Discover how a welcome sequence, weekly newsletter, and launch strategy became the foundation of Liz Wilcox’s email-first business using Kit.
Welcome sequence. Weekly newsletter. Launches. That’s it. Liz Wilcox, the Fresh Princess of Email Marketing, has built a $500K/year business on the simplest possible approach to email. And she’ll tell you that’s the whole point.
Liz Wilcox has a theory about why most creators fail at email marketing.
“Everyone thinks email is this suit-and-tie type of game,” she says. “That’s why people hate email because the majority of people put on their suit, put on their tie, and they’re writing, ‘Dear Mrs. Miller.’ Or they’re e-commerce and they’re sending ten emails a day.”
Her approach is the opposite. No complicated funnels. No elaborate segmentation. No persona.
“I’m an email-first online entrepreneur,” she says. “If I’m doing my business, I’m either in my inbox answering emails or I’m in my Kit account writing emails. And that’s pretty much it.”
The results of that deliberately simple approach: a $9/month membership with nearly 4,000 members, a growing speaking business, and a creator education brand generating around half a million dollars a year built almost entirely on three things: A welcome sequence. A weekly newsletter. And launches.
“I just like to keep it really simple,” she says. “My business makes around half a million dollars a year, and that’s enough for me to, instead of trying to build out more advanced funnels and segmentations, just go to the beach.”
Why Liz upgraded to Kit’s Pro Plan
Liz has been on Kit since December 2017. She upgraded to Pro in 2021, when her $9 membership started growing quickly and she wanted more visibility into what was actually happening on her list.
The feature that sold her: subscriber scoring.
“I want the best metrics,” she says. “I teach email, so I want to make sure I have a really good grasp on what my email list actually looks like beyond just opens and clicks.”
Kit’s subscriber scoring ranks each subscriber from one to five stars based on engagement behavior. For Liz, it’s become a near-daily diagnostic tool, and she’s turned it into a game.
She explained, “A month ago, 90% [of subscribers] were five-star. Now it’s only 87%. So I ask, Oh, I wonder, is it the quality of my leads? What am I sending out?” she says.
Instead of having to put something in a spreadsheet or scroll through all my campaigns individually, I can just look at that subscriber scoring and see whether I’m doing better or worse than I was a month ago, a quarter ago, a year ago.
The same gamification mindset applies to the Insights dashboard, where she tracks email performance over rolling 90-day windows, comparing each individual send against her overall average.
“I sent out an email. Wow, that had a 5% click rate. My average click rate is only 2.8. How can I do that again?” she says. “I use it as a game more than, oh my gosh, I have to strategize and analyze all these analytics.”
She pulls up the engagement overview the same way. “Right now it says I have 86 subscribers that have never engaged. Okay, well, could I get that number to 80? It’s not something that feels heavy. It’s like, oh, that’s actually pretty good, and what could I do better in my welcome sequence to get that number even lower?”
She adds, “I always tell people: forget about the benchmark and just be in competition with yourself. Your open rate is what it is. That’s your baseline. See if you can improve it from there.”
How Liz measures success
Bookmark this for later. She focuses on:
- Subscriber scoring
- Engagement trends
- Click rate improvements
- Welcome sequence performance
- Unengaged subscriber count
How Liz personalizes email without complex segmentation
With about 14K subscribers, Liz faces the same challenge every growing creator does: how do you make an email feel like it was written for one person when it’s going to thousands?
Her answer isn’t segmentation. It’s personality.
“I’m so lazy,” she says with a laugh. “So I just use the really simple things Kit has, like subscriber field names. But what I really focus on is getting replies.”
She pays close attention to what her audience is telling her, then writes directly to it. When replies started coming in about feeling overwhelmed and struggling to concentrate, she pivoted her content to match.
When she noticed she hadn’t talked about NSYNC in a while (a longtime signature of her brand) she wrote a whole email with ten NSYNC song references woven through it.
The email was a win-back campaign targeting lapsed members of her $9 membership. The subject line: “canceled.” The preview text: a reference to NSYNC calling. The body copy peppered with “bye bye bye” references and just enough personality to make people smile before asking them to come back.
“I’m getting members back,” she says. “People know it’s from you. They know you’ve got a little personality. They like you.”
It’s the same principle she teaches beginners: you don’t need a persona. You just need to be yourself.
“The more you lean into yourself, the more your metrics go up,” she says. “People open your emails because they know it’s from you. You can just hit send and you’ll see the results.”
How Creator Network became a consistent subscriber growth channel
When Kit launched Creator Network, the feature that lets creators recommend each other’s newsletters to new subscribers, Liz was an early adopter. Today, 321 creators are recommending her newsletter, and she’s received over 4,000 subscribers at a conversion rate she’s worked up to nearly 20%.
But the subscribers are almost secondary to what Creator Network has done for her business relationships.
“I really try to reach out to every person that recommends me and personally thank them,” she says. “It’s allowed for a lot of collaborations from people I never would have known or maybe knew in passing. That email that comes through really helps me keep it top of mind.”
For Liz, collaborations are one of her primary list-building strategies. Having them surface organically inside Kit rather than requiring cold outreach or conference networking changed what was possible.
“When Kit announced creator recommendations, I was like, wow, that’s actually something I want to keep the Pro account for,” she says.
“Because now it’s ten times as valuable. I don’t have to go outside of my email service provider to find collaborations. It’s right here. Bada bing, bada boom, I’m sold.”
