If you want the FASTEST, easiest way to make more money from your email list… 

There’s always one thing to start with: 

An in-depth email revenue growth audit. 

I’m gonna walk you through how to do this. 

First, let me explain why this is always the first thing to do: 

See, many people will try and look for a genius strategy they can instantly apply to generate MORE revenue from their email list…

Something “extra” they aren’t already doing, that will add bonus revenue.

But that’s step #2…

Step #1 is always a smart audit with someone who can clearly diagnose what the lowest hanging fruit is, where you’re leaking the most money. 

We have 26 strategies we deploy with clients. 

But how do we know which order to apply them in? 

Well, we have to diagnose first, to see where the gaps are in the business, and which strategy is gonna produce the fastest results. 

Let me go through our audit process.

How to conduct an email revenue growth audit

We first need to answer 5 questions: 

-Annual revenue: 

-List size: 

-Monthly list growth rate (%):

-Monthly email revenue:

-Number of emails sent per month:

This then lets us determine: 

-EPS (Earnings per Subscriber) = monthly revenue ÷ list size

-EPS per email = EPS ÷ emails per month

-Email revenue contribution (%) = (monthly revenue) ÷ total revenue

We then compare these answers to the industry benchmarks for your company’s revenue stage:

0–$100K  

– List Size: 500–2,500  

– List Growth Rate: 2–3%  

– EPS: $0.50–$1.00  

– Email %: 10–15%

$100K–$1M  

– List Size: 2,500–15K  

– List Growth Rate: 2–5%  

– EPS: $1.00–$1.67  

– Email %: 15–20%

$1M–$10M  

– List Size: 15K–100K  

– Growth Rate: 2–4%  

– EPS: $1.11–$2.08  

– Email %: 20–25%

$10M–$50M  

– List Size: 50K–500K  

– Growth Rate: 1.5–3%  

– EPS: $1.17–$2.33  

– Email %: 22–28%

$50M+  

– List Size: 100K–1M+  

– Growth Rate: 1–2%  

– EPS: $1.25–$2.50  

– Email %: 25–33%

Let’s walk through an example. 

Example Assessment

Business: A SaaS company offering project management tools with $20M annual revenue.

Current Metrics:

Annual Revenue: $20M

List Size: 80,000 subscribers (benchmark: 50,000–500,000).

List Growth Rate: 1% monthly (benchmark: 1.5–3%).

EPS: $200,000 monthly email revenue ÷ 80,000 = $2.50 monthly (benchmark: $1.17–$2.33).

Revenue from Email: $200,000 × 12 = $2.4M ≈ 12% of $20M (benchmark: 22–28%).

Number of emails per month: 12

Diagnosis:

List Size: 80,000 subscribers

-Within 50,000–500,000 but on the lower end for a $20M company.

List Growth Rate: 1%

-Below 1.5–3%, suggesting poor lead acquisition or high unsubscribes.

EPS: $2.50

-Exceeds $1.17–$2.33 benchmark. Healthy, but can always be better.

Revenue from Email: 12%

-Well below 22–28%, a major leak due to small list size and low growth. Likely causing you to rely on ads, field marketing + expensive travel/hotel/lodging costs, social media with isn’t as cost-effective as email marketing

Number of emails sent per month: 12

-This indicates a lower send frequency as a big issue, and you would likely see more revenue with more email sends each month. You can do this by sending more campaigns each month, or building more flows.

Example Solution

Goal: Grow list to 150,000 subscribers and maintain $2.50 EPS.

This would result in $375,000/month in email revenue. 

x12 months = $4.5M/year

= 22.5% of $20M gross revenue.

This brings us within KPI range. 

Optimization Strategies

Increase List Size and Growth Rate

With a company of your size, you likely have traffic figured out already and have a decent audience size across social media channels (IG, LinkedIn, YouTube), a website with healthy SEO rankings, and advertising methods. 

The goal then should be to capture 5% of leads who visit your website and start converting more social media followers into subscribers to quickly grow your email list. 

–Pop-up forms: Add a pop-up form to your website with a lead magnet. Include embedded CTAs inside your blog posts as well with a lead magnet. Deploy forms on your blogs sidebar to capture more leads there as well (if sufficient traffic). 

–Gated Content: Offer whitepapers (e.g., “Scaling Remote Teams”). GetResponse 2024 notes gated content drives 2% growth (web:4). Aim for 2% growth (~1,600 subscribers/month).

–Social Media Giveaways: You’ve probably seen these before on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. People post something talking about their lead magnet or exclusive asset, then say comment, “KEYWORD” and I’ll send you the link. 

Use ManyChat to CAPTURE emails first, then deliver the guide. Alternatively, send people the landing page for the lead magnet, so they can opt-in to get it and you get their email address. 

–Webinar Series: Host quarterly webinars on project management, targeting 1,000 subscribers/event. Webinars are an exceptional lead gen and list growth tool, mostly because they produce tons of revenue while also building your list! 

Boosting EPS and Email Revenue

–Cross-Sell Flows: Promote premium features to customers who have been long-time subscribers and show high usage in your softwares backend. The goal is to get them to either take an add on service that enhances their results, or get them to upgrade to the next tier plan. 

You can also sell additional credits to customers at a discounted rate, if you notice they’re getting close to their credit/usage limit towards the end each month – but they aren’t using credits fast enough to warrant upgrading their plan yet.

This lets them try additional credits and slowly walks their usage rates up, eventually until they see it’s a no-brainer to just upgrade to the next tier plan. 

Cross-sell flows like these boost EPS by 15%.

By implementing these flows, it will also increase your total send frequency. 

For example, if you take the total number of email subscribers you have and divide that by the total number of delivered emails you send each month, this can help you get your total campaign sends to average out to 16 emails/month instead of the current 12 you’re sending. 

This increases your frequency without you having to worry about creating + sending an additional weekly email.

So to recap: 

Goal: Grow list to 150,000 subscribers and maintain $2.50 RPS, yielding $375,000 × 12 = $4.5M ≈ 22.5% of $20M.

We start with list growth, as that was the core bottleneck. So we would first focus on implementing the list growth strategies, while maintaining our average earnings per subscriber (EPS). 

We identified frequency was a core issue, so sending more campaigns (more flows would mean more trigger events for subscribers, and would naturally lead to more people entering those flows. Combined with list growth methods this basically kills 2 birds with one stone as normally when people join your email list, they also go through flows.)

I hope this was insightful. If you want a custom audit like this for your business, schedule your free profit-per-lead growth audit with me here.