the right steps, and learning from reputable platforms. Learning from reputable platforms like Mailchimp lets you learn from vetted experts. Using the right resources and steps helps speed up the learning process. These help you have a strong foundation for your copywriting side hustle.

Email marketing is a good side hustle because it improves sales and marketing. Sales Cycle says email marketing affects consumer purchasing decision by 59%. HubSpot says 79% of marketers include email marketing in their top three strategies. They also claim email marketing outperforms other marketing strategies like paid ads. This shows that you can make money in email marketing as its profitable and in high demand.

In 2024, email marketing is thriving. Litmus says email marketing's average ROI is $42 per $1 spent. SnovIO Labs says 72% of customers prefer email as their way to communicate with brands. Its direct, personalized approach affects marketing and communication. This drives demand for email marketing from both consumers and businesses.

In this post, we'll discuss how you can make email marketing your side hustle. We'll include challenges, provide tips to scale, and other ways to make money online.

1. Take an Email Marketing Course or Learn from Free Online Sources.

Understanding how email marketing works involves learning the basics of the business model. This helps you be effective, efficient, and compliant in your email marketing efforts. The best resources you can learn email marketing include HubSpot Academy and Omnisend. These platforms provide free and paid courses from vetted industry experts. This helps you build an understanding of email marketing.

Essential skills include sales, communication, copywriting, data analysis, and tool mastery. These help you communicate and promote to your client's audience. This improves sales, brand awareness, and engagement for your client and their audience.

2. Focus on an Email Marketing Niche.

Focusing on an email marketing niche involves specializing in a specific market. This helps you narrow down the who, what, and how you'll craft emails. Doing this right helps you craft emails that resonate with your intended audience.

Identifying your target market and segmenting your audience ensures marketing efforts are relevant. For example, this Reddit commenter used targeted cold email outreach and achieved great results. While the open and response rates are lower than mass email blasts, the leads they got converted more. This shows the effectiveness of finding your specific audience and giving relevant content.

The most popular email marketing niches in 2024 include:

3. Develop Your Email Marketing Workflows.

Email marketing workflows are a series of automated emails triggered by user actions. These guide users throughout the buyer journey or influence certain actions. Examples include welcome sequences for new subs, newsletter updates, and re-engagement campaigns. These ensure your campaigns are efficient, consistent, and engaging.

Developing your email marketing workflows helps you win back or re-engage audiences. For example, Sale Cycles says 3/4 of online shoppers leave items in their carts. Sending abandoned cart emails led to a 44.1% open rate, with 30% of these leading to a sale. Tools like HubSpot, SMTP, and Campaigner help streamline email workflows. These ensure your email automation workflows are effective and engage your target audience.

Here's a brief guide on how you can set up your email marketing workflows:

1. Create a Workflow: Plan out and visualize how your sequence and funnel work.

2. Get Usable Data and Content: Gather content like blog posts, e-books, and promos. These aim to improve audience engagement by providing relevant content.

3. Set up email triggers: Define what user actions will trigger your automated emails. This includes sign-ups, wishlist products, and post-purchase thank-you emails.

4. Segment email recipients: Leverage your subscribers' data and behavior to segment your audience. This lets you create personalized emails and suggest relevant products to subscribers.

5. Determine email frequency: Entrepreneur says 69% of email users unsubscribe because they receive too many emails. This aims to avoid overwhelming potential leads and subscribers.

6. Execute and track metrics: Analyze metrics like CTR, conversions, and open rates to gain insight into your workflow's performance. Use insights and adjust your workflows to get better performance and engagement.

4. Create a Website for Your Email Marketing Brand.

Creating a website for your email marketing brand establishes your online presence. It gives prospective clients a hub to see examples of your work and results you give clients. This helps attract more clients, improve credibility, and showcases your expertise.

Your website serves as a brochure for your services. You can either invest in having someone create it for you or make it yourself. Platforms like WordPress, Wix, and Weebly let you create your own site. With enough knowledge, you can get a site that improves reach and displays your skills with less cost.

5. Build an Email List of Potential Clients.

Building an email list of potential clients involves nurturing subscribers into loyal customers. This gives you access to a large and engaged audience. Doing this right increases the likelihood of leads converting or generating sales.

