💰 What it takes to build a profitable email marketing system

Here's what you DO NOT need:

❌ You do NOT need to be techy. If you're tech-savvy enough to read this email, you're tech-savvy enough to write and send emails to your future customers.

❌ You do NOT need experience in email marketing. You can learn what you need as you build your system and grow your audience.

❌ You do NOT need a truck-load of money. Email marketing is probably the most accessible and affordable digital marketing channel available to us as solopreneurs. (You can even get started for free - Kit's free Newsletter plan allows up to 10,000 subscribers.)

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Here's what you DO need:

✅ A proven way to attract and collect your ideal subscribers.

✅ An onboarding process that reassures new subscribers they've come to the right place.

✅ A nurture system that builds trust and turns interested subscribers into customers.

✅ A way to deliver what you sell that leaves your customers delighted with their purchase.

✅ A system that knows what your subscribers and customers have bought, what they're interested in, and what they might need next.

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None of these things are particularly difficult to do.

You just need to work out what makes sense for your business, design the system around it, and then build it.

And yes, there's some work involved - there's no shortcut around that.

But once it's built, you have something very different from another marketing activity that needs your constant attention.

You have an asset.

A system that can attract subscribers, build relationships, generate customers and create repeat business - whether you're actively working on it that day or not.

What's happened to Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is still one of the most recognised names in email marketing, particularly among solopreneurs and small businesses.

When someone decides to get started with email marketing, there's a good chance Mailchimp will be one of the platforms they consider.

It originally became hugely successful because it did one thing particularly well: it made email marketing feel simple, accessible and affordable to small businesses and solopreneurs.

But from around 2019, it began trying to become an all-in-one marketing platform, adding websites, ecommerce, social media, CRM, advertising and other tools.

It seems that, in trying to do more things for more people, Mailchimp gradually lost the simplicity and focus that had made it successful in the first place.

After it was bought by Intuit for around $12 billion in 2021, its performance appears to have weakened further.

Revenue has declined, user growth has stalled while several competitors (e.g. Kit, Mailerlite, Klaviyo, etc.) have continued growing, and Intuit has made significant job cuts, including reportedly within important areas such as email deliverability.

The conclusion isn't that Mailchimp is about to disappear - it still has millions of users and could remain a large, profitable business.

But it's no longer the dominant, category-defining email platform it once was.

And I think there's a useful lesson in its story for all of us...

Sometimes, adding more doesn't make a business better.

Mailchimp became hugely successful by being really good at one thing. Somewhere along the way, it seems to have lost some of that focus.

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P.S. I was a Mailchimp user myself for a few years (probably around 10 years ago), and I never found it particularly well-designed or intuitive to use. I often wondered how many solopreneurs tried email marketing for the first time using Mailchimp, found it more complicated than they expected, and simply gave up. 🤷🏻‍♂️

YouTube's rules are changing, but I don't care...

If you use YouTube as a way to market your business, you may have read about the impending changes to its monetisation model in the Partner Program.

Essentially, if you qualify and are accepted into it, you can generate an income based on how many views your videos get across their network.

There are a bunch of things you need to do to get paid, but as a baseline, you need to have at least 1,000 YouTube subscribers to your channel, and a combined minimum of 4,000 watch hours per year - two criteria I have not yet achieved with my channel.

This week, YouTube announced that from February 2027, new creators applying to the Partner Program will need 8,000 qualified watch hours in the previous 365 days - double the current 4,000-hour requirement.

Understandably, this has upset a lot of creators - particularly those who were getting close to reaching the existing 4,000-hour requirement.

But for me personally, it doesn't really change anything.

I've never built my YouTube channel with the goal of making money from YouTube.

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Why I don't care

When I say I don't care, what I really mean is that becoming monetised by YouTube has never been a goal of mine.

For me, YouTube offers a much bigger monetisation opportunity - and it doesn't require me to meet any of those criteria.

It's simply creating and publishing content that my ideal customers will find helpful, and using that content to attract them to my email list.

Once they become an email subscriber, that's when the real relationship-building - and monetisation - opportunities begin.

I already generate far more income from YouTube using this approach than I'm ever likely to make from the Partner Program.

"Should I use a 'tag' or a 'custom field' to store that data?"

That's a question I was asked this week by one of my customers.

To be fair, it's a relatively common question - and I completely understand why. The difference isn't always obvious.

If you're not familiar with the terminology, think of a tag as a little Post-it note you attach to a subscriber to indicate that something is true about them, or that something has happened.

For example:

• Downloaded Free Kit Guide
• Attended July Webinar
• Purchased Hub Membership

These are essentially yes/no pieces of information.

Did they download the guide? Yes or no.

Did they attend the webinar? Yes or no.

Did they purchase the Hub membership? Yes or no.

A custom field is slightly different.

Rather than simply telling us whether something is true, it stores a value about that subscriber.

For example:

• Current business challenge: Growing my email list
• Number of subscribers: 501-2,000
• Next service needed: Kit Consultation

And importantly, those values can change.

If I asked you today:

"What's the biggest challenge in your business right now?"

...you might answer:

"Growing my email list."

But if I asked you the same question three months from now, your answer might be:

"Turning subscribers into customers."

The custom field stays the same - Current business challenge - but the value stored inside it changes as your circumstances change.

So, as a general rule of thumb:

Tags = Is this true, or did this happen?

Custom fields = What is the current value?

The customer who asked me this question wanted to store the most recent product or service a subscriber had purchased from her.

So, based on what I've explained above...

Which would you recommend she uses - a tag or a custom field? 🤔

I'll give you my answer in next week's Email First.

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P.S. As with most things, there are edge cases where you might choose a tag when a custom field appears to make more sense, or vice versa. Sometimes that's simply because of how your email marketing platform works or a limitation within the software.