Key to Email Revenue: List Growth

The most important thing you can do to sustain and grow your email revenue is to grow your email list. Whether you’re happy with your current email revenue or not, you need to grow your list because your email list is in a constant state of deterioration.

As many as 1 out of every 3 people will change their email address this year. People get new jobs, they change service providers, and they get so tired of hitting the unsubscribe button that it just seems easier to get a new email address. Some people will re-subscribe or update their email address before they go, but the majority won’t.

Others might just get new interests and unsubscribe or stop opening. An email subscriber that stops opening is just as important to replace as one that bounces due to an email address change or unsubscribe. Your consistent openers are the ones that drive the majority of your revenue.

Either way, you have about 1/3 of your list you need to replace each year just to sustain your current email revenue. So take your current list size and divide it by 36. That is your minimum goal for how many new email address you should be collecting each month. (That’s your total list size divided by 3 to get the third and then divided by 12 for each month of the year.)

Where you get your list can be an important factor. Try and keep track of your opt-in sources to monitor which source is most profitable. You won’t sustain your email revenue if you constantly replace high profit subscribers with low profit subscribers. The source of the opt-in is one of the most important factors when it comes to comparing the likely revenue of a subscriber and it is easy to track and calculate.

The best way to grow an email list is to collect email addresses at every point of customer contact. Those will always be your most profitable subscribers so perfect that channel first. Though, there are a lot of additional ways to grow your list outside of that – just Google “50 Ways to Grow Your Email List.” Be creative, do what makes sense for your business and measure the profitability of all your sources.