“You want some tequila?”

That’s what my new doctor said when I walked into the waiting room.

Yes. My doctor offered me tequila. At 11:45 in the morning.

What did he do? What was he trying to accomplish?

He slapped me in the face with a pattern interrupt I never saw coming. 

He said something so unexpected that I stopped thinking about whatever was on my mind and paid attention to him.

I realised I do the exact same thing in my email marketing.

And that one moment, standing in a waiting room mildly stunned and definitely amused, taught me something that most email marketers never figure out. Getting people to open your email is the same job as getting them to pay attention to anything else in life. You have to earn it. You have to say something they didn’t see coming.

That’s just one of the things I’ve learned from sending over 300,000,000 emails and running more than 1,000 split tests across industries like photography, mental health, and business news.

What follows is the full picture. Everything I know about building an email list that actually makes money. Not theory. Not a framework I read somewhere. The stuff I learned in the trenches, from the emails that crushed it and the ones that flopped like dead fish.

Let’s get into it.

Part 1: Why Email Is the Only Marketing Channel Worth Building On

Here’s a question nobody asks often enough.

What happens to your Instagram following if Instagram disappears tomorrow?

Gone. Every follower. Every post. Every relationship you built. Just gone.

Now ask yourself the same question about your email list.

Nothing happens. Because you own it. You can download your list right now and move to any platform you want. It lives with you. Not with a tech company that can change its algorithm, throttle your reach, or shut you down without warning.

(By the way, have you tried to recover a lost Facebook Page or IG account? It’s a nightmare…)

That’s the foundation of everything I believe about email marketing. It’s the only channel you actually own.

But ownership alone isn’t why I’m so obsessed with it. The ROI is sky-high. According to Omnisend, email returns $36 to $40 for every $1 spent. I’ve had months where I made well over $100 for every $1 I spent on my email account. I’ve seen businesses generate $1,000,000 a year from a $99/month email service.

No other channel comes close. Not social. Not paid ads. Not SEO.

You’re probably thinking, “Okay, but social media is where the attention is.” You’re right. But email and social media aren’t competing. They work together. When I have a new YouTube video, I email my list to make sure my biggest fans see it. When a new social platform launches, smart marketers flood it with subscribers from their email list on day one. When Meta launched Threads, that’s exactly what smart email marketers do.

Think about the companies with the most marketing data in the world. Google. Meta. OpenAI. Every single one of them runs aggressive email marketing campaigns. Every single one of them asks for your email address before you can use their products. ChatGPT requires an email to sign up. That’s not a coincidence. The smartest marketers on the planet know your email address is the most valuable piece of information they can get.

And here’s the final argument, if you need one.

When someone goes to buy an online business, the first question they ask isn’t “how many YouTube subscribers do you have?” It’s “what’s the status of your email list?” A healthy email list is an asset because it prints money on autopilot when treated well. Anyone who’s been in business long enough knows it. Here are 11 specific reasons why an email list is the most valuable thing you can build.

The 8 Email Marketing Lies You Need to Stop Believing Right Now

Before we get into strategy, we need to clear out some bad ideas.

Because the email marketing advice floating around the internet is full of stuff that sounds reasonable, but is dead wrong. I know because I believed most of it early on, and it cost me real money.

Here are the eight biggest lies and the truth behind each one.

Lie #1: Email marketing is dead.

More emails are sent every single year without fail. The ROI keeps climbing. And you can’t create a social media account, sign up for any major software, or click on an online ad without being asked for your email address first. Email isn’t dying. It’s the backbone of marketing.

Lie #2: People don’t want emails.

Reality: People don’t want crappy emails. There’s a difference.

The average person checks their email multiple times a day. They sign up for lists voluntarily in exchange for ebooks, discounts, video courses, and newsletters. What they’re rejecting isn’t email. It’s emails that waste their time.

Lie #3: You should send as few emails as possible.

This lie costs small businesses billions of dollars each yewar.

One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was discovering that the more emails I send, the more money I make. I once sent 500,000 emails in a single day with 7 emails goin to every contact. I made a bunch of money and had near-zero spam complaints. The 500,000 Email Rule is real: volume works when the email content is entertaining and easy to read.

Lie #4: You need to be a great writer.

You don’t need to be a strong writer to create good emails. You just need to be clear. 

As long as your message is simple and interesting, people will forgive typos and imperfect grammar. Overly polished writing actually hurts because you stop sounding like a real person and starts sounding like a press release. If you’re really worried, dump your email text into ChatGPT and ask it to fix the errors and simplify the language. Then move on to your next email.

