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How Much Is Your Email List Worth in 2024?
Learn How To Make Money Making Great Content
Kanishka Kumawat & Lenore Sterner
September 1st, 2024
This article has been updated to maintain its accuracy and relevance.
Imagine one day you wake up and your audience is gone.
That’s the reality that some people are experiencing when they exclusively build their audience on social media. Don’t get me wrong, social media is an excellent way to build your brand and your audience, and to get your name out there.
The problem with social media, though, is that you don’t own your audience. If for some reason you were to lose access to your account, you suddenly would lose access to all of your followers.
This isn’t to scare you or to cause a panic. That being said, it has happened before, in India in 2020 when TikTok was banned, and could happen again in 2024 with potentially banning TikTok in the US.
Protect yourself and build an audience that you own– not anyone else.
That, of course, leads into today’s topic. How much is an email list worth?
To you, owning your list may be invaluable, and rightfully so. It’s also worth noting that directly selling your email list can put you into hot water legally, so putting a hard and fast number on how much your list is worth is difficult to nail down.
The value of your list really lies in how much money you can make over time, through email marketing and other monetization options.
Building an email list takes time, consistency, and–most importantly–value for the audience. Done well, list-building can help you get maximum effectiveness for your marketing campaigns and scale your brand.
Table of Contents
How Much Is an Email List Worth?
Well, it depends. A list of 10,000 emails from highly engaged users may be worth more than a list of 100,000 emails from low-activity users.
Additionally, the value of an email list can vary depending on the industry and how the list is being used. For instance, a list of emails from people interested in a particular product may be worth more than a list of emails from people interested in a specific topic. A potential sponsor looking for a specific niche may be willing to pay more if your audience matches that niche.
People’s interest in your niche, and how you leverage it is what makes your list more valuable. It is not just a way to build your brand outside of other social media channels, but also to tell your story.
Email lists provide an opportunity to collect valuable data about your customers, such as their age, location, interests, and purchasing behavior. This data can be used to build more effective campaigns, increase conversions, and boost ROI.
Email lists with well-curated data allow you to send targeted messages to your audience, segment them into different groups, and track the performance of your campaigns.
Email lists are priceless assets for any business. They are a way to reach out to potential customers, build relationships, and increase sales. In simple terms, an email list is worth exactly what it can do for you.
4 Factors To Consider To Understand the Value of an Email List
List Size
While pure size is a significant element, it isn't everything. When monetizing your emails, it’s more important to have an engaged audience than simply high numbers.
beehiiv’s Ad Network, for example, works on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis. This means that even smaller creators can monetize (and potentially make more money!) because what matters more is how many people are clicking the advertisements.
An engaged audience = more link clicks. So, what’s more valuable, a list of 10,000 engaged subscribers, or 100,000 subscribers who don’t interact with your newsletter?
List Quality
Now that we’ve established how important a quality list is, how do you measure the quality of your list, and how do you ensure that your subscribers are the engaged readers you’re searching for?
To measure how well engaged your audience is, you can look to key metrics like:
Click-through rate: This is the percentage of subscribers who clicked at least one link in your email. This number is especially important when considering how effective a CPC advertisement may be with your audience. An audience with a higher click-through rate is naturally more likely to click an advertisement.
Open rate: This is a percentage of how much of your audience opens your emails. This is the most direct way to know whether your audience is engaged. If a subscriber regularly opens your emails, you know that they are interested in what you have to say.
Once you’ve established what an engaged audience looks like, take the time to clean your list regularly of anyone who isn’t engaging.
You can do this easily on beehiiv by creating a segment of people who haven’t opened your emails in the last 90 days. Send them an email asking if they still want to receive your emails. If they click yes, they’re still interested. If not, you can remove them from your list easily.
Open Rate
A small list with a high open rate is going to impress a potential sponsor more than a huge list with a low open rate.
That’s why list cleaning is so valuable. Although it may seem counterintuitive to remove hard-earned subscribers from your list, you’re only removing the subscribers who aren’t interested in your content.
This will improve your numbers and put your newsletter in front of only the people who want to read it. Building an engaged audience can be a slow process, but it pays out in the long run when negotiating deals.
Unsubscribe Rate
It's a bad sign if the list is losing email addresses. List retention provides valuable information for you to understand how you are doing.
A large amount of unsubscribes may indicate that you need to switch up your content. On the flip side, a low unsubscribe rate is encouraging, particularly if the open rate is high.
How Much Can You Sell Email Lists For?
It’s important to understand that directly buying and selling lists isn’t a great idea, for a wide range of reasons. The biggest being that more than likely, doing so will violate the law. Let me explain this further.
Legality of Buying and Selling Lists
The big question you’re probably wondering is – is it legal to buy or sell a list?
The short answer is: probably not.
The longer answer: that it depends where you are, and where the person you’re marketing to is.
The problem with buying and selling a list is that you don’t know who is on the list, where they are located, and whether they want your marketing materials to begin with. The likelihood is that they don’t, because they have not consented to receiving emails from you.
