215: Turning Emails into ATMs: My Newsletter Monetization Framework

Hey guys, Destiny here and this episode is just a little bit different from what we typically do on the Creators MBA podcast. And in this episode I am being interviewed by Gabe cox with the redhotmindset.com and this interview was in the Grow youw Biz Without Social Media Summit. I know you are going to absolutely love this episode, so let's jump right in and get started.

Do you feel trapped in the cycle of social media? Constantly posting, chasing algorithms, and still not seeing the results you want? What if I told you there's a better way to grow your business and make money every time you hit send? In this chat, I'm joined by Dr. Destiny Kopp, a certified business world coach who helps Digital product entrepreneurs 10 times their revenue without being glued to their screens. She's sharing her journey of breaking free from social media obligations while building three successful brands, plus her proven framework for monetizing email newsletters. Destiny has been featured in Billion Success Authority magazine, Thrive Global, and tons of business minded podcasts. If you're ready to learn how to grow your business without the social media grind, then this is for you. Let's dive in. Hey, Destiny. So good to have you here. I'm super excited about this conversation with you, Gabe.

I'm also super excited and I can't wait to kind of delve into all of this with you. We're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects here today.

I have been secretly following you for a while. I love your newsletters and this is one of the reasons I wanted to have you talk on this topic. Because you know how to get readers, you know how to get people to read your newsletters, and maybe we can even talk about open rates and things like that if we want to get geeky about it. But what I see is that really many entrepreneurs feel trapped by social media algorithms, which is one of the reasons that we're doing this here. I want to hear a little from you. Can you walk us through how you made the decision to focus on email marketing more specifically and maybe even what immediate changes you saw in your business because of relying more on email marketing than on social media?

This is a great question and I'll just kind of take you back a year ago.

You know, we're all like pressed for time.

There's only so much time in a day. And as I was kind of analyzing my time and the ROI I was getting on it, what I realized was all the time that I was spending or trying to spend on social media to get people, you know, either back to my email list or getting clients from that, or selling my digital products from that. It just wasn't working. It really wasn't giving me the ROI of my time. So I was like, you know what? That's not working. I'm not going to do that anymore. So I'm going to really focus on email marketing. And that's when I saw a change. And then we can dig into kind of all the changes I've made over the years and some of the challenges, quite frankly, that I've even had with email marketing. I didn't have a lot of time, you know, I'm a busy mom, like probably everybody else kind of listening here, and I only had so much time to spend on my business, so I really had to analyze and dig in. Where was I going to get the most ROI for that?

That makes a lot of sense. So now that you focus on email marketing more than social media, I'd love to hear what is your business relationship with social media now? Do you use it? How do you use it?

Great question. Because I do have several different brands and businesses that I own and manage, and one of them is Hobby School. And in Hobby School, we do have a fairly large Facebook group there that we use for our events because we run online learning summits throughout the year. So we do use that. We do have like a Facebook page and an Instagram account for that. The main reason why we do still post on social media in Hobby School is that is a brand that I am planning to sale. Lord Willie, I'm planning to sell in like two, two years. And I know that the buyer for that brand is going to want a social media presence. It's mostly there just to, you know, have a presence there so that when the buyer comes that he or she sees that we have a presence on social media. And, you know, obviously they like that. So that's really the main reason why we're doing that for Hobby School. Now, for my personal brand, I put up a 9 grid on Instagram. I do use Pinterest, but I don't really consider Pinterest necessarily a social media. I consider that more of a SEO, search engine, search and discovery type platform. One of the areas that I may kind of dip my toes in a little bit this upcoming year is LinkedIn, because I do have some offers in my personal brand. One of them in particular, which is my newsletter, Profit Club, that I know that people on LinkedIn are definitely going to be interested in. Now, I haven't really done that much there, but that is on Kind of my future plans, if you would, for that brand.

