Everyone will tell you email submits are easy when you’re a noob. And I’m sure they are for the first day or two. Then you’ll start to see your conversion rate drop like a rock.
Co version rates on email submits are hardly ever steady. Why? Because they rarely ever back out for the advertiser. Most email submits are just used to build lists, then sell them to other companies to spam them. With a list of 10000 emails built up, you might only get about 5 percent opening an email sent out, then another 5% actually clicking through to whatever spam site or offer is being mailed out. It’s cheap and shitty traffic.
You’ve got much better options else where. Think about it. You get paid about $1 per email you send in. 100 emails = $100. Alternatively, you could promote games for about $2 a lead = $200 per 100 leads. Orrr you could do dating and get paid $4 per lead = $400. Insurance and credit offers nail you $10 – $20 per lead, adding up to 1k – 2k dollars at the end of the day. Get started in rebills and you double that. See what I’m talking about here? Would you rather spend time optimizing a campaign for $100 or $1000?
In fact, you’d be better off building your own list than using an offer on an affiliate network. Sometimes my offers die and there are no good offers to replace it with. I can save the traffic for later by building out my own offer page, just collecting user data and emails. Then I mail bomb them when an offer comes up and I make all that money back, and I can continue to keep making money off those emails. And if I want to be like those email submit advertisers, I can sell the lists if I choose.
So with all that said, running an email submit offer is probably the dumbest move you can make in this industry. You won’t learn much, you’ll have to optimize new campaigns within a few hours after launch, and they pay out piss poor. My time is worth a lot more than the money they pay.
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Nick
Not all e-mail submits are a waste of time…just most!
I have been running 2 email submits for almost 18 months now – combined revenue is over $200 daily and profit is about 50% of that…
Now I’ve probably run 50 other email submit campaigns, all of which had similar results as you mentioned above – but to say ALL are a total waste is a bit much. The 2 campaigns I mentioned earlier have been on autopilot for almost 6 months now.
Bottom line – don’t give up on ALL email submits…but don’t keep chasing ones that aren’t going to perform.
Nick
Ad Hustler
“You’ve got much better options else where. Think about it. You get paid about $1 per email you send in. 100 emails = $100. Alternatively, you could promote games for about $2 a lead = $200 per 100 leads. Orrr you could do dating and get paid $4 per lead = $400. Insurance and credit offers nail you $10 – $20 per lead, adding up to 1k – 2k dollars at the end of the day. Get started in rebills and you double that. See what I’m talking about here? Would you rather spend time optimizing a campaign for $100 or $1000?”
….Or you could promote legal leads at $200/each and make $200,000/day???
This whole paragraph is retarded. The money in any campaign comes with scale. You can very well make more money/profit per day on something that pays out LESS per lead but can be marketed on a larger scale. Payout per lead means nothing.
Justin Dupre
True, and I wasn’t intending to say you will make more money promoting an offer that pays out $30 rather than $1, but it’s I guess down to what you are scaling and how you are scaling it. An email/zip submit can only go so far before you start getting crap traffic and having the scrub button turned to the on position.
You’d be tough pressed to get 1000 legal leads a day, however, you’ve got huge niches out there such as dating, weight loss, beauty, smoking, gaming, gambling, make money online that can be scaled out, maybe not as much as any gift-card zip submit offer, but its just down to where you want to put the effort in, and for me, its not in $1 payout email/zip submits.
Harshad
All my AMs keep on telling me to run email and zip submits and I keep telling them that I am not here to make pennies…I am here to make dollars $$$$. I never really bother to run an offer which pays me les than $3 and we are talking about almost all zip/email submit offers.
browie
The other nice thing with submits is you can teach a noob (wife) how to direct link and optimize for an extra $100/day
dullspace
There are many factual errors in your post.
“Free gift” email submits don’t make money from the email addresses, but rather from the user filling out the incentive-based CPA offers on the following pages to earn the gift. That’s why you’ll see email submits priced 5-10 cents higher than their equivalent zip submit. The zip is worth $0 and the email is worth the difference. The quality adjustment you discuss in your post that happens over time is the result of some traffic not filling out the incentive-based offers and existing the registration path. Other, often pre-qualified, traffic fills out many offers and never sees a scrubbing percentage.
Additionally, your entire third paragraph asserts that a higher CPA is invariable better than a lower CPA. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of affiliate marketing and were it true, there would only be volume on a handful of the highest paying offers. However, it remains that dating, downloads, mobile subscriptions, and daily deal offers are some of the strongest currently in the CPA space.
You’ve really done a disservice to the less educated of your readers with this post. I hope you make an effort to research topics further before distributing misinformation.
Justin Dupre
Thanks for filling in some of the blanks, dullspace.
Lazy quick written post gets scolded appropriately.
I figure there are just better ways to make money than with email/zip submits (the free gift ones, at least). You could spend time focusing on it, or you could spend time focusing on offers that are a bit harder to convert, and as such, usually pay out more because they require some sort of payment from the user.
Like Nick said… 2 out of 50+ offers running long term. I’d rather focus my time on projects a bit more stable.
Thomas
Great post!
I made some profit with e-mail/zip submits but all the campaigns I tried never lived more than 1-3 days…
Josh
Tight margins but they can be profitable. You just have to monitor the more than other campaigns I find.
Anonymous
I read this post and came up with this … http://imgur.com/VYzJQ.png
Kyle Irwin
Worst post ever. Christ, I can’t believe I ever read you blog. Enjoy the ladybois.
ace
Jesus, I guess you needed to add some nonsense in to get as close to 400 words as you can? As I have been saying all along, do you really make any money? God bless those nubs that are paying to be in your forum.