Lie #5: Your emails need to look fancy.

My most profitable emails are plain text.

No logo on top. No custom graphics. No HTML template. Just black works on a light background. They work because they feel like real emails from an actual person, not a mass marketing blast. There are exceptions. If you’re selling sunglasses or makeup, you need people to see the product. But for most email marketing applications, plain text works just fine. Run your own tests if you don’t believe me.

Lie #6: Open rates tell you how you’re doing.

Open rates have been broken for years.

In 2021, Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection, which automatically marks emails as opened on Apple devices. Overnight, open rates across the industry went through the roof. Your 15% open rate became 40% the next day without you changing a single thing. I’ve worked with profitable email lists that had open rates below 10%. If you’re obsessing over this number, you’re measuring the wrong thing.

Lie #7: Unsubscribes are a disaster.

When someone unsubscribes, they’re telling you they’re not the right person for your list.

That’s useful information. And it’s actually a good thing. Because you pay for every subscriber on your list, and unengaged subscribers hurt your deliverability. When someone leaves, your list gets cleaner, your bill goes down, and your emails reach the people who actually want them. I regularly remove people from my list on purpose. A smaller, engaged list beats a bloated, dead one every time.

Lie #8: You can’t sell high-ticket items over email.

I thought this was true early in my career.

Then I sold items up to $7,500 over email. Not to everyone on my list. To the right people, at the right time, with the right sequence. More on exactly how to do that later. Never assume email can’t carry a big offer. It absolutely can.

Part 3: Why Your Email List Is an Eliminator, Not a People Pleaser

Most email marketers think their job is to keep everyone happy. To write emails that nobody will complain about. To stay in everyone’s good graces.

That’s exactly why most email marketers fail. They want to please everyone, including people who will never buy.

Your email list isn’t a community you’re trying to please. It’s a filter. Its job is to find the people who genuinely care about what you do, and let everyone else go.

Think about it this way. If your message is for everyone, it’s boring. And boring emails don’t get opened, don’t get clicked, and definitely don’t make sales.

The marketers who win with email are willing to polarize their list. To say something specific enough that some people think “this is exactly for me” and others think “this isn’t for me at all.” Both reactions are wins. The people who stay are fans. The people who leave stop costing you money.

What does this look like in practice?

I send emails to my list every two days. Sometimes more. My welcome email tells new subscribers exactly what to expect, so if someone doesn’t want to hear from me that often, they can opt out immediately. I’d rather lose them on day one than have them sit on my list unengaged for two years, dragging down my deliverability, and inflating my ActiveCampaign bill.

And speaking of deliverability, the 500,000 Email Rule is the best proof I have that volume works.

When I sent 500,000 emails in one day, I wasn’t being reckless. I was testing a theory: that the relationship I’d built with my audience was strong enough to support heavy volume. It was. Sales came in. Spam complaints were close to zero.

The lesson? If your emails are entertaining and easy to read, people want more of them. Not fewer.

Your instincts about email frequency are probably wrong. Your friends and family will say “nobody wants to read a lot of emails.” But your friends and family aren’t your audience. They’re not the people who voluntarily signed up to hear from you about a specific topic they care about.

Send more. Just make sure every message earns its place.

Part 4: The Infotainment Formula: How to Write Marketing Emails People Actually Want to Read

Information is available everywhere.

You can Google anything. Find tutorials on YouTube for free. Ask ChatGPT a question and get a decent answer in seconds. Pure information alone isn’t enough to keep someone on your list.

What keeps people coming back is infotainment. Something useful AND something enjoyable to read at the same time.

The fastest way to get there is stories.

Stories aren’t decoration in email marketing. They’re the delivery system. A principle you just state gets forgotten. The same principle wrapped in a specific story gets remembered and felt.

“You want some tequila?” is a weird thing for a doctor to say. So when I open an email with that line, you lean in. You want to know what happened. And by the time I explain the pattern interrupt concept, you’re not just reading a marketing lesson. You’re living one. That’s the difference.

So how do you tell a story that works in email?

Start with the hook, not the beginning.

Don’t set the scene. Don’t provide context. Drop people into the most interesting moment first. The tequila. The bad joke. The moment you fart in a fancy restaurant. The exact millisecond everything went wrong. Attention is the currency of email marketing, and a hook is how you earn it in the first two seconds.

And show the transformation.

