Case Study: He made 450k in a single month with his Email Marketing Agency

All right, what's up everybody? I got Mark here, he's inside a Client Ascension and Olympia. So Mark, just so everyone knows what's happening here, you joined Client ascension originally in October 2023 at $2,500 a month. And in December 2025 you did $450,000 in a single month. That's completely insane. And as a quick disclaimer to everybody watching this, I'm not promising that you're gonna make $450,000 in a single month by working with me. It's more probable that you don't get results in the business than you do. According to the US Bureau of Most people cannot do this. What I do want to do though is just have Mark on here so he can relay like what exactly he's doing, what exactly he did to get to where he is. And Mark, you also have a partner as well, right?

Business partners handle sales and operations pretty much.

Let's start from the base fundamental layer. What do you sell? What is your offer?

Yeah, so we sell email marketing for e commerce brands that sell on Shopify mostly. And you know, if they're using something like Klaviyo, that's when we kind of come in and help them manage that platform.

You're in our mastermind Olympia where we teach people how to scale with ads, build a sales team, all that. So could you walk us through like what your funnel looks like or like how this whole marketing process looks with your ads?

Yeah, so we use something called a VSL funnel. So pretty much I have a VSL on my landing page. You have application as sort of the main cta, you know to click on a cta, put in their information. If they don't do a certain revenue, pretty much reject them and they do a certain revenue that matches our qualifications, then we pretty much let them go in. They book call, they get some pre calls, you know our setters closers send over some materials before the call and then on the call itself do like a one call close, walk them through our offer, you know our processes and you know, close them from there they need another call. Then we set up a follow up call.

What do you charge for your services and like what are the deliverables?

Yeah, so we charge anywhere between 3 to 6k for our deliverables. We build out e commerce brands, flows and campaigns. So pretty much covering their whole customer life cycle. You know if you're in E comm, pretty much know these customer life cycles. So it goes welcome series abandoned, checkout, band and car browse Abandonment, site abandonment, post purchase series wouldn't bat replenishment, VIP flow, sunset flows, things like that. And then we also manage their campaigns. So depending on a package, we can Send anywhere from 12 to 18 emails per month. We even have some clients that are sending emails daily. So that will reflect on what they're paying us.

Are you on the front end in the VSL funnel that you're actually running ads to? Are you promoting a one time setup of flows and upselling on the back end or is it straight to recurring?

Recurring, straight to recurring. So we've done that in the past, but just because on how our company is, we thought it's just better for us to do retainers upfront. There's better LTV there.

Is it like an audit funnel that you're basically saying, hey, we'll give you a free audit. Like how does that work?

Yeah, so it's a mixture of like an audit and also just kind of consultation.

How many new ads are you making per month or per week right now?

So last month I got like really sick so I couldn't produce that much ads. But right now our frequency is like 20 ads a week right now. Okay, yeah, it's like unique ads, unique body, unique hooks. Everything is not like four ads with like five different hooks or whatever.

That's, that's the unlock. I tell everybody. I'm like, you need a substantial amount of ads. If you're capped out, you can't make more. It's because you need more ads. Like you need to be making like 80 new ads a month. It's such a substantial amount of ads. Let's revisit back to the beginning when you were at 2 1/2 k a month and you first joined Client Ascension. How'd you get your first couple of clients like that? Like how did this evolve into where you are now?

So I started this agency around summer 2023. I was doing free work for like a friend's econ brand and also a friend's company. So I did get results from there and then case studies, they were able to record like a video for me, showcase my expertise. That's kind of how I got my very first client. Just doing free work and then just showing that you can actually deliver. And then from there how I scaled that was doing code email pretty much. I just bought a bunch of email inboxes and I had Christian help me with the very first code email scripts. The first month I joined Client ascension, I signed two clients and that brought to like 7.5k a month. They're actually still clients to this day.

So how many clients do you have now?

Right now we have a mixture of like one time projects and like retainers. So I think right now we have 70 clients right now.

How many people were on the team managing all that?

Right now it's about 50.

