A couple of days ago, I did something that I hadn't done for quite some time. I opted in for a freebie to get a free ebook regarding affiliate marketing. Whenever I do such a thing, I have this special e-mail address that I never check. It's my dump address. After opting in, I go there, get my free e-book and don't bother to read all the e-mails that I would get from this person.
I did a lot of affiliate marketing in my past and I just realized the limits of building a list. Probably everyone nowadays has several e-mail addresses and one that is just for such a purpose where we get all the spam.
The funny thing is that this ebook was supposed to teach me how affiliate marketing works. Basically you have an opt-in page that you drive traffic to, on this opt-in page you offer a freebie to encourage people to sign up to your list. Then you generate an automated e-mail series that you send to the person who signed up to little by little bring her to your paid offer and to make him buy your product.
Is e-mail marketing still valid nowadays?
Just recently I had an issue with my work e-mail. It got blocked by outlook addresses and I realized that there are some things were norm nowadays that I had no idea about. It's things called SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication requirements. Thanks to chatgpt, I learned what I needed to know to set this up for my work e-mail.
This showed me that whatever you do regarding e-mail, you need to be up to date and the e-mail providers like gmail, outlook or yahoo will do everything possible to filter out everything that looks remotely like spam.
In my opinion, in these conditions E-mail marketing simply doesn't work anymore. The chances that your e-mails are delivered have decreased, you might get flagged for spamming quite quickly and then people use their spam addresses to sign up to your offers. This is without taking into account that only about 20% of the people who receive your e-mails actually open them and even fewer click on the link in your e-mails.
You would probably need at least 10'000 subscribers in order to get a reasonable conversion of your e-mail actions. The issue with that is that most services for e-mail marketing index their prices to the size of your list. With a big list, you pay a lot of monthly subscription. On one hand, you need a lot of subscribers to generate an income and on the other your potential profits get eaten up by the increased costs of the providers...
I honestly believe that in 2025, it's not possible to acquire new customers through e-mail marketing. E-mail is still useful for maintaining customers that already know you to communicate and give information.
Do you have a special e-mail address for such purposes?
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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