The best stories move from before to after. Something changes. That change is what your reader connects to because they want to make a similar change themselves. Before and after is the oldest frame in marketing for a reason. It works.

Don’t be the hero every time.

The email marketers people trust most are the ones willing to share their failures.   Sharing those moments doesn’t make you look weak. It makes everything else you say more credible. If you’re willing to admit the failures, the wins must be real.

And use physical details.

You don’t need to paint the whole picture. You just need a few specific details and the human brain fills in the rest. “At 11:45 in the morning” does more work than “one day.” “Angela laughed at my terrible joke” does more work than “a girl I was seeing.” Specific details make people see a movie in their head. When they can see it, they feel it. And when they feel it, they buy.

Write for one person, not your whole list.

Here’s the mental model I use every time I sit down to write an email: I’m giving advice to a friend at a bar at 1 am. Not a crowd. One person. Someone I know. Someone I want to actually help.

When you write for a crowd, your email sounds like an announcement. When you write for one person, it sounds like a conversation. That’s the difference between an email people skim and one they actually read.

Keep it simple.

One email. One idea. One call to action.

Pick the one thing you want to say and say it well. Then stop.

On format, plain text wins more often than you think. Because a beautifully designed HTML email with a fancy logo and custom colors looks exactly like what it is: a marketing blast. A plain text email looks like a message from a person. People respond to people, not brands.

Part 5: What Email Subscribers Are Actually Buying

You can write a great email and still not make the sale.

Because most email marketers misunderstand what people are actually buying when they open their wallet. Get this wrong and it doesn’t matter how good your subject lines are.

Nobody buys a product or a service.

People buy one of two things. The first is a shopper’s high. A dopamine hit from the act of purchasing itself. This is very common with online courses. People buy the course because buying it feels goo, Not because they’ve carefully evaluated whether it’ll help them. That’s a real buyer motivation, and it’s worth understanding.

But most of the time, people are buying an outcome.

They’re not buying a workout plan. They’re buying 6-pack abs. They’re not buying a photography course. They’re buying the ability to take a specific kind of photo of their kids. They’re not buying a luxury handbag. They’re buying the status that comes with carrying it.

What does this mean for your emails?

Lead with the outcome, not the product.

Here’s an easy way to know if you’re doing it wrong: count how many times you say “I” or “we” versus “you.” If your email is mostly “I” and “we,” talking about your product, your features, your program, you’re writing about yourself. Nobody cares.

Flip it to “you.” Talk about what the reader gets. What their life looks like after. What they feel when it works.

Stir up emotion.

If people feel nothing, they buy nothing.

Your email needs to create some kind of emotional response, whether that’s excitement, FOMO, or even a little fear. This should happen in the subject line or the opening line. Not paragraph four.

How do you do it? Play a movie in the prospect’s head. If you’re selling a marathon training program, don’t describe the workouts. Describe the feeling of crossing the finish line, putting on the medal, calling your family. Or go dark. Describe the walk back to the office on Monday when everyone asks how the race went and you have to tell them you didn’t finish. Fear of embarrassment is a powerful motivator. Use it when it’s appropriate.

Give them a reason to buy now.

It’s not enough to give people good reasons to buy. You need a reason to buy TODAY.

Because if someone can just as easily buy in six months, most of them will wait. And then forget. Answer the “why now?” question directly in your email. If you leave it unanswered, you’ve done most of the work and left the sale on the table.

Social proof closes the gap.

Nobody wants to be first. It’s just human nature.

That’s why Amazon tells you how many people bought something this month. That’s why Metal Method, a heavy metal guitar course, used the line “Metal Method has reached more than 50,000 guitarists in 54 countries.” If 50,000 people in 54 countries trust something, the risk of buying it feels a lot smaller.

Use testimonials. Share specific customer results. Tell people how many buyers you have. Just don’t make any of it up. Fake testimonials are illegal in the United States, and the short-term gain is never worth the long-term damage.

Part 6: The 6-Question Checklist Every Sales Email Needs to Pass Before You Hit Send

Most sales emails fail for the same predictable reasons.

Not because the product is bad. Not because the list is wrong. Because the email has a fixable problem that nobody caught before it went out.

Run every sales email through these six questions before you hit send.

Question 1: Am I designed around 1.5 calls to action?

Give someone a lot of choices and they’ll choose to do nothing.

Every sales email should have one primary ask, usually a link to a sales page. Cut everything that doesn’t support it: blog links, social media buttons, other offers. All of it.