Why email outperforms social media for long-term business growth
If email is the tortoise, social is the hare.
“Social media is more media than social,” she says. “It’s where we get our news. It’s creators trying to grab your attention. But email is strong and steady.”
She puts the history in perspective: electronic mail was first sent in 1979. Email predates the internet. It’s a decentralized platform that is, by design, slow to change, and that’s exactly what makes it powerful.
“We’ve been emailing literally since the 70s,” she says. “We know what it is. It doesn’t change. It’s familiar. It’s a comfortable space for people, even if they say they hate their email. Guess what? The number one app people open when they wake up is their email app. It’s not Facebook. It’s not Instagram. It’s not even TikTok.”
Social platforms change constantly. Algorithms shift. Reach fluctuates. Email doesn’t.
Social media is changing constantly, and you have to keep up. Email is slow and steady. We’ve all heard of the tortoise and the hare. Which one wins?
Why simplicity continues to scale Liz’s business
Liz’s goal for the coming years: 10,000 members in her $9 membership. That’s $1.2 million a year from a single offer priced for beginners, proof that you don’t need a high-ticket course or a massive list to build a serious business.
“So many people told me, especially when you teach email marketing, that tends to be an expensive product,” she says. “And here I am teaching it for nine bucks a month. I just want to prove to my audience that you can have an email-first, sometimes email-only business that makes a million-dollar offer. You can price it whatever you want. You don’t have to run ads.”
Liz’s tips for why simple email marketing works
- Automations work, but focus on fewer stronger automations
- Consistency is the most important thing for your email list
- Relationship building is key for growth
- Repeatable systems help creators of any size scale
- Personality over perfection—lean into what makes you, you
Nearly a decade into her Kit relationship, her take on the platform hasn’t changed. It’s only deepened.
“You can start with those 1.0 strategies—welcome sequence, newsletter, sales—and grow into whatever it is you’re trying to grow into. Once you make a living with Kit, you can also make a killing with Kit. Because it grows with you.”
Earlier this month, Liz announced that she bought Smart Passive Income, Pat Flynn’s longstanding creator business. Liz plans on using the same marketing skills and tactics she shared to grow her own business to continue to grow SPI. You can read more about Liz’s plans for running SPI here.
FAQs
What is the best email marketing strategy for creators?
The strongest email strategy for creators combines four things: a real welcome sequence for new subscribers, tags and segments that keep content relevant, automations that handle the repetitive sends, and consistent delivery to inboxes people actually check. Segmented emails drive three times the engagement of generic blasts, and automations let you welcome, sell, and re-engage while you focus on the work only you can do. Put those four pieces in place once, and they keep working long after you’ve moved on to the next email.
Do I need advanced email funnels to grow my business?
No. A short, well-built sequence usually beats a sprawling funnel, especially while you’re still learning what your audience responds to. Terry Rice runs a single automated sequence tied to one free guide, and it brings in over $10,000 a month on its own. Start with one automation built around one goal—a welcome, a launch, a re-engagement—get it working, then add complexity only when the data tells you to.
How often should I send a newsletter?
There’s no universal number. What matters more is picking a schedule you can sustain and keeping it. Tell subscribers upfront what to expect (weekly on Tuesdays, a monthly deep dive, whatever fits your workload) on your signup form, then keep that promise. Some creators send weekly, some send once a month, and both can work well as long as the cadence is consistent enough that subscribers remember who you are and why they signed up. Consistency protects your open rates far more than frequency does.
What is a welcome email sequence?
A welcome sequence is a short series of emails—usually 3-5, sent over your first 1-2 weeks with a new subscriber—that replaces the single “thanks for signing up” email most lists send. It’s the one series every subscriber sees, and it typically earns open rates of 50-70%, well above the 30-40% a regular newsletter gets. A simple version covers three moments: a welcome that sets expectations, a question that helps you learn about the subscriber, and your story or best work. That basic structure alone will outperform a single welcome email.
How can creators personalize emails without segmentation?
You don’t need separate segments to make an email feel personal — a merge tag that pulls in a subscriber’s first name, or a block of conditional content inside one email, can do most of the work. Drop a subscriber’s name into a subject line or body copy with Liquid, Kit’s personalization tool, and add a fallback like “there” for anyone who didn’t share one. From there, you can show different content to different people inside the same send—a product recommendation only to non-customers, or an event date based on location—without building a single new segment. It’s how creators like Tarzan Kay send one email that reads differently to everyone who opens it.
What is Subscriber Scoring?
Subscriber Scoring is a Kit feature, available on the Pro plan, that automatically gives every subscriber a score from 1-5 stars based on how recently they’ve opened your emails or made a purchase. A 5-star subscriber engaged in the past 30 days or bought something from you; a 1-star subscriber hasn’t opened an email in nine months or more. You can use the score to see the health of your whole list at a glance, or build a segment of your most engaged people before a launch. Tarzan Kay keeps 82% of her roughly 12,000 subscribers at 5 stars—a sign of how selectively she grows her list.
Can a simple email strategy generate significant revenue?
Yes, some of Kit’s highest-earning creators run on strategies simpler than you’d expect. Terry Rice built a six-figure consulting business on one automated sequence tied to a single free guide, and it still brings in over $10,000 a month without him touching it. Danny Gregory earns $45,000 a year from a paid newsletter with only 600 subscribers. Revenue tends to follow how well you know and serve the people already on your list, not how large or complicated your setup is.
