Part 4: The $40 Million Brand Built By Email - Monetizing Your List

Thank you for reading - and if I may be so forward - thank you in advance for subscribing! ;)

This is Part 4 of our mini series “The $40 Million Brand Built By Email”. This brand gets a huge jump in the industry because of the power of email marketing!

Please send me any questions you have throughout this series. I’d like to answer your questions in future installments of my new newsletter: Email Moats & GOATs. I expect this limited series to run for 4 to 7 newsletters before we deep dive into other stories like this one.

When I first discovered digital marketing was a real career option back in 2004-ish, there was a cool-cat blogger and forum participant who went by the handle “randfish”.

My own handle is evidence of my aspirations and admiration for “randfish” at the time… I chose “jameszol” for my handle.

Everybody loved Rand Fishkin’s content.

I think everybody still loves his content.

But everybody loved his content back then, too.

(Any Mitch Hedberg fans here? Hehe.) 

Rand wrote about inbound marketing strategies.

He specifically niched down to SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)

By sharing his knowledge at SEOmoz, which eventually turned into moz, he attracted a mass market audience of clients AND marketers alike. (Check out Rand’s latest venture - SparkToro!)

I totally drank the SEO (inbound marketing) kool-aid even while starting and running a pay per click advertising agency back then.

I sold myself on “I can attract all the clients and growth I ever need with organic inbound content and search engines.”

And it was kind of true - I attracted several clients by ranking for “ppc management” and other keywords at that time.

But…

My biggest clients came from PPC ads for my agency.

It took me a few years to start running ads for my agency because I dedicated my time and efforts to inbound strategies exclusively.

However, within weeks of launching my own ads I sold one of the biggest monthly-retainer clients I’ve ever had.

Now - don’t get me wrong - they likely converted after reading some of the inbound content, visiting the website several times to check out our knowledge, and each media channel worked together to help build trust and land that client…

After making that sale, I decided that I needed to use ppc AND seo on my own affiliate marketing websites.

While I was growing the ad management agency, I started collecting product-specific domain names in really weird niches:

• Log splitters
• Rototillers
• Wedge shoes
• Camping tents
• Cast-iron pans
• Tankless water heaters
• And more.

All of these sites were leveraging SEO as their sole strategy. But as soon as I turned my ppc knowledge into another channel for these sites, the revenue took off.

It was at that moment that I made a new discovery as a young digital marketing manager:

Using as many marketing distribution channels as possible lifts revenue across all channels - in most cases - when done right.

What is a marketing distribution channel?

To me a marketing distribution channel is any channel that can scale, requiring a full-time team to run it…

Here are some examples of digital marketing distribution channels:

• Email list affiliate marketers
• Facebook carousel ads
• Google Shopping feed ads
• 3rd party email (cold email lists)
• In-house email (1st party - list subscribers)
• YouTube pre-roll ads
• TikTok trend-following ads

Note how specific I am with each example… developing, optimizing, testing, and maximum utilization of each of these channels is one key to getting to 8 figures in revenue.

This is what we do with our $40 million ecommerce education brand.

We have the same type of mindset for monetization!

Every company needs multiple streams of income, just like multiple deep value marketing channels, to survive.

And every company needs to have an affiliate marketer mindset to monetization and marketing channels:

Test everything in a BIG way…

The 10x thinking way…

The massive action way.

One massive action affiliate mindset example is that we create 20 completely unique banner ads - designs unique, copywriting unique, all the same size - and run them as a big split test to find a clear winner in our ad campaigns.

Every. Single. Time.

We never let up on our relentless pursuit of excellence in our campaigns for every channel. Naturally, email is one of those channels.

After doing a test that big, we roll out the winning variation to other ad types and sizes. Then we do it again: run another 20-way test with the previous winner as the control.

When you have thousands of email addresses in your list, you can segment out and run massive action creative tests in a similar way.

The primary goal with all of this testing and the affiliate marketing mindset?

Positively impact the lives of our audience…

And along the way make a lot of money. ;)

There are 3 ways that you can monetize your email list:

1) Monetize your list with your own products

“We monetize our lists primarily with our own products.” - Captain Obvious

Remember our value ladder?

We segment our lists, track purchases and behaviors at every step in our value ladder.

Then we create flows (email campaigns) and tell stories to our audience constantly (20 different ways!) so they can move through our value ladder as fast as possible.

Give yourself a deadline to send a reactivation flow out before making an email address “inactive” or doing a list purge or list cleanse.