Where are you getting a lot of them from?

So we have recruiters. In the beginning I was mostly just posting on like my social job posts, forums or whatever. I think the quality wasn't there so we kind of just moved recruiter or just went with LinkedIn job postings and referrals.

It's all coming through a VSL funnel. Do you have an opt in on that?

No, it's just straight to the tech one. Okay.

Do you do anything like you're to put on a webinar or you do some quick promo for something to all the dead leads who didn't end up buying. Like you've ever done anything like that?

Not really. I tried to do just a direct car thing so they like don't qualify and then we send them over to like a page where they can just buy something. But that hasn't worked for us. I'm probably thinking of doing some schooling or something just to have them in the ecosystem.

Dude, this is so interesting because a lot of people watching this, they might think that a big problem they'll have is that they're not going to get any calls booked with ads. But the actual problem is is that you get too many calls booked. But they're just all a bunch of unqualified idiots and they're using a type form. It's routing people to get rid of people. So everyone thinks they're so smart when they come up with this. They think, well if I just send them to buy something I can liquidate some of my ad spend. But the problem is that none of them buy it legitimately. 0% of the people end up actually buying it. It's because your ads and your VSL sold one thing, this great thing that you're trying to get them on the ph only for qualified people. So that's their expectation. Then you send them to something that's like. Not that they don't want that. That's not what attracted them. It doesn't work the way people think it does. Dude, I've been at a downsell. I want to recapture 10% of the revenue. I'm like, no you're not. You're going to get literally zero percent and it's going to be a colossal waste of time. So I've always found that hilarious. Let's talk about some numbers. What is your cost per call right now?

Around like 450, right?

$450. Wow, that's pretty high. How is like the filtering work? Exactly.

So we pretty much reject anyone that's doing less than like 20. I think on average our Pro are doing anywhere from like 50k plus.

What's your cost to acquire a customer?

Right now it's about 2,000.

What's the average amount that they're paying upfront?

Normally our ALV is 5.3 K. You're.

Liquidating at least 3x. So that's pretty good. Do you know what the LTV is?

The minimum is 9.10K.

Okay, that's really good. So you're getting overall 5x on the business. What's your gross profit margin on the fulfillment of a customer? So just on the fulfillment side, not net profit, just gross profit on what it costs to fill each person.

It's like 70% less.

Less if it was 70%. The LTV is 10k 70. So you have like a 2k CAC on a 7k. You're getting a 3.5x profit return for every dollar that you dump into this entity, which is like really good, extremely healthy business. I'm sure you could come up with some kind of 20, 30, $40,000. Upsell that one out of 50 people take and then that would just make you a substantial amount more money. So I think you should try to come up with something like that and just see what you can finesse. It's only for previous customers. You see what I mean? Like you're not going to try to market it on the front end. Just leads you already or active customers or past customers and just try to sell. You see if you can get someone to buy and that would just take your 3.5x and probably turn it to like 4 or 4.5.

We do something similar. So we actually offer like Google Ads and meta ads as well.

Do you have that in house or are you like outsourcing it?

It's awesome.

How much of your fulfillment is labor versus AI assisted, say?

Most of it's actually labor. We use AI to help speed up ideation and stuff. Most of our fulfillment is labor.

So I think what's interesting is if somebody is watching this, anybody below 30k a month, somebody who's just getting started, who was also at like $2500 a month like when you started, they're probably thinking that to be at numbers as high as you have is inconceivable. Dude. What, like, how is that even like functionally possible at all? What would you say to that person?

So I would probably tell that person. In business, I feel like you just have to figure stuff out along the way. The things you don't know, if you're in the game, you're going to eventually learn it, but it's just the things you don't know now to get to that certain level. When I was at 2.5k, I didn't know paid ads. I didn't know that much about code, email or like sales. But I just kind of stayed in the game, learned from people like you, other coaches, things like that, and then just applied it to my business also. I personally think people slow down in business because they're not testing new things or just like scared to spend money on things. Coaching, paid ads. Paid ads, that costs a lot of money. When you're at that 2.5k per month, you can't really afford to spend 2k on a customer. That's like your whole revenue plus fulfillment and other software costs. You're probably going to be in a negative. So I guess my overall suggestion, just do the small things first and then once you kind of dial in operations, then just scale with ads as you get more money from free sources like organic code, email code. Emails still cost money, but just not as much as paid ads.