A Reddit discussion advises building email lists through creating compelling copy or freebies. No one likes having ads in their faces. Personalizing or clever emails can increase conversions. Tools like OptinMonster and Sumo help create forms for building an email list. Focusing on subscriber connection increases engagement and sales.

6. Choose an Email Marketing Platform.

Choosing an email marketing platform lets you manage email campaigns and automations easier. Email marketing platforms can help you segment audiences, track performance, and personalize emails. This ensures better audience engagement, efficient workflows, and better results.

Here’s a quick overview of the best email marketing platforms in 2024:

7. Craft Your Email Marketing Content.

Crafting your email marketing content involves making messages that compel your subscribers. You can do this through high-quality, relevant content. This drives conversions, builds brand loyalty, and engages the audience.

Content creation techniques include storytelling, copywriting, and segmenting the audience. This lets you create targeted content relevant for your intended audience. Tools like Canva help to create captivating graphics. Grammarly can help in proofreading text content. Buzzsumo or Google Analytics help in content research. These can help you create engaging content for your audience.

Let's look at some examples. Postmates' promotion email blends humor and visuals in a concise way. It describes their product's completeness for the low price of $4.99. Their CTA aims to persuade you to order as it's affordable and available whenever you want. Another is Cuisinart's automated unsubscribe email with the subject line "Psst... We have a question for you.". It tries to ask what they can do better to improve and win back subscribers without being pushy. They also give you options to customize your preference or completely unsubscribe. These show how blending these elements together make effective email content. 

8. Launch and Optimize Your Email Marketing Campaigns.

Launching and optimizing your email campaigns involves planning and organizing your strategy. For example, you can promote your client's relevant e-commerce products for Father's Day. Promotional emails like these can boost sales and engagement rates.

Different types of email marketing campaigns include:

1. Promotional emails

2. Newsletters

3. Abandoned cart emails

4. Re-engagement emails

9. Monetize Your Email Marketing List.

Monetizing your email marketing list involves leveraging your subscribers to generate income. Email marketing gives you a direct way to communicate or advertise to your audience. This gives you a different way to earn by utilizing your engaged audience.

You can monetize your email marketing audience in a lot of ways. Examples include showing relevant ads, affiliate products, or offering e-books or seminars. Find out what they need and show it to your audience. Create personalized email copies to maximize engagement and sales. This lets you leverage your email list and audience without being too salesy.

8 Reasons You Should Start an Email Marketing Side Hustle

What are the Challenges of an Email Marketing Side Hustle?

6 Tips To Scale an Email Marketing Side Hustle

Is Email Marketing the Best Side Hustle Idea in 2024?

Yes, email marketing is one of the best side hustle ideas in 2024 because of its high ROI and impact on marketing. Litmus says the average ROI for email marketing is $42 per $1 spent. Statista says 89% of marketers around the world use emails for marketing. Its effectiveness in reaching targeted audiences and driving sales pushes its demand.

However, it's not easy to do and may need more time and effort. This Reddit comment says email still gets results in many industries. There are different ways to reach audiences and consumer behavior is always changing. They suggest learning more about subjects that you're interested in. This ensures what you're promoting to your subscribers is something you're knowledgeable on.

The Best Side Hustle in 2024: Why Consider Local Lead Gen?

Email marketing is popular due to its high ROI. However, local lead generation is the best side hustle in 2024 because it gives a way to passive income. Email marketing plays into a digital marketing strategy. You'll need to ensure your strategy works, have a valuable offering or affiliate link. It demands constant content creation and personalization to maintain engagement. This is difficult especially for beginners. If done poorly, can lead to unsubscribing and unhappy clients. Local lead gen requires less ongoing content creation and offers more stable income.

Email marketing has challenges like growing an organic email list and finding clients. Its direct access to the audience can have negative effects if done wrong. For example, if you create copies for the wrong audience, they won't open or lose interest in the message. This leads to high unsubscribe rates and loss of audience and client trust.

In local lead generation, you create websites for search engines like Google. Once your site ranks and generates traffic, you then sell leads rent it to businesses. These sites can earn $500-$3,000 monthly each. You can then scale this by creating more sites to rent for different niches and ZIP codes.

I've created over 50 local lead generation sites in different niches like gold and tree care. Together, these earn over $52,000 monthly. The best part is I own these sites, and it lets me earn passive income. If you're looking for a side hustle with reliable returns. Consider local lead generation, it has lesser concerns.