For example, if we couldn’t sell another product or service in our value ladder within 60 days, we sent a reactivation flow.

Then for those that never opened or interacted or took action - we moved them into an “inactive” list - which has another 90 day sequence to reactivate… but we monetize these contacts differently.

2) Monetize your list (especially INACTIVEs) with other people’s products (as an affiliate!)

DON’T BE STINGY HERE.

I’m serious.

Too many companies think their list is exclusively buying their brand, their products, and no other product can be bought by their list.

It’s simply not true.

Your list is buying something else, somewhere else, some other time.

If it’s not with you, then why not send them somewhere else? Why not learn more about them that way? Find out what makes them buy?

Our “active” list was roughly a rolling 60,000 email contacts in our ecommerce education brand.

That means every 60 days, we cycle through another 60,000 email addresses and move them to “inactive” - where we pump affiliate products to them to see if we can reactivate and figure out what made them open or buy.

And we make money along the way!

This one monetization method alone made us an extra $600k of pure profit every year (we have ZERO cogs here outside of the cost of sending email.)

When our audience is done buying our own products, we make an extra $1 per month per contact by putting them through a huge email flow that exposes them to competing offers, complimentary offers, and any other product we knew they needed or were buying somewhere else.

All we did was get in front of them…

And guess what??

They trusted us even MORE because of it.

We have fewer spam complaints.

More opens.

More clicks.

More revenue.

More love. ❤️❤️❤️

Awwwwwww. ❤️❤️❤️

We move the email records who buy from our affiliate sequences back into our “buyer” lists or “active” lists to cycle them through experimental flows that push our value ladder again.

After roughly 90 days we completely retire contacts out of our flows if they do not engage or take any action at all.

This keeps our list fresh, our prospects happy, and we don’t push spam limits with old data…

Something the industry doesn’t talk about a lot is this when it comes to list hygiene:

Older inactive contacts sometimes get purchased or migrated over to spam detection providers and turned into “honeypots” or “traps.” Any email messages going to those lists of known old inactive records go into a watch list. And the most egregious senders to those addresses get put into “known spammer” databases which slowly erode Inboxing abilities and email revenue.

Open your mind to selling other products or services to your list while paying attention to list hygiene…

And you’ll find an amazing source of revenue that you didn’t know existed. ;)

Here’s our final counter-intuitive (and risky) way to monetize our list:

3) Sell the data

“It’s no secret that your personal data is routinely bought and sold by dozens, possibly hundreds, of companies. What’s less known is who those companies are, and what exactly they do.” - Fast Company authors Steven Melendez and Alex Pasternack

If you’re generating leads (building your list) at a high volume, or generating purchases at a high volume, data brokers want to add a pixel to your site or app and will pay thousands per month for the opportunity.

This monetization technique is considered controversial to some, and I even hesitated to share it, because I’m a fan of privacy.

However, I’m also a fan of revenue and developing as many streams of income as possible - where it makes sense to do so.

In the business opportunity and education industries, where our ecommerce education brand sits, it makes sense as a monetization tool for us due to the high volume of course buyers and traffic we have.

We take a responsible approach to it.

We find clean data brokers who anonymize the data and do not track any personal identifying characteristics.

A few brokers who do (or did?) things the “right” way (disclaimer: DO NOT TAKE MY WORD FOR THIS AT ALL…things may have changed!) - infutor, kbm, and equifax.

Alternatively, if you want to learn more about your audience and your list than ever before, you can subscribe to those same services or companies and build massive databases and personas around every single email address, name, and ip address that you’ve already collected…

If you bought a course, or signed up for Robinhood the app, or have started an account or signed up for a list in finance, education, business opportunities - you likely have a “anonymized” data profile somewhere and have been monetized without knowing it.

However you choose to monetize your email list, the example “randfish” has always set still stands the test of time -

• Create great content.
• Tell great stories.
• Share your content and your stories.
• Test everything.
• Learn all you can about your audience.
• And help them achieve their goals.

“Jameszol” likes to add (some of it as a second or fiftieth voice to Rand’s timeless advice) -

• Take massive action to tell the world about what you have.
• Don’t wait for the audience to come to you - take your offering to your audience.
• Sell whatever your audience will buy.
• Email every day or every other day.
• Create multiple streams of income for your business.
• Be aggressive and stay aggressive with your business growth.

Thanks for reading this far… and stay tuned:

In my next edition I’ll get a little technical and tell you about the list hygiene process we follow at our $40 million brand. You’ll get to see the flow of data, the list cleaning tools we use, the deliverability tools we use, and more!