When a founder tells us they need revenue in weeks, not months, the first place we look isn’t the ad account. It’s the list.
Ads can work, but they have a speed limit. A new funnel takes weeks to build and months to tune. A list, if it’s been looked after, can bring in money the same week you email it.
The usual reply is either a big number (“about 40,000”) or a shrug (“we don’t really have one”). Both miss the point, and the second one is almost never true.
“We don’t have a list” usually means “we have one nobody talks to”
Most businesses that say they have no list have something like this sitting in a tool somewhere:
- Past customers nobody has emailed since they bought.
- People who registered for a webinar a year or two ago.
- A checkout or subscription database.
- A CRM full of enquiries that went nowhere.
That’s a list. It’s just been left alone.
One of the businesses we work with is a telemedicine brand selling prescription medication. It doesn’t collect leads: there’s no free guide and no webinar. People buy first, then complete a medical intake. So when we relaunched the brand this summer, the view inside the business was that there was no list. Only past customers.
There were about 2,200 of them, and nobody had emailed them in eight months.
We had also just moved the brand to a new email platform, so the first sends did double duty: cleaning the list and warming up the new system. After two cleanup emails, around 1,500 addresses were still active.
Then, over two weeks, we sent about four emails with nothing for sale. We told people the brand was back and what it stands for. We introduced the doctors behind it, explained the medication, and showed what’s on offer now. The point was to remind them why they had trusted the brand in the first place.
Only after that did we start selling.
A few people unsubscribed. Not many. The ones who stayed open the emails and buy. Every email now brings in six to eight orders, at an average order value of around $120. For a prescription brand, where every order is a real consultation and a real product, that’s a very good result from people the business thought it didn’t have.
We started at one email a week and are at two now, moving towards three.
The big list that was fast because it was kept warm
The other end of the scale is a wellness brand we launched from zero. Over the years we built its list to around 200,000 people.
Most of our energy went into new customers: funnels, ads, cold traffic. The list grew alongside them. But cold traffic has that speed limit, and some months it didn’t bring in enough.
When the business needed cash faster than the ads could produce it, we went to the list. An existing product, usually a course or a masterclass between $50 and $150, with a campaign built around it. Each of those campaigns brought in somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 in about ten days, from email alone.
It worked because of something we’d done since the first week. We emailed that list every week, whether we were selling or not: a newsletter, every Thursday. And before a campaign we’d send more, all about the topic we were about to sell. If the offer was a detox program, the list spent the weeks before it reading about detox, so nobody was surprised when the offer arrived.
That list was fast because it had been looked after slowly.
Per person, the small list wins
Put the two side by side and the numbers look backwards.
| List | Size | Revenue | Per person |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wellness brand | 200,000 | $20,000 to $50,000 per campaign (several emails) | 10 to 25 cents per campaign |
| Telemedicine brand | 1,500 | $720 to $960 per email | about 50 to 65 cents per email |
It’s not a fair comparison. Different products, different prices, different businesses. But it makes the point: everyone on the small list has already bought once. Most of the big list downloaded something once. Size is the wrong number to look at.
What we look at first
When we audit a list, we ask three questions before we count anything:
- Who’s on it? Buyers, registrants, leads, or a mix you can separate?
- When did they last hear from you? A week ago and eight months ago are different lists.
- Do you write to them when you’re not selling? If every email is a pitch, people learn to skip them.
Then we look at how often you send. Most founders send too little, because they’re afraid of annoying people. On a third business, in a restricted category where cold traffic didn’t convert at first, the list carried the sales. They were sending one or two emails a week. We moved them to three: Tuesday and Thursday about the product, and Saturday a personal email from the founder in his own voice, selling nothing. Revenue went up with the extra sends, and the monthly campaigns to that list brought in at least $50,000 each over two weeks.
Three a week worked there. It won’t be right for every business, so treat it as something to test in yours, and watch revenue and unsubscribes together, not opens alone.
Your list is also your first webinar audience
If you’re planning a webinar, a workshop or a challenge, your list is where it should start, before any ad spend.
The people on it already know you, so they register more readily and show up more often than cold traffic does. They also tell you early whether the title and the promise land. If your own list doesn’t respond to the invitation, paid traffic is unlikely to fix it, and it’s a lot cheaper to find that out from an email than from an ad account.
A following is not a list
Followers belong to the platform, and the platform decides who sees your posts and when. Your list belongs to you. If you need revenue by Friday, you can email it on Tuesday morning and it lands in front of the people on it. With followers, you post and hope.
What we’d do this week
- Find the list you already have: customers, registrants, enquiries. Export it.
- If nobody has emailed it in months, don’t sell yet. Send something useful first, and keep going until people are opening again.
- Pick a day and email that list every week from now on, whether or not you have something to sell.
The fast money is in the list, but only if you’ve kept it warm.
Launching something soon?
On Wednesday 11 November, Simina and Sara are running a free live workshop on the four guesses that sit underneath most launches that don't sell. About 90 minutes on Zoom, at 6 p.m. Madrid (CET), 5 p.m. London (GMT), 12 p.m. New York (ET) and 9 a.m. Los Angeles (PT).
And if you'd like us to look at your list and your funnel with you, apply to work with us.