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And what I heard in what you were saying is that you're very purposeful with where you are and why you're there. So that way you can have the roti. The return on time invested. Right. And so that, I think, is a huge mindset shift that we need to have as entrepreneurs as we delve into the online space. So I know that we're going to talk email newsletters, but obviously we need to have a way for people to get on our email newsletters. So I just love to hear what are your favorite ways outside of social.

Media to bring people in? Definitely collaborations. I think that all of us would agree that collaborations are key there. And there's tons of ways you can do that. You know, like we have the newsletter Profit Club collaboration app where people can go in and enter their newsletter information, find other people to collaborate with and do freebie swaps with. You can do summit bundles. You can just go find one of your peers and say, do you want to do a freebie swap? I did one of those this past week. You can also do paid advertising. Some people pay to actually get on my email list, Right? They'll pay. Do it like a sponsored post, you know, go, go sign up for this. I've done several of those already as we're recording this, and it's 2025. We've only been here, you know, a month or so. I've already done several of those this year myself. So. Free stuff. Hate stuff. Honestly, it all works.

Yeah, Love it. So tell me a little bit about what mistakes you see entrepreneurs making with their news newsletters. Do you see, like a rolling C medal?

Well, you know, we could really go on and on all day about this, but, you know, and I've made these mistakes also myself, so I'm not really pointing fingers at anybody. One of the things that I see a lot of people making is giving away free gift after free gift after free gift in their newsletter. And my philosophy is, and I'm not saying you should never do this or you should never provide value in your newsletter. I am not saying that at all. But when you're giving away stuff, you know, every single week and you train your audience, basically that your newsletter is basically a freebie fest that's going to put them in the frame of mind so that when you're ready to sail, they're like, why isn't this free? Why is she charging for this? You know, some of the things I Have. And I've done a lot of newsletter audits over the past year, and I've seen people like having the banner at the top of their email lists. Free resources or free gifts. So what happens when you do that in your newsletter? Basically, people are going to see that at the top. They're going, oh, I want to go get that. They're going to click on that, go to your website, your landing page, or wherever you put those free gifts. And they're never going to come back to your newsletter because something's going to happen, right? They're busy, the dogs barking, the UPS guy's going to show up, or the dinner's on the stove, or their kids are tugging at their legs. So they're just never going to get back to the important content in your newsletter. So that is one of the big mistakes I see actually a lot of very seasoned business owners making.

It makes a lot of sense because we're essentially training them with what we want or what we expect of them. And if all we train them on is free stuff, they're never going to be like, nurtured to buy. So how did you flip the script on traditional newsletter thinking? So maybe we start with what is true traditional newsletter thinking? Like, what are most people doing? But then how did you change your mindset on it?

Yeah, so basically what was happening is kind of I wasn't seeing results in my email marketing, right? So, you know, sending out offers, not making as many sales as I thought I would make. And I was following all of what I would call kind of the traditional advice that is out there in this online business world, creator marketing. And that was, you know, send out your main piece of content for me, that was a podcast episode, right? So send out your main piece of content to your audience, giving them a ton of value. You'll. They will be warm and nurtured. Right. And ready to buy from you. Well, what was happening? And I saw this in my own behavior. So it's very normal out there. I was seeing their weekly email coming up and I knew it was their latest podcast episode. And I'm like, well, I'll go listen to that if I want to when I'm in my car taking my kids to school or working out or whatever. I don't need to open up this email. So something clicked in me and I kind of put my marketing college professor on, because I do, I do still teach at the graduate level, teach marketing courses there. And I'm like, I'm going to go do a research study. So I Conducted a six month research study and really looked at all of these, what I would call these really newsletter type businesses. People who had set up email newsletter and that was their main product, like the Morning Brew, the Hustle, you know, those type of big type newsletter businesses. And I'm like, what are they doing differently? Because a lot of these have sold these newsletter businesses for millions of dollars. And I'm like, that just seemed crazy to me. It's just a newsletter, it's just a, you know, email platform and they're, you know, selling these businesses. I'm like, they've got to be doing something differently. So I kind of dug into that and did that six month study and I came away with a lot of aha's and really just everything changed, quite frankly about how I viewed and approached email marketing. And one of them was what I designed called my mini magazine method. And it really kind of goes back to when you think about and I'm kind of dating myself a little bit here, but when I was like in high school and the Cosmo would come in your mailbox, you like run out there and you would like open it up and you know, go to this section or go to this section and go to this section. That's what these newsletter operators are doing in these newsletters, are kind of recreating these old timey type newsletters. And that's really, you know, what changed and that's kind of really just changed everything for me.