Over the past six months, if you were to think about some things that were kind of unlocks for you or something that you did that just made everything work so much better, what would be some of those things that you.

Could come up with that would probably be just more creatives, more testing and I think a mistake I did in the last six months was not getting a sales team faster. I think that was my mistake. I felt like I could have gotten even faster to like 450k if I got a sales team earlier.

Well, how much are you spending on ads per day right now?

Right Now I think it's 2:33K right now.

So you're getting six qualified calls a day, scheduled three, four shows.

Yeah, I think it's around there. It's probably a little bit more than that. Pyro's probably like not tracking it or something.

For everyone watching this, just notice that Mark has his numbers accessible and just knows them. This is such an important thing. You'll talk to someone who's. They're all jumble and really don't even know what's going on in their business. I don't Know what the problem is. And like, you don't even know your numbers. The absolute bare minimum. I asked Mark what his CAC is. He knows what it is. Like, I asked him what his cost per call is. He knows what it is. If I ask him how many calls you booked yesterday, you can easily go in and look and find it. Everything is tracked, everything's accessible. It's easy to find. That's like really important for somebody watching this that they need to understand.

Back in the day, I did not know my numbers. I think you, like, roasted me for that. It was like, dude, I would never be your business partner. Since you never know your numbers.

What's been the hardest part of this so far?

I would guess building out fulfillment, just kind of keeping up with the demand.

How many hours a week are you working personally right now?

I would say a regular amount. I'm not like pushing 80 hours or something like that. Probably like 50 around there.

You're in charge of marketing and Legion, kind of like me in client ascension. And let's get. And then you have one partner who does sales and sales team, another does fulfillment. Yeah. And how do you find these people?

They're actually my friends from school.

Oh, interesting. Normally when people start with their friends, a lot of them tend to not work out very well. So, like, was there any vetting process in this? How were you thinking about that?

They actually didn't start the business with me. I think they joined probably like six months in. One join as a copywriter and then one joint as like a closer. So they just kind of work from there. And then I was like, okay, this, this is like a good partnership. Let's do this full time. Now.

Walking through like the journey from 2 1/2 k a month to 450k, I'm like, what were you at when you started ads with us?

So I started ads on my own. You guys really helped me dial in and optimize. When I started with you guys, I was at 40, 50k a month.

40 or 50k a month to 450k a month was 12 months.

40 50k to 450 was 12 months. Yeah, yeah.

That's insane. All of the acquisition ads, like 100% of it.

And then we do have some organic as well.

So what's next on the plan here? What's the growth path this year?

Hoping to get to like 1 to 2 million per month. And then I guess we'll just see what's going to happen next year.

Yeah. How are you going to do that though? You're just going to spend more into the VSL funnel. You're going to introduce more funnels or like what do you think the bottleneck is?

I think the bottleneck is probably my offers. So I do want to try to come up with like some new offer, front end offers. And of course since we do ads, meta ads, we want to like create the offer for that as well and spend on there and then of course scale our sales team as well. Bring in more closers, bring in more setters and yeah, just spend more on ads.

How does the distribution of this money work? Do you reinvest all of it into the business or do you paint it all out?

We do invest a lot of our money. We have a war chest. So if we see opportunities, we have that ability to just, just, just spend it. We see something that's going to help out the business get like a good ROI from it. We have that ability to, you know, spend that.

Somebody watching this would make the argument, they would say something like we'll just spend more on ads, Mark. And I'm sure obviously you've thought to do that and I'm sure you've probably tried to increase it more but it probably introduces a bottleneck. What is that bottleneck exactly? Is it availability of closers?

