Master The Inbox

The KPI That Reveals Whether Your Email List Has Buyers or Just Readers

• Monica Badiu • Season 1 • Episode 11

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0:00 | 12:28

Your open rates look fine. Your list is growing. So why isn't revenue following? In this episode, Monica Badiu introduces the one metric that tells you whether your email list is actually profitable — revenue per subscriber — and walks through a real example of a course creator with 16,000 subscribers who discovered his list had doubled in size while his results stayed flat. If you've ever wondered whether you're building an audience of buyers or just readers, this episode will show you how to find out.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

  • Why open rate, click rate, and list size can all look fine while revenue stalls
  • What revenue per subscriber is and how to calculate it in under a minute
  • The real story behind a 16K list that doubled in size but didn't double in revenue
  • Why not all traffic sources are equal — and what that means for how you build your list
  • How a mismatch between your audience and your offer shows up in your numbers before it shows up anywhere else
  • Why a 30K list can outperform a 200K list — and what that tells you about list quality vs. list size

Resources:

  • Take the free Email Bottleneck Assessment → https://www.monicabadiu.com/email-revenue-self-assessment/ 
  • Find Monica on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicabadiu/
  • Find Monica on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/itsmonicabadiu/

Hi. And welcome.
My name is Monica Badiu. I am a marketing consultant turned conversion copywriter and copy coach. I help online course creators and info product businesses sell more through persuasive, non-spammy, no fluff copywriting.

I teach about copywriting, digital marketing, and conversion strategies tested in my businesses and with my clients. 

Other links:

Master the Inbox - Revenue per subscriber

Master the Inbox - Revenue per subscriber

[00:00:00] A course creator came to me not that long ago, frustrated after a launch. He had 16K people on his list, but only 24 of them had bought during his last promotion, and his first instinct was, "Let's go after more traffic so we can get more subscribers." But I stopped him. There's a number that indicates whether or not your list is profitable, and that's what we're talking about today.

Hi, and welcome to Master the Inbox.

I'm Monica Badiu, your host, email copywriter, conversion strategist, and I hope your guide to building an email list that actually makes you money. Today's episode is one of those things that keep coming up whenever I'm talking with course creators about their [00:01:00] results monetizing their email lists.

They often tell me, "Monica, my list is growing," or, "My list is this big, and I have decent open rates, but I'm just not seeing revenue, and it seems like I'm doing all the right things." But when we actually go through the numbers, we realize that they've been focusing on the wrong KPIs. And this KPI, the one that I wanna tell you about today, is a great indicator whether you have buyers or readers on your email list.

Now, if I asked you right now to pull up one number to tell me whether your email marketing is working, what would you come up with? Now, most course creators probably would say like open rates, maybe click-through rates, almost everybody talks about list size and how many people they have there.

Some of them mention [00:02:00] that they don't really have that big unsubscribes, which is great, and none of those are bad numbers to know, but none of them answer the actual question: is your email list making you money? So let's break it down one by one.

There's a huge debate around open rate, whether or not they're actually useful indicators for your email list performance. But at the minimum, they kind of tell you whether your subject line worked and whether or not you have some deliverability issues. Click rate would tell you whether the email got someone to take one more step, but even that's a very complicated KPI to take into account because of so many different things that influence the decision to click that button.

And then you have list size. Now, list size just tells you how many people have at some point handed over their email address, so they can receive something from you. [00:03:00] And unfortunately all three of those numbers can make you think that you're looking at a healthy email list, where your revenue is blocked by not having the right offer or not having the right discount or just not sending this at the right time.

But I think there's another number that you should be looking at That truly indicates whether or not you have built an email list that would buy. And I think it's important because it goes back to one of the things that I've been trying to educate course creators about. You have to decide whether or not you wanna use email marketing as a content system or as a revenue system.

Because if you want revenue from your email list, then the strategy you're employing needs to be adapted for that goal in mind. That doesn't make you a bad guy because you wanna monetize your [00:04:00] audience, and that's probably a discussion for another time. But if you do wanna use email marketing to monetize, to sell more courses, to bring in more students, to bring more people to your events, then you need to look at revenue per subscriber.

Now, the formula for this number is pretty simple. You take the total revenue from a promotion and divide it by number of people on your list when you sent it. So total revenue plus list size at send time equals revenue per subscriber. This number tells you what each person on your list is actually worth to your business.