Yeah, I love that. And the idea of having a newsletter that you can sell like a brand that you can sell because of people engaging and wanting what's inside. I think that's really, really intriguing. So I know you've mentioned making money every time that you hit send on an email. Can you walk me through a little bit about an example of what one might look like?

So there's a lot of different ways that you can monetize your newsletter. And some of these I do every week. Some of them I kind of pick and choose. It kind of really just depends on what my promotional strategy is or what I'm promoting for that week. So some options are. And I've done all of these recently. Like in the past few weeks I've had a sponsored post. So somebody has actually paid me to put their free gift or whatever, like get response. We did that for, it was like a side hustle kit. We did that for our Harvey School brand here recently. So they actually paid me to send that out. And they will pay really, really good money to get in front of Your audience. So if people are out there saying, I didn't even know you could do that, well, I didn't either. And when I found out how to do it and where to find people that could find me to pay me to do it, it really did change things. So that's. Now a lot of us are familiar with affiliate marketing. So that's another way. If you have like a section in your newsletter, maybe it's I'm gonna make something up. Maybe it's like tool of the week or something. You could have a teaching section in there that kind of teaches them a little bit about how you're using that tool, obviously, and have that in there. So it's just one section in your newsletter. Something short, sweet, but you're really making it valuable. And also promoting that particular offer to the make money. Every time I send out would just be my own, like digital products or services or whatever I'm promoting there. And I almost do that every single week. You know, that's, you know, something I would put in there. But I'm very strategic about how I do that. So like for instance, in my creator's MBA newsletter, I have a section that's called bookmark worthy. And in that section that's like kind of the meat of that newsletter. And I want to make sure that people walk away after they read that. They're like, that was worth me opening up that newsletter. So it's something truly super valuable and that I've covered in there. And I might have a little promotion. Like if you want to know more, you know, you can do this type thing foreign.

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I love those ideas and even just the sponsorship idea, that's actually newer to me, like a newer concept. I've done a lot of lead magnet swaps, which is great freebies. But the idea of starting with a sponsorship, somebody wanting to pay me to be in my newsletter, it's a pretty cool thing. Like, I want to kind of.

I know other people are like, how.

Do you do that? So can you break down just what that looks like and maybe how you can pitch it, or how do you find sponsors?

In January, I made $3,000 by doing just that. And it was really just putting a section in my newsletter that was, you know, either a lead magnet or something that they were wanting to promote. Maybe it was a webinar. So something. So between both of the newsletters I had, I made $3,000. So definitely can do it now. How do they find you? I'll just walk you through how some of these people found me. One was through the Ad Creator Network for ConvertKit. They reached out to me saying, and this was actually for my hobby school newsletter, they said, tim Ferriss wants to sponsor your newsletter. Here's what you're going to do. And they gave me everything. So I just had to put the snippet in the newsletter. So that was one. Another person reached out out of the blue. So I don't know. I actually don't know where they found me. And they wanted me to promote a webinar for them that was for the self publishing. Com. So that was. And we kind of went back and forth, came up to an agreement and I said, I will, you know, do it for X amount. So we did that. Passion Fruit Me is passion F R O O T dot me. And you can put that in the show notes if you want. I actually have my newsletters there and I do get a lot of people that are reaching out to me wanting to do, like, sponsorships there. So that's another place that they found me. And I think two of these sponsors that paid me in January found me through Passion Fruit.

Do you have a little note in your newsletter, like, where the sponsorship is about becoming a sponsor or anything like that?