But why 1.5? The extra 0.5 is a call to action to reply. Because some people are ready to buy but have one question they need answered first. Those people are red hot prospects. Make it easy for them to reach you. Tell them to reply directly to the email.

Question 2: Am I stirring up emotion?

Read your subject line and your opening two sentences out loud.

Do they make you feel something? Or do they just state facts? Facts alone don’t sell. If your opening is flat, you’ve already lost most of your readers before they ever reach your offer.

Question 3: Am I selling an outcome, not a feature?

Count “I” vs. “you” in the email. If the ratio leans too much towards “I”, rewrite it to focus on you.

Not “our program includes 12 video modules.” But “by module 3, you’ll have your first client.” The feature is the thing you built. The outcome is the thing they want. Give people what they want. 

Question 4: Am I selling something people actually want?

This one might hurt a little.

100% of my clients and prospects believe they have a marketing problem. At least 50% of the time, they also have a product problem. If you’re sending good emails and still making no sales, ask yourself: “do people actually want this?” Great products sell okay under bad conditions. They sell like crazy with average marketing.

Question 5: Do I have social proof?

What evidence does this email give the reader that other people are buying and getting results?

If the answer is nothing, add something. A testimonial. A number. A specific customer result. Even one real piece of proof can be the difference between a click and a pass.

Question 6: Have I answered “why now?”

Read your email and ask: could someone read this and say “I’ll buy it next month?”  

If the answer is yes, think about what could make someone buy right now. A deadline. A bonus. A simple reminder that every day they wait is another day they don’t have the result they’re looking for.

Part 7: How to Sell High-Ticket Offers Over Email — A 5-Step Process That Works

Here’s the lie I believed for too long: email is for low-ticket stuff.

Then I sold items up to $7,500 over email.

Not to everyone on my list. To the right people, using the right sequence. And that distinction, right people and right sequence, is EVERYTHING when it comes to high-ticket email sales.

First, the math.

Say you have 50,000 people on your list and 2,000 customers.

Out of those 2,000 customers, maybe 20 are a real fit for a $5,000 or $10,000 offer. That’s 1% of your customers. 0.04% of your total list.

20 out of 2,000 sounds low. Really low.

But 20 people at $7,500 each is $150,000. From one email sequence. So don’t let the small percentage fool you. The math works.

The catch is this: you must only sell to qualified buyers.

Selling expensive things to people who aren’t ready for them will destroy your business. You end up with Better Business Bureau and Federal Trade Commission complaints, massive customer service headaches, and refund requests that eat your margins and your time. Qualify the right people first. Then sell to them.  

Here’s the 5-step sequence.

Step 1: Start with a tease.

Your first email goes to your whole list. No pricing. No links. Just a description of the program and what it does for people.

Tell people to reply directly if they want more information. Or have them click to be put into a new email sequence. 

This is how you identify your white hot prospects. The superfans who raise their hand immediately. These are not impulse buyers. These are people who’ve been on your list, trust you, and are ready for a deeper relationship.

Step 2: Send an application.

Your next email announces the program is open for applications and that some spots have already been taken.

Don’t lie about this. If you haven’t sold any spots yet, just don’t mention quantity. Fake scarcity will get you in legal trouble.

The application filters out people who aren’t serious and gives you everything you need to close the sale. Because once you know someone’s goals, fears, and current situation, writing the pitch becomes almost automatic.

Step 3: Go one-to-one.

Now you reach out personally to everyone who replied to your tease or filled out your application.

Get on the phone or on Zoom and close them. These people have already expressed interest twice. They’re not cold. They’re warm. Your job is to get them over the finish line.

Step 4: Crank up the volume to the rest of your list.

At the same time as Step 3, increase your email frequency to the whole list.

More emails. More emphasis on results and benefits. More urgency as spots fill up. Keep pushing people toward the application.

Step 5: Announce it’s full and take deposits for the next round.

Once you have as many people as you can handle, email your list and tell them.

This creates interest for the future. Some people who missed this round will put down a deposit so they don’t miss the next one. And the announcement itself is social proof. It tells your whole list that people are willing to pay serious money for what you offer.

The downside risk of this entire process? Near-zero. Sending one more email is basically free. The worst case is it goes out into the universe and nothing happens. But some people just might buy. So why not try?

Part 8: Email Marketing Metrics That Matter — And the Ones That Are Lying to You

I’ll say something I’ve said before, even though I’ve been guilty of the opposite.

Bragging about open rates is mostly theater.