It's a mixture, availability of closers, making sure their leads are like high quality and also fulfillment. Right. If you can bring like, like 40 clients in a month but fulfillment can't handle it, then that just doesn't work.

I always find that argument so interesting. People will be like just spend more on ads. And it's like well it doesn't exactly work like that. Normally what happens is you spend more and your cost per result goes up. Whether that's because of reduced availability, you start just running into problems with being able to actually fulfill for those people. But let me know if you've seen the same. Obviously I think you have. So you're spending like two or three grand a day. If you were trying to do that with 10 ads or 20 ads, your cost per call would probably be like triple or quadruple what it is right now. Just the activity of having 80 active ads or like 150 active ads or 250 active ads inside of the campaign. I don't know why, because it'll concentrate a lot of the spend on just a couple. But it would be so much of a lower cost per call. Is that what you also see?

So that's why we have like a good schedule to like put out. We See, like, cost per call going, and like, yo, we got launches.

How do you set up the media buying? Is it like all in a CBO or is it abo? Like, what are you doing over there?

It's all abo.

When you launch new ads, is it like, okay, I'm launching this batch of 20 into a new ad set in the ABO. Do you ever turn old ones off or you just leave them on?

Yeah, they're doing very poorly. Then, yeah, we just, just turn it.

I've actually been using CBOs instead, where every new batch of ads I launch, I just launch into the cbo, which has been pretty efficient for me because I don't have to go in and manually do anything. And it kind of just allocates it correctly, which I like because I don't want to have to sit there media buying all day. I don't know. So you should try that out if.

You want to give it a whirl.

Earlier you were talking about split testing. What do you split test?

Well, be totally honest, I haven't gone today.

It just adds. You're just split testing new ads. Ads.

I know it's important. I literally just haven't gone.

I had one dude, we took all of his winning ads. It was a campaign abo. It was probably like 15 ads that actually got spend and were kind of like winners. Each one was in its own ad set with a different destination, so a different landing page with a different headline. And there were eight ad sets. So eight different landing pages. And then just spent into that for like three, four days. And then there was a very clear, obvious winner of those. You took the clear obvious winner and then applied that as the main landing page. So it's something that you can kind of play with if you want. Most tests, tests you do will not be statistically significant. That's just what I've personally found. Not going to be like, oh, this page converts at 2%. This one converts at 2.13%. Like, that's the winner. It's like, well, not really. That's like just random. A lot of people split test themselves into poverty. They'll split test something and they forget what was originally working and then it's all downhill. It's all from there, which is pretty interesting. So keep like a log somewhere. Everything you're doing actively so you don't forget. I actually cannot express how many times somebody has come to me with an issue and it's like, they legitimately don't launch any new creatives. That's the do you need more creatives. I think it's very interesting because it makes the process of getting results with ads way harder because there's a higher barrier to entry because it's so much more labor involved. You need to make filming new creative much easier for yourself. So, like, how do you do that? A filming setup in a specific spot? How do you go about that? Yeah, you get the teleprompter, just like everyone knows what you just saw. The camera is set up and it stays there. The teleprompter is set up and it stays there. The lighting is set up and it stays there. It just makes it so much easier to sit down because you don't have to settle the shit up.

Yeah, if I need to record, I literally just script some stuff and then put it on the teleprompter and start yapping for the camera for like an hour.

What AI tools are using to script.

Ads mostly right now? Manus.

Yeah, I've been using Claude a lot lately. Claude got really, really good. 4.5 opus. I've been playing with that. Mark, you got anything else to leave the people with? Perhaps some advice that you would give them to help them grow their business?

Just don't be afraid to spend money in business. You spend and you'll get it back tenfold. Thanks, brother.

Bro, appreciate you coming on. For everybody watching, all of Mark's links will be in the description, and also Olympia will be in there as well. So Mark is in Olympia. That's where we help people scale with ads and build a sales team and do all that. That'll be the first link in the description and all Mark's stuff. If you want to connect with him and check him out, that'll be in there as well. All right. Appreciate you, bro.