Selling your list means that the person who consented to receive emails from you is now being sent emails from someone whom they have not consented to receive emails from.
Consent is important because it’s legally required in many parts of the world, including all of Europe under GDPR. If you buy a list, you don’t know what laws that person may be covered under, and because you haven’t received their consent to market to them, you’re likely going to violate the law by sending your newsletter to them.
In the United States, CAN-SPAM is the legislation that covers marketing emails, and under CAN-SPAM you must make it clear who is sending the email, and also make it easy for them to remove themselves from your list. Not doing so can lead to harsh penalties.
Unfortunately, this is non-negotiable. Familiarize yourself with GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws to better understand what is required under law– and also to see the consequences of violating either law.
The biggest takeaway here is that you don’t know who’s on your list, and they haven’t consented to receiving emails from you. There is a strong likelihood that you will be violating the law, and that just isn’t a gamble that’s worth taking.
Acceptable Use Policies
Going further than legal policies, beehiiv’s Acceptable Use Policy does not allow you to buy lists and opt-in is required.
This is going to be the norm on any platform you attempt to send emails from. Violating the AUP or Terms of Service (TOS) policies can get you kicked off the platform and cause a huge headache that just isn’t worth it.
Deliverability Issues
If you market to someone who hasn’t consented to your emails, the likely outcome is that your emails won’t be opened. Worse yet, the people opening your emails will likely mark your emails as spam.
Each time this happens, it is less likely your emails will be delivered in the first place, and more likely that your emails will go straight to spam.
Purchased lists also are more likely to contain spam traps, or emails that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to identify senders who are sending spam or senders who aren’t practicing good list hygiene. Because you did not receive consent from the emails you’re sending to, it’s easy for a spam trap to be on your list, and for you to immediately end up blacklisted and in a spam filter.
By now you understand why buying and selling lists is a bad idea– but what about acquisition?
Acquisition is a little bit different because you are buying and selling a full business (for which the email list is an asset) with the understanding that the buyer is going to be continuing to build an existing business relationship with their new audience.
Assuming everyone on the list has opted-in, they opted-in to receive emails from that specific business, and have an expectation that the emails they receive from that business will continue to be what they have grown to expect.
And as a best practice, the new business owner can always ask if the subscribers still wish to be subscribed (giving the opportunity to have the new list opt-in, and therefore stay legal).
Acquisition is a great goal, and a great way to sell what you’ve created, with much less risk of violating any laws, policies, or regulations. And you can make some serious bank doing it.
beehiiv’s easy to use features has made it possible for numerous newsletters to be acquired. Here are some of our favorites:
Milk Road is probably the best example of a newsletter that got acquired. They scaled from 0 to 250k subscribers using beehiiv in under a year by focusing on compelling content and being strategic with how they grew.
Inverse Cramer used X (then Twitter) to build his email list and focus on creating engaging and entertaining content that kept their open rates above 50%-- a huge part of why they were able to get acquired in only one year.
AI With Vibes used his background as a developer to build mini-tools and release them, bringing on new subscribers who were interested in what he was building. This incredible growth tactic led to his newsletter being acquired in less than a year, while the creator was still in college.
Can You Make Money From an Email List?
Yes, you can. There are numerous avenues to monetizing an email list–too many to include in a single article. That said, here are some of our favorites.
Email Marketing
Once you have a list and are sending out emails, you should consider creating an email marketing campaign. This is a series of emails that are sent out over some time with a specific goal in mind, such as promoting a product or service.
Remember to track and analyze the results of your email campaigns. This will help you determine what is working and what is not, so you can make changes to your campaign as needed.
Monetization on beehiiv
Monetizing on beehiiv is easier than you may think, and possible even for smaller creators from day one. The monetization features are available on all paid plans and make it easy to make money creating great content.
Ad Network
Anyone on a paid plan with beehiiv can take advantage of the Ad Network, without you having to lift a finger to find opportunities. You have full control over which ads you choose to run and get paid easily a few weeks after the ad send.
Boosts
Boosts allow you to get paid for recommending other beehiiv newsletters– and if you want, you can pay to have other newsletters boost yours! You get paid when a new subscriber opts-in to a newsletter you recommend through Boosts. It’s that simple.
Partner Program
Loving the experience on beehiiv? You can earn 50% of revenue for an entire year for anyone you refer with the Partner Program. It’s a great way to earn passive income, just share your link!
You can turn your audience into recurring revenue by creating premium subscriptions, and keep 100% of the revenue (minus processing fees).
Email List Worth: Final Thoughts
Email lists hold more value than social media in today’s times because of the experience they can provide to a selected audience. Be it surveys and polls, audience segmentation, or just engaging with them on a personal level, you can do it all through an email list.
There is a lot that email lists can help you achieve if you do it the right way. A high-quality email list is a priceless asset for your business. The right email service will help you build better for yourself and your audience.
If you’re wondering which service to choose, we’ve got your back.
You can start your free trial with beehiiv, and start writing!
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