Today I want to tell you a short story from my life which will demonstrate the importance of email marketing.

In mid 2012, I was lost. I had just finished my MBA and then left my placement job very swiftly.

During this time I was trying my hand at a lot of different types of jobs, ranging from teaching to marketing to content writing to even working with a sports betting company.

It was at the end of 2012 when I got hired as a content writer with a very popular company in Pune. I’ll not name it since that company later on got into some controversy (not because of me).

But for the first time, I was in a job which I did not hate. I used to like writing articles but I knew I would not last there because the salary was a complete joke. Here’s a photo from those days:

Since I knew I would not last there, I started spending a good amount of time researching and learning about digital marketing…while I was in office (not the most enviable of ethics I know). I even got called out by the IT guy once who warned me not to browse other websites LOL.

There was one particular website which I would spend most of my time on – Warrior Forum. It’s still a great forum today also but at that particular time, it was the largest and most well known forum for digital marketing enthusiasts.

I would spend a ton of time reading the different threads (discussions) there and being amazed at how people were making a good living from the internet without having a typical day job. It really opened my eyes and inspired me.

But why am I telling you all this?

Because no matter what I read on Warrior Forum, one topic always stood out from the rest. That topic was Email marketing. The following phrases were repeated so often by the digital marketers there that they literally got imprinted in your brain:

• “Money is in the list” (list refers to an email list of subscribers)
• “No list, no business”
• “An Email list is your asset”
• “If you don’t have a list, your business is a hobby, not a profession”

When I used to listen to all this initially, I somehow never got convinced.

I used to believe that the best way to make sales was to simply send traffic to your sales page via ads.

And I continued to believe so and ignore the advice.

That was until I released by first e-book in January 2013 called “How to Start a Successful Blog in 100 Steps“. I created a website and a landing page to sell this e-book. I still have the screenshot with me:

Every thing was ready. I priced it at Rs.149. All I needed was traffic and I was ready to invest Rs.5000 from my savings into running Google Ads.

As I finished creating the ad, I remember hitting the Submit button with so much enthusiasm. After all, I was going to become a millionaire the moment Google approved that ad. My e-book would go viral and I would soon be declared a best selling author.

As soon as I saw that Google had approved my ad, I switched to Google Analytics to see all the incoming traffic fully expecting them to go to the thank you page of my website (which can only happen after they buy).

And such was my confidence that I actually made two separate “Buy Now” buttons, one for the Indian audience and one for the audience from abroad. After all why should the rest of the world be denied of this amazing once in a life time opportunity to buy from Kush Sharma, the author of all authors.

So I started witnessing traffic coming in from different countries. My heart beat went up. So did my blood pressure. So did my expectations. But one thing remained unchanged – SALES. They stayed firmly at ZERO.

0 after the 1st campaign.

0 after another try.

0 after the final third try.

Within a few hours, all hopes of becoming a best selling author were not just dashed but shredded into such small pieces that it would not even be worth the effort to put them back together to make sense of things.

Feeling completely dejected, I put up this story on Warrior Forum, expecting someone to help me out. All the answers pointed to one and only one thing – the lack of email marketing in my campaign.

The mistake I was committing was that I was expecting the cold audience who had never heard of me, to click on my Google ad, come to my landing page and simply purchase my e-book. In my mind I was the future best selling author and I was expecting them to treat me like one. Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. And especially with a cold audience.

This is where Email marketing comes in.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to turn that cold audience into warm prospects.

How does a cold prospect become a warm prospect?

With Exposure.

The more you come in front of your audience, the more familiar they become with you. The more they trust you.

Email marketing gives you the perfect opportunity to do that.

So instead of sending that ad traffic to my sales page for the e-book, what I should have done is to FOCUS ON THEM AND NOT ME!

And that can be done by giving them something of value for free or at a very very cheap price.

For example, I could have directed them to a free webinar that helps them understand the importance of blogging first and then sell the e-book via the webinar.

What this does is that it gives you an opportunity to develop trust with that cold audience. In exchange for the webinar, I could have asked for their e-mail address. So not only would I have got a chance to add value to their lives through the knowledge I give in the webinar, I would have also got the opportunity to send them valuable emails.

This would have eventually helped me to turn that cold audience into warm prospects.

Always remember that no one likes to buy from strangers. If you are not willing to help out people, they will not buy from you. Or at least the majority of them won’t. That’s just how human nature works. You scratch their backs and they will scratch yours.

There’s another very important advantage of building an e-mail list. Let’s assume that you are an expert at running ads and you target them so well that even the cold audience that comes to your website ends up purchasing your product or service.

In such a case you may think that you don’t need email marketing. But again this will not be a good strategy in the long run. Why?

Because you’ve put all your eggs in one basket. Which is running ads.

Running ads involves expenses and now your only strategy is that the money you make from the sales should be more than the money you spend on ads.

This strategy is fine till the time your ads are running well.

But what happens if for some reason, your ads stop performing as well as they were doing before?

In such a case your expenses will begin to catch up and you can soon find yourself going even in loss.

Whereas if you are building an Email list, you are forever developing a large base of prospects whom you can reach out to anytime without paying anything (apart from the monthly fee for the Email marketing software).

If you don’t develop a list and only rely on ads, a person who comes to your website after clicking on your ad may or may not purchase your product or service. If they do, all well and good but if they don’t, you have forever lost that person. Whereas if you had focused on collecting their email address, you can reach out to that person whenever you want.

Developing an email list has so many more advantages than just making sales. It actually helps you build your business in a more wholesome way. For example, let’s say tomorrow you want to start an Instagram account for your business. If you had made the effort of building your business via developing an email list, you can simply send an email to this list announcing them that you are on Instagram now. You will immediately get followers.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you release a second online course or any other product or service. If you already have an established email list, you are one email away from making sales of this new product or service.

You can even use an email list to remarket on advertising platforms like Facebook where you can create custom audiences using your email list. This would mean that Facebook would only show your ads to the people who are present in your list. These type of ads work much better than using ads for cold audiences.

The benefits are endless. Sky is really the limit with a well maintained list.

That’s why an email is referred to as an asset for a business.

Another important point is that no one can take your email list from you. If you’re using a particular email marketing software and tomorrow that company decides to shut shop, you’ll just have to move your email list to another company without losing anything.

But this is not the case with social media pages or accounts. Some people rely only on their social media accounts like Facebook pages, Instagram or YouTube accounts to build a following. They never focus on building their email list. Tomorrow if Facebook or YouTube or Instagram decide to change a policy or decide to shut down, your followers (and your business) will also go along with them.

The perfect example of this was the recent event where the Indian government banned the Chinese app TikTok. Literally overnight, some TikTok stars lost their entire income. If these people had also focused on leveraging their large following on TikTok to build their e-mail list, they would not have faced such a bad situation. They could have simply created a new account on another app and then sent out an email to their list to get their followers back.

So always remember, if you want to build a serious business, start building your email list today. Check out this page to see which e-mail marketing software I’m currently using my self.

This post was just to convey the importance of email marketing. I do plan on creating a detailed article or video on how to actually do email marketing using an email marketing software. In Online Course Launchpad, I show you how to set up an email marketing software to sell your online courses.

If you have any questions regarding the importance of email marketing, do let me know in the comments below.