I don't. It's something I certainly can do. You know, sometimes, like in our hobby school brand, we'll send out emails to some of our past speakers and our affiliates saying, here are some ways that you could either collaborate with us or get your name out. And so we'll do that. Sometimes we'll put in blurbs if you want to, like, collaborate or sponsor. You know, here's the options there. But I don't normally include that as a normal kind of section in My newsletter.

Okay, very good. So I know you've built multiple six figure brands primarily through email, which is amazing. So I'd love to hear. Do you have any other secrets or tips to keeping subscribers engaged and eager to open up your emails? Because there is so much competition out there and so everyone gets so many emails every day. How do you get them to click on yours?

The first thing that you need to build up is your reputation. That's really why or why not they're going to open it. So that goes back to kind of creating that valuable content that I referred to earlier. So you really want to make sure that you are teaching directly in there. You're providing that. I'm not saying that I don't include links to my podcast episodes because I certainly do, but that's just not the complete topic. Right. In your newsletter. You have other things in your newsletter that's valuable for them. So you want them, when they see your name in that inbox, you want them to say, okay, this is worth my attention. And then of course, subject lines are always very important because that kind of gives them a little sneak peek in terms of what's in your newsletter. Always make, you know that preview text, make sure you're always using that. Another mistake, actually I probably should bring up that I see a lot of people making for the newsletter is they'll put like the newsletter name in the subject line. That valuable real estate. You don't want to do that. So if you're doing that, you know that's something you'll definitely want to change. And then you know, it just goes back to that valuable customer content you want them to be. Basically save your emails in a special Gmail folder. And that's kind of what I teach. When I actually made the change in my email newsletter, how I knew that I had really kind of hit the nail on the head if you were is I had people emailing me back saying, destiny, your emails are so good. I like save them all in a special fold in my email system. And I'm like, okay, so now I know that's working.

I love that. Have a little Destiny folder. Yeah, I need a Gabe folder. So when I hear that that's really interesting about the subject line because I have seen some people like say it's kind of their curated newsletter. So it always has their newsletter name. But I feel like that might become more people get kind of a little numb to that at some point and maybe that's the reason that it is a mistake. Or what is the kind of the thought process behind that.

So they know. They know that it's your newsletter. Right. Because they see your name so you.

Don'T need to tell them that.

The only time I actually do that is when I'm sending out a member email. So like for my digital product growth lab or you know, my part time passion club and hobby school, like, I want them to know that that's a member email. So I want them to know that different that they really, really, you know, they just open it that contains important information about their program. But that's the only time I ever include something like that in the subject line.

Okay. I do the same thing for students because I just want them to know that it's the openness because it's important for your membership or the course that you're working on or whatever it is. So very good. Now let's talk measuring success. How can we measure success with our newsletter? Is it just open rates? Are there other things to think about? I think what you even just mentioned somebody replying and saying, I have a folder for your newsletters because they're so good. What are some indicators?

Well, certainly replies, I mean when people are kind of having that conversation with you, I think that's very important. Open rate, sometimes they're just hard to measure. Right. We don't really know if that open rate is really giving us a right. Open rate click are important because like going back to the sponsors that we talked about before, they're going to want to know how many clicks you're going to be able to send over to them. That's going to be basically how they're, how you can measure how much you can charge. So that's one of the most important things. But just like the clicks, you know, the replies and how much you're making, right? I mean, you want to know how much you're making. Like whenever I send out an email, I'm like, okay, I think I might be able to make, you know, whatever $1,000 from this email that reported to me.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And success is so measured different ways than just the numbers. So. And yeah, like singles coming through that came from that email because I know I promoted it, right? Like just all the different things that can come from it and the impact and the ripple effect you can have just with your newsletter, which is really cool. Well, let's talk a little bit about transitioning to an email first business model. So for those who are feeling overwhelmed by social media or whatever marketing strategies they're doing, what would Be your first steps or your first tips to give to someone who is like, I want to transition to this, what Destiny's talking about. Email first business model.