And once you start tracking it across launches, it tells you something even more valuable, whether your list is getting more profitable as it grows, or it's simply just getting bigger. And over my many years working with course creators, I have seen inflated email lists [00:05:00] that were costing a lot and were not generating money.

It got to the point where in some situations we had to start from scratch because the audience that was collected there was never going to buy. And I'm talking about a mismatch between the audience that became a subscriber compared to the audience that was supposed to become a buyer. And these expectations are set up pretty early from how you bring people in.

Now, since we're talking about revenue per subscriber, I think it's very important to differentiate between the traffic sources that are bringing those subscribers in. This should tell you where to focus your efforts when it actually comes to building your email list, 'cause not all traffic sources are equal, and the people who are coming on your email list, they're not in the same problem, [00:06:00] product, or solution awareness stage

So remember the story from the beginning of this episode, the creator with 16K on his list, but only a small fraction that was actually converting? Well, the whole ecosystem for his email was actually more complex, But here's what we started doing to figure out what was actually happening.

So we pulled up two launches of the same product, one recent and one from about two years earlier, and we compared them. Now, the first launch, when his list was much smaller, brought in about 40K, And revenue per subscriber was around four point thirty-seven dollars. Now fast-forward two years later, his list had grown a lot more.

He had more subscribers, and obviously having that level of subscribers can make someone feel more comfortable and more confident about selling to that email [00:07:00] list. But big numbers don't necessarily mean really big results when it comes to a campaign.

So what instantly became visible was that revenue per subscriber had dropped, and the newer, larger list wasn't converting at the same rate per person as the smaller, more engaged list he had two years earlier. So why was that happening? Well When you grow fast, you have probably broad lead magnets, maybe you run giveaways, maybe you even run some ads.

It's very easy to inflate your subscriber count quickly, but many of those people are most likely not the strong fit for your offer to begin with. So when that happens, your list gets bigger, your revenue per subscriber drops, and because you see more people coming in, you don't really notice the problem until it compounds.

So for [00:08:00] this creator, what we did realize was that while he was generating leads that were interested in the problem he was solving, most of those leads that were signing up were not actually potential buyers. So he had two products. One of his product, there are so many people who are teaching the same thing. So he had huge competition, and the people he was bringing in there were not exactly saying, "Here, take three hundred dollars and give me what you have." But the other product, he was probably one out of three people teaching it. He had a specific solution for a specific problem for a very specific target audience. So when we looked at the data, what we did realize was that the people coming in through the lead magnet for that second product [00:09:00] had a much higher value when it came to revenue per subscriber.

So it can sound like it's a tiny detail, but it's actually a very important one because it tells you where to focus your efforts. And as we know, as an entrepreneur, especially a solopreneur, when you're wearing all the hats, it's impossible to give 100% to every single thing . So what that means is you need to figure out what's your bottleneck, figure out is that the most important bottleneck to solve right now, and then start solving it so you can focus on the next thing in your business. Now, I see this very often with many course creators. Most of them think that their emails aren't converting because you're not using the right words, they don't have the best offer, they don't know how to write an email. But in reality, the problem is a [00:10:00] mismatch between the audience they have on that email list and how they are positioning the product.

Now, this also means that if you have a smaller email list, you can still generate money. I have worked with one specific course creator who had very good reputation, but an email list that was around 30K people. He still generated six figures with that 30K list. Whereas I have worked with people who had 200K people on their email list, even up to one million people, and they were struggling to even bring in five figures per month.

And that's because when you focus on increasing your email list quickly, you're getting a lot of people who are not ready for working with you. Some of them have no idea who you are, and if you add other issues [00:11:00] like sending messages infrequently, they forget who you are in the first place. If you don't have an automation that welcomes people in and basically educates them about who you are and the problem you're solving, they're going to forget about why they actually joined your community in the first place.

So don't focus that much on growing your email list for the sake of growing your email list, and look at how profitable it is right now. Revenue per subscriber is a very important KPI, especially if you're monetizing your email list.

So that's it for today's episode of Master The Inbox. And before you go, if you don't know why your email isn't generating revenue, take the free email bottleneck assessment. It's a quick assessment that pinpoints where your email strategy might be breaking down, so you know what to fix first, and the link is in the show notes.

And if this episode hit close to [00:12:00] home, I wanna hear from you. Come find me on LinkedIn or Instagram and tell me what's your current revenue per subscriber, i'd love to help you make sense of it. And if you found today's episode useful, the best thing you can do is share it with another course creator who needs to hear it.

So thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.



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