Tarzan Kay has been teaching ethical, story-driven, consent-based email marketing since 2016. She’s done it with a nearly 50% open rate, an 82% five-star subscriber score, and a philosophy that treats every person on her list as a human being worth respecting. Her Kit account is the platform that makes all of it possible.
When Tarzan Kay talks about email marketing, she doesn’t talk about funnels first. She talks about consent.
“We have frequency options that are built into the email template,” she says. “You can choose once a month, once a week, or all the emails. Anytime we’re in a promotion, we always use opt-outs. You can turn off any promotion, right at the top of the email. We let people hide countdown timers if they don’t want to see countdown timers.”
These are tactics for marketing as well as the foundation of a philosophy Tarzan has spent nearly a decade developing and teaching, one she’s now formalizing into her next major program, the School of Consent-Based Business.
The premise is straightforward: most online marketing feels slimy because it is, and creators get stuck not because they lack skill but because they can’t bring themselves to market the way they’ve been taught.
“The reason you’re stuck in your marketing is because you don’t want to be a predator and you don’t know any other way,” she says. “So come over here and I will help you.”
Her numbers are the proof of concept. With roughly 12,000 subscribers, Tarzan runs a business that generates revenue primarily through digital courses, a mastermind, and a monthly membership, and she does it with engagement metrics most creators with ten times her list size would envy. An 82% five-star subscriber score. Cold subscriber percentage so low it barely registers. Open rates hovering near 50% consistently.
Example of Tarzan Kay’s emails
“I feel like because I’m in email marketing, my numbers should be higher than everyone else’s,” she says with characteristic directness. “If they’re higher than everyone else’s, I’m like, yeah, okay. But for me, that’s normal.”
The email automation system behind Tarzan’s business
Tarzan is quick to credit the person who built most of what makes her Kit account hum: her operations lead Sandra, who she describes as “the Spock to my Captain Kirk.”
“Any conversation about the things I do strategically with email marketing should mention Sandra,” Tarzan says. “I would say, here’s the strategy I want, can we do this? And she would go figure out how it’s possible.”
The thing Tarzan is most proud of is their tagging system, a structure Sandra engineered and Tarzan eventually learned herself after years of handing it off.
“Our tagging system is like an Italian painting,” she says. “Very clear categories of tags.” One of the most important innovations: what Sandra calls action tags that trigger automations rather than simply labeling a subscriber.
An action tag is a tag that makes something happen. It triggers an automation. If you don’t label something as a tag that triggers an automation, how do you know if adding a tag is going to fire something off?
The conditional content layer is equally sophisticated. Rather than building separate email sequences for different subscriber segments, Tarzan’s team layers conditional blocks inside a single email, a technique that reaches maximum complexity during a promotion.
“In my newsletters, there’s three different messages depending on which box you’re in,” she says, describing how her Girl Boss Apology Tour summit emails worked. “Either I’m saying: hey, come join us, it’s happening. Or I’m saying: awesome, you signed up, here’s what’s happening today. Or this person signed up but hasn’t upgraded yet: here’s what you’re missing. Or this person already upgraded: here’s your link. All of that happens in the same email. An email that’s not even about that.”
How Tarzan used Subscriber Signals to discover affiliate partners
When Tarzan participated in the beta for Kit’s Subscriber Signals, a Pro feature that surfaces behavioral and influence data about your list, she put it to work immediately for her summit launch.
The goal: identify potential influencer affiliates already hiding in her subscriber base, without having to manually research thousands of people.
“Kit had several pre-built influencer-related segments inside Subscriber Signals,” she explains. Working through those segments, her team tagged 1,066 subscribers as potential influencer affiliates and sent a direct outreach email inviting them to join the summit affiliate program.
The result: 12 people joined as affiliates, generating 47 leads—roughly 5% of total summit leads—from a single outreach effort that didn’t require building a full campaign or nurture sequence. “One of the biggest benefits was being able to surface potential influencer relationships that may not have otherwise been obvious within a large subscriber base,” she said. “It gave us a starting point for affiliate recruitment without needing to manually research everyone on our list.”
“I think there was more potential here than what we were able to fully implement,” she says.
The plan for next time: start earlier, identify partners well before launch, build relationships intentionally, and treat Subscriber Signals as a long-term relationship discovery tool rather than a last-minute activation lever.
“For us, the strongest value was less about immediate conversion and more about helping identify relationship opportunities that could be developed more strategically over time.”
Why she left — and why she came back
Tarzan has been on Kit for nearly a decade, but she’ll tell you honestly that she wasn’t always. Around 2018, she left for ActiveCampaign, drawn by specific features Kit didn’t yet have.
It didn’t go well.
“As soon as we moved to ActiveCampaign, I never logged in again,” she says.
The feature set couldn’t compensate for the support gap. “Sandra told me that in the two years we were with ActiveCampaign, she never—not one time—had someone resolve a ticket that she submitted.” When the platform raised its price by $1,000, the decision was easy.
Coming back to Kit meant migrating years of accumulated automations, a significant lift that Kit’s team took on largely themselves. “Kit did a lot of work for us, rebuilding automations, getting us migrated back over,” Tarzan says. “I thought it was quite generous of them to do.”
The return also meant coming back to a platform that had grown considerably.
“In the years we were away, Kit added so many features. It’s so clear to me they are building a tool that is for me. When they roll out new features, I’m like, yeah, they’re actually not just building a tool for Pat Flynn. They’re also thinking about the small-timers, like me. People that have fewer subscribers. Making a tool that’s really going to work for everybody.”
She pauses and smiles. “You can quote me.”
Kit’s customer support became a competitive advantage
The platform is one thing. The relationship is another.
“Kit treats me like I’m the most important customer,” Tarzan says. “Whenever I go to an event and Kit is there, I’ve been out to dinner with their team. Nathan [Barry] always greets me by name.”
She’s been part of the beta program for new features, including Subscriber Signals. She collaborated with Kit’s team through Sparkloop. She’s been on the receiving end of hands-on migration support. None of it feels transactional.
I don’t know that there’s any other software we use—and we use a lot of software—where I have personal relationships with the people who work there. It really did feel like coming home again. Like, oh, now we’re with a company [where] there’s actually people here.
Email automation creates more time for creative work
Tarzan’s business runs largely through email. Courses drive the majority of her revenue, the mastermind accounts for most of the rest, and a $25/month membership called Email Review Club serves as a community anchor for her most engaged subscribers aka the people who tend to buy other things too.
Building a business that makes space for life
But the platform Kit provides isn’t just about running promotions or filling cohorts. It’s about creating space.
What Tarzan is most excited about right now has nothing to do with a course launch. She’s training as a community song leader leading grief singing circles, showing up at 200-person events to guide rooms full of people back into their bodies through music. She texted a colleague, Kate Northrup, about bringing it to her annual event. She got on faith, on the basis of relationship. She led 200 people in song and called it one of the top experiences of her entire career.
“I want to be out in the world doing things as well as behind my computer,” she says. “That feels like safety too in a world that’s more uncertain. Things that used to sell easily don’t sell as easily. So having something that brings you into community, into presence. That’s what’s exciting to me.”
The email list keeps running. The automations keep firing. Sandra keeps the tagging system humming. And Tarzan gets to go sing.
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