Yeah, the really, the first thing is to grow your email list with your ideal customer. And I think that one of the fastest ways to do that and easiest ways would be just to go somebody that has your ideal customer on their email list and just maybe do a collab with them. That's really one of the easiest ways to get started. Obviously you can do like the summit speaking, the bundle collab, and you know, those are also good ways to get started too. But that's what I would do is just focus on growing my email list. And then from there I just want you to be very strategic about your email marketing. Right. Think about what, what the purpose is of each email, what you're trying to promote in that email, how you can do that mix of promotion and value because you always want to make sure you're providing that value too in your email newsletters. And I do, I do want to make a distinction here because I think this is important. We are specifically talking about your weekly newsletter, a promotion that you're doing to launch an offer. Like what I'm doing right now in hobby school. I'm in the middle of launching our part time passion club. So those emails I'm sending out, those are my newsletters. Those very, very sales focused with the bonuses and the urgency and all that. I'm not talking about. What we're talking about here today is your email newsletters.

Yeah, that's a good distinction to have because there are different purposes for specific promotions and how often you're sending and what's inside it. Right. So if we have a podcast or YouTube channel or a blog, how are you incorporating that into your magazine newsletter style so that it's still in there and can give the value but it's not the main part of the email.

Yeah, so great question. So I have a section like in my creator's NBA newsletter that's for the podcast. But I know and I realize based on human behavior that they're not necessarily going to go from there and just go directly and listen that podcast. It's more just kind of planting the seed saying, okay, that sounds interesting. I want to make sure that I go listen to that when I'm walking my dog or whatever and actually traffic. It was HubSpot. I think when I was kind of doing some of this research, they actually stopped including links from their newsletter to their YouTube channel because it was messing up that algorithm to their YouTube channel. And let me explain why that was happening because I think this is important. Basically when you think about behavior of somebody when they're reading or kind of where their mindset is, when they're reading an email, they're not necessarily in the mindset to go watch a 30 minute YouTube video. Right? So basically what was happening is when they were sending traffic from their newsletter to YouTube and people were going there and they were just bouncing off. Right. Because they weren't ready, they were in that mindset to watch that video. When they stopped doing that and then let that new video and let the YouTube algorithm kind of do its thing, it helped build their channel. And not saying that they wouldn't go back to that video like two weeks later or a week later and point people to it after it kind of build up, you know, the algorithm had done its work. Oh, very good.

Let's make this really practical. What's one simple change that listeners could take today to improve their newsletter's performance? If they could only just do one thing today, what would it be?

If they could only do one thing. And I'm going to make the assumption that they're sending out their newsletter on a regular basis. Now I think that weekly is kind of ideal if you're not doing it on a weekly basis. To me that's kind of the minimal for most of us, for most newsletters out there, because you want to stay top of mind. So let's assume that everybody's already doing that. Then the next thing I would do is map out your promotional schedule. So map it out for the next three months and you're going to use that as the basis for your email content. So whatever you're trying to promote that that particular week, your newsletter content needs to be able to weave all of that in kind of naturally in a non salesy type of way. And that's going to help you kind of promote those offers.

Destiny. Like so many tidbits, so many little gold nuggets. And I know that you are not leaving anyone empty handed. You have the newsletter profit calculator that they can go download for free. Tell us a little bit about what that does.

Yeah, so I wanted people to really kind of dig in and analyze how much they can actually make from each newsletter they send out. And there's. We talked about some of the ways here today. So there's different ways you can monetize, but basically what this calculator will allow you to do based on how many people you have on your email list, your open rate, flip through rates, that sort of thing, and what you're wanting to monetize. It will help you analyze or kind of predict, if you would, how much money you can make from each newsletter.

I love it. And if you download it, you get to see Destiny's newsletters in real time and see how she's formatting them to be magazine style, to be engaging, and.

All of the things.

So if anyone wants to connect further with you, what's the best place for them to find you?

So the best place, which you've already mentioned it, right? It would be my email newsletter, my creator's MBA email newsletter. The other place would be the creators MBA podcast. Definitely check that out. If you're a podcast listener, I'd love to see you there.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me today.

And.