If you sell online courses, you already know this particular pain: you’ve built the list, you send the promotions, you do everything you’re told to do when Black Friday rolls around — and the revenue that comes back never quite matches the size of the audience you just emailed.
The instinct is to assume you need more of something: a bigger list, better copy, bigger discounts, but in six years of running email campaigns for course creators, the most expensive problems I’ve seen had almost nothing to do with size, and almost everything to do with whether the right message was reaching the right people at the right moment.
That’s what I sat down to talk about with Dr. Sapphire on the Email Marketing Experiments podcast. I walked her through two campaigns that taught me this the hard way — including one that went from two years of sliding results to roughly fifty percent more revenue and one with a million people on it that still managed to break my heart.
The first is a Black Friday campaign that came within five thousand dollars of six figures.
For two years before that, the same creator’s results had been sliding — the same offer, sent to the same everyone, performing a little worse each time. What turned it around wasn’t a clever subject line or a new urgency tactic. It was the decision to stop treating one list as one person, and the customer research that told us how to split it.
There’s a specific moment in the episode where I explain what changed and why it produced roughly fifty percent more revenue — and I’ll be honest, it’s less glamorous and more useful than most “what we did for Black Friday” stories you’ll hear.
The second story is the one I still think about: a re-engagement campaign for a one-million-person email list.
We brought two hundred thousand inactive subscribers back from the dead — genuinely, the kind of number that should make a marketer sing, but then the promotion underperformed anyway. What the data revealed about why is the part that reframed how I think about big lists, deliverability, and the difference between an audience that exists and an audience that’s actually listening.
If you have ever wondered whether segmentation is actually worth the effort, or what to do when a big list produces small results this episode will change how you think about email marketing strategy.
INSIDE THIS EPISODE
1. Why sending the same Black Friday offer to everyone was quietly killing this creator’s revenue, and what changed when they segmented
2. Why Your Black Friday Campaign Flopped (and How to Fix It with Segmentation)
3. The 3-Layer Customer Research Framework for Highly Profitable Email Launches
4. What a 1 million-person email list with low engagement actually looks like behind the scenes
5. How a re-engagement campaign brought 200,000 inactive subscribers back from the dead
6. Why deliverability alone is not the real problem and what the data actually revealed
7. How to do customer research that gives you real segmentation ideas, not just guesses
8. The email revenue self-assessment tool that tells you exactly where you are leaking money
9. How to Turn Your Email List into a Sales Engine
Resources
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicabadiu/
- Website: www.monicabadiu.com
- Free Resource: https://www.monicabadiu.com/email-revenue-self-assessment/ – this is a self-assessment that identifies the bottlenecks that are impacting email marketing performance. It’s based on my experience working with course creators for 6 years.
Connect with Dr. Sapphire, host of the Email Marketing Experiments podcast
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.sapphire_/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayebanoabenwari/
- Threads: https://www.threads.com/@dr.sapphire_
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/sapphirelearninghub/
- Website: https://sapphirelearninghub.com/