There are plenty of tools available to business owners these days to generate more traffic to their company websites and monetize that traffic, but perhaps one of the most often overlooked online tools is the humble email. What’s important to remember and recognize about emails is that they serve as instant and constant contact with your customers and potential customers. With the click of a mouse, you can send out information about a new product or service, update customers on important company information, and much more to millions of people across the globe. As a result, you need to be using email as a marketing tool in order to drive traffic and generate increased revenue.

SEE ALSO: How to Monetize Your Website without Ads

Entice Readers to Click Through

In order to monetize emails, however, you have to be savvy. One of the easiest techniques is to include a portion of some interesting content in an email newsletter, but then require the reader to click through to your website in order to view the entirety of the content. By doing this, you receive more traffic to your site where you can then have more focus placed on your products and services. What’s important to remember when doing this, however, is that the content in the email has to be so compelling that a reader is willing to take the extra step of clicking through. Content that isn’t compelling will likely not result in increased traffic, and in some cases, it might annoy a reader to the point that he or she unsubscribes from your newsletter.

Charge for Email Ads

Another easy way to monetize the use of email is to sell advertising space through banner ads and the like. Using this method, you’re guaranteed income from your emails as long as you have an advertiser. The added benefit to this approach is that you’re not only making money from the ads, but you’re also increasing the odds that customers or potential customers will still make a purchase from your company. When using this method, make sure that the ads are relevant to your industry if at all possible, and you should screen advertisers carefully. The last thing you want is for one of your customers to get scammed by an ad that you ran in your company’s email as you’ll share in some of the blame through guilt by association.

Rent Out or Sell Your Email List

Lastly, you can rent out or sell your email list to other companies that are interested in marketing to your customers. This approach, however, needs to be handled with extreme caution. If your customers did not agree to receive offers from other companies and they find out that you sold their contact information, you may be in for some trouble. It’s a good idea to provide options for receiving third-party emails when someone signs up for your email list, and by law, you must provide a way for people to opt out of receiving emails at any time.