I’ve done it. Posted screenshots of my open rates on social media. And I’ll be honest, at the time I knew those numbers weren’t fully accurate. But they looked impressive, and impressive gets engagement.

Here’s the reality.

When Apple introduced Mail Privacy Protection, it broke email open rate tracking. Every email sent to an Apple device gets automatically marked as opened, whether the person actually opened it or not. Overnight, open rates across the industry shot up. Your 15% became 40% without you changing a single thing.

So if you’re managing your email strategy around open rates, you’re navigating with a broken compass.

I’ve worked with hugely profitable email lists that had open rates below 10%. The open rate was irrelevant because the sales were there.

What do you actually track?

Here’s how I rank the email marketing metrics that matter and why:

Sales. If your emails are making money, your strategy is working. Everything else is a supporting metric at best.

Clicks. Because clicks tell you what your audience responds to. What topics, what offers, what formats drive action. This is the most actionable data you have.

Revenue per email. Divide your revenue from a campaign by the number of emails sent. This tells you which types of emails actually move the needle, so you can do more of what works and drop what doesn’t.

List growth. A healthy list grows constantly because you’re always losing people to unsubscribes and natural attrition. If your list isn’t growing, you’ve got a lead generation problem that no amount of great email copy will fix.

Split test the big stuff.

Most people split test subject line length, button colors, and sending time. Those tests have their place. But the biggest gains I’ve ever found came from testing BIG IDEAS. Entirely different angles, different stories, different emotional hooks.

Does your audience respond better to fear-based framing or aspiration? Does a long story email outperform a short punchy one? Does a personal anecdote drive more clicks than straight teaching content?

Format matters at the margins. The big idea determines whether your email makes money or doesn’t.

Part 9: Email List Health — The Unsexy Work That Determines Everything

Let me tell you about a 100,000-person email list that got wrecked.

The list owner never cleaned it. They held onto every subscriber they’d ever gotten, whether those people were opening emails or not. Over time, the unengaged contacts piled up. Deliverability tanked. Emails started going to spam. Open rates dropped. Clicks disappeared. Sales dried up.

They went from a healthy list to a dead one. Not because they wrote bad emails. Because they refused to let bad subscribers go.

But it gets worse. These lists tend to die out of nowhere. They’ll be going fine for months or years, then one day, you wake up and the metrics collapse. Your domain suddenly gets blacklisted for sending lots of emails with no engagement. 

The good news is this is easily avoidable.

Clean your list.

Regularly remove contacts who haven’t engaged in six months or more. Yes, it hurts to watch your subscriber count drop. But a smaller, active list is worth ten times more than a big, dead one. Deliverability, meaning your emails actually reaching people’s inboxes, depends on your engagement rate. Dead weight contacts drags that number down fast.

I throw people off my list on purpose. It lowers my email bill. It protects my deliverability. And the people who stay are the people who actually want to hear from me.

Protect your deliverability.

Deliverability is simpler than it sounds: if your list is clean and your content is good, your emails land in inboxes. If your list is full of bad contacts and your content is irrelevant, your emails land in spam and nobody sees them.

The basics: use a professional email sending service, not Gmail. Remove unengaged contacts before they drag down your sender reputation. Never buy an email list. Monitor your spam complaint rate, and if it goes above 0.1%, something is wrong.

Set the right expectations from day one.

The best list hygiene starts before someone even gets on your list.

Your welcome email should tell new subscribers exactly what they’re signing up for. How often you’ll email them. What topics you’ll cover. What to expect. The people who aren’t a fit leave immediately, before they sit on your list for two years doing nothing.

The subscribers who stay after a clear, honest welcome email are real fans. They’re the people worth writing for. And they’re the people who eventually buy.

Conclusion: What Good Email Marketing Is Really For

Every principle in this article comes back to one idea.

Getting the right person from where they are to where they want to be.

Not blasting a list. Not chasing open rates. Not building a fancy template. Moving the right people closer to the outcome they actually want, with honesty, with consistency, and with enough respect for their time to make every email worth opening.

The mechanics are learnable. The results are real. I’ve seen a $99/month email account generate $1,000,000 in a year. I’ve sold $7,500 offers over plain text emails. I’ve sent 500,000 emails in a day and come out ahead.

None of it required being the biggest name in the industry. It required understanding what email actually is: a direct line to the people who want to hear from you.

If you want to go deeper, go here and get my free video course on selling $1,000+ offers over email. If this article gave you what you needed, that’s enough too.