This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today's listener has achieved a milestone. They have 3,000 people on their email list. That's great, that's wonderful. I always encourage listeners as you're starting a side hustle, especially if you're trying to build a customer base over time or even just an interest base, like people who are following you because they might want to purchase something at some point, email list is critical. It's one of those things that hasn't changed very much, at least in terms of its necessity over the years.
Social media, lots of different platforms come and go. There's always like some new thing, but email list is pretty consistent in terms of its importance. So it's great, they have 3,000 people on their list, but they're concerned because they're noticing that the cost keeps going up. Email list providers, they don't do their work for free. And in fact, they charge more, they charge based on volume, on subscriber volume, like the number of subscribers you have, it could be some other metric, but that's typically the most important one in terms of the cost.
The more subscribers you have, the more you pay in a monthly subscription. So they're wondering, can anything be done? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. We're gonna look at this question in just 30 seconds.
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Hi, this is Michael calling from London. I've got more than 3,000 people on my newsletter list now, which is really exciting. But I also noticed something that's given me concern. Now that I have more signups, my subscription costs more. I guess that makes sense in some way, but does it just keep going up forever?
What if my 3,000 strong list turns into 30,000? What if I grow it all the way to 100,000? Could it eventually cost me thousands of dollars a month? It bothers me because I'm not currently selling anything, so I don't really have a way to justify the expense. Is there a way to get an unlimited email list account?
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Well, all right, got some good news and bad news. I guess the headline is this is how these services work. They do in fact charge by volume. And so if you have more volume, it costs more. If you do grow it to 100,000 plus names and emails, that could easily be $1,000 a month.
I pay more than that, in fact, for my account. So I don't know of an unlimited email list account, at least not one that's reputable and it's going to be reliable. It is possible to not use one of these companies and kind of self-manage the process, but it's pretty difficult to do so. It requires a lot of advanced technical knowledge. You're still gonna need to use some sort of program or platform to actually send messages.
So one way or another, you're going to be paying for something. And these platforms make it really easy. They also help increase your email deliverability, which is really key. I mean, like the one thing you don't want is to be sending out emails that aren't going to people's inbox, which can happen when you try to do it yourself. So to me, the bigger issue here, it's not like, how can we have a huge email list and not pay for it?
The bigger issue is that you're not currently selling anything. Like if the email list is taking off, if hundreds of people and thousands of people are saying, like I want this information, I want to hear from this person or this business, somehow we need to monetize it, like one way or another. So leaving aside the email list cost for now, my question is, what are your goals for the business? Like what are your goals? What do you hope to achieve?
I know like a number of small businesses with pretty small email lists of a couple thousand people sometimes that earn $100,000 income a year just because it is targeted and tight and they've really figured out who their ideal customer is. And you can do a lot with this. So that's why it's good news, bad news. Bad news is you have to pay for it, but the good news is you should be able to do a lot with this. It should be well worth it once you begin to monetize.
So my suggestion is start soon. Let's spend some time thinking about that. And hopefully you can come back with a good report. Let us know. Listeners, if you have a question or a comment, sidehustleschool.com/questions will continue to feature them every week along with updates from listeners as they launch and grow their projects.
I'm so glad you're out there. I hope you grow your email list or whatever metric you use to measure success in your side hustle. If you're just trying to figure out what it is, just remember I'm cheering you on, trying to make a new resource for you every day that will be helpful. Okay, that's all for now. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
