Matt Ragland breaks down how email newsletters generate six-figure revenue. A client made $250K in six months, Ali Abdaal's course drove 80% of $500K+ sales from 120K subscribers, and a 10K-subscriber list with 5-8% conversion on a $200 product yields $100K-$160K per launch. Sponsorships add $1.5K-$2K monthly.
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I didn't understand how much money newsletters could make. And I know there's like some frameworks around this, but, uh, one of our first clients that, that we had, um, Matt, when you and I started working together, the first time I ever logged in their ConvertKit account, I saw like the dollar number of like, I think it's like past 6 months. And that number was over $250,000 in the past 6 months from their newsletter. And I I'm not saying, I'm not giving that number out, or I'm not gonna tell who this person is for the sake of like bragging at all. It's more so just like I had no freaking idea that that could happen, right? And the other story I use, Matt, is that you and I worked on a launch. You mostly worked on a launch for a big creator and it did $120,000 in a weekend. And all of the sales mostly are coming from email list, not social.
The one I think that you're thinking of, it was 100% through email. And another, we had done a prior version of that launch for the same client where he did promote it on social also. And I think 95% of the sales came through, came through email. And there's actually like, I'd have to find the tweet, but there's a public post about this from Ali Abdaal from a few years ago when he, or maybe just a couple years ago when he was running the Part-Time YouTuber Academy and he showed like screenshots from Google Analytics and from, uh, ConvertKit. Ali had at the time like 2 million subscribers on YouTube, over 100,000 followers on socials, like probably close to 400,000 across like all the socials and a mere, like, 120,000 email subscribers. So the smallest audience, but I think he said it drove, like, 80% of sales for the course. And this is a course that did, like, well over $500K. I think I'm just— I don't have, like, the specific numbers in front of me, but I just remember that it was such a staggering difference. It was email and everything else. Like everything else could have doubled and email still would've been like number one.
Yeah. Walk, walk me through that because I think I have the, um, I don't wanna get this wrong for our audience. Like I want, I want you to explain it.
Yeah.
But let's say I had, um, let's just say I had 10,000.
Okay.
Subscribers. Like that, that's an attainable goal for most everyone that's listening, right? Like you kind of need, to be doing this for a very long time or have some external factors come in to bump over that 10,000 subscriber mark, I'll say. So let's just say sent 10,000 subscribers and say they, someone wanted to launch a course or a t-shirt or any sort of product in their newsletter, right? Like help me do some math on this of like how much money someone could make from their 10,000 subscriber list. And once again, wanna reiterate, 10,000, not easy to get to, but also not impossible most people listening?
No, not at all. Because I want to give you even some numbers on getting to 10,000. If you averaged 555 subscribers per month for 18 months, you would be at 10,000 subscribers. And you like don't get like, that's an average. So like if you, if it goes like most things do on the internet, the first 6 months you may average 100. But then the last 6 months, you'll average like 2,000. Chanel Growth in Reverse, like, saw this, like, she's been posting about this stuff for quite a while. I think she's over like 30,000 subscribers now, but I know 18 months ago she was at like 1,000. So it's just, it starts compounding and starts building. So if you're talking about 10,000 subscribers, if we're talking about a course that some of this is going to depend, I want to be clear. Some of this is gonna depend on what your offer is and also what type of topic or niche that you're in. Okay? So there can be some variance here, but on average, let's say that you're offering some kind of, like, relatively short course. Think, like, Justin Welsh's Content OS or LinkedIn OS. That's something that, like, a lot of listeners are probably familiar with. We actually— we have a lot of clients that come in and say, like, can you help me build a Justin Welsh style course? So shout out to Justin for changing the game. I would expect to have like an 8, 8-ish percent conversion rate. So that means that over the span of maybe 2 or 3 launches of this thing, let's say in a year, you can convert 8% at $200. So that is $200 times 800, 800 customers, that's $160,000 on a 10,000-person email list. Now you might even say like, hey, 8%, you know, 8% is too high. It's probably more like 5%. Again, like you can play with all these numbers, but in really simple, really round numbers, 500 customers, $200 offer, That's $100,000. And yeah, I'm not saying you should expect a $100,000 launch every single time you throw this out. What I have found, the way that I kind of got to my first $100K in courses, is that the first one was like $40,000, and then the second one I like extended, expanded. I could do like some different things in terms of creating different tiers on the value ladder. And the second one would probably be around $40,000. Again, it just might be like it's a $500 offer and with some like cohort element to it. And then like it just kind of goes from— it just kind of goes from there. Might do a flash sale and make $20,000, $25,000. That was kind of my progression to the first $100K was to do like $35,000, $40,000, do $35,000, $40,000 again, and then run a couple of smaller sales that would get to the other like 30-ish that I needed to hit that first $100K. But it was within— it was in about a 12 to 18 month period that I was able to do that. I was also doing sponsorships. I had some brand deal opportunities. And the other little thing about this is that 10,000, you can, you can get sponsors for a lower like subscriber number than that. But 10,000 kind of is a magical number for subscribers, also for sponsors, I should say, also. And you could probably expect that for a brand sponsoring your newsletter at 10,000 subscribers, assuming an open rate of around 50% and a click rate of between 3% and 5%, you could probably do like $400 to $500 per email. So you're talking about $1,500 to $2,000 per month for sponsors. Now, again, that'll vary. I also recommend if you're early on to like book your sponsors in like 3-month blocks. So try and get them like, I would rather have someone come in and say if I was going to do $500 per send, 4 sends a month, that's $2,000. I would rather book $5,000 for 3 months upfront than try and do 2, 2, 2. So that's, I mean, We'll have to have Justin more on to talk more about sponsor stuff. We could probably like bring in some of his summit content. But yeah, I mean, the money, the money's there. Uh, the money's there in the list. The, the money's in the list for sure.
All of that to say, this is why you should get to 10,000 email subscribers, right? This is the value of a newsletter. When I first understood like how that equation kind of works, where it's like, you're probably gonna be between 3 and 8, if you're lucky, 10% of your list buys at any given point or over the course of a product's, like, life cycle. Um, and then the dollar amounts attached to that, right? So we talked about the different, like, ladder of products. If we haven't done on the show yet, like, we're going to, where, like, there's $50 products, there's $100, $150 products, there's $500 products, there's $1,000 products, right? And obviously, as that dollar number goes up, your percentage likely goes down, but it all kind of comes out to the same of how it was going to be. All of this, once again, to say like growing the email list and sending consistent, awesome newsletters that are directly to your audience, that point people to offers and point people to what you want them to go to, that is like the math behind it is, is the reason why you do this, right? And I couldn't see that as a, a junior employee working with you, Matt, and everything that we've been doing is like we're writing awesome newsletters, but I didn't know the next part of it, which is like, the actual money behind why, why we're doing this.
