I first got started with clickbank and making money online, i have made some money though i can't say that i am there yet. What i found is for you to make money you need to learn from someone who is already making money and have them teach you their methods.
Now you there are two ways to go about this. One is the free method where you spend a lot of time on a forum like this reading posts from members and see what they are doing to have success then you try and replicate it. The main problem i have found with this is that it can take a long time before you find a good method that works and its also easy to get distracted as you will find many people doing different things which all seem too be working.
The second is to just buy a good course that will show you how to make money on CB look to spend any where from $50-$100. Most people may not really see the point of paying for the info but believe me it will save you a lot of time and guess work and you only need one good method to make money and then trade up from there with whatever you make from it.
As for email marketing you can build an email list by using a squeeze page where you offer something valuable in exchange for the person's email. Where do you get the valuable item to give away? Well you can get something from a private label rights seller or create one of your own. Then get traffic to your squeeze page using things like solo ads, or even facebook ads just make sure the traffic you buy or send to your squeeze page is targeted or at least related i.e. don't send video gaming traffic to your cooking offer page.
Hope this helps.