Starter Story - You’ve got 319 billion emails

Hey,

This is Pat, founder of Starter Story - every week I write this email to share the lessons we learned after talking to successful founders around the world. If you're not interested, you can unsubscribe here.

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Here are this week's stories, enjoy!

You’ve got 319 billion emails

Did you know that’s how many emails are sent daily? 

Another fact: there are over 4 billion email users in the world?

Those are some pretty hard-to-match numbers compared to most other industries

Given that, it’s no surprise that email is every marketer's favourite channel.

It’s been around for so long that it could seem that it’s outdated, but that’s far from reality. Businesses are betting bigger than ever because of their email marketing.

Like this business, which has reached $100K/year by simply sending more email newsletters.

These other companies leveraged the email channel to grow:

• 50% of this $2.4M/year business revenue comes from email

• This $72M/year company grew 57% thanks to a new email strategy

• These $960K/year cookies have grown double digits thanks to email marketing

And of course, there’s a huge opportunity for companies to help businesses grow their email revenues:

• This email marketing platform generates over $1M/year

• This email agency generates $5.8M in sales for its clients

By the numbers:

• $10B -> expected global email marketing revenue by 2023

• $36 -> returned for every dollar spent on email marketing

• 100+ -> case studies where email has played a major role

Our take:

I’d never get tired of praising email marketing. Of course, trying different strategies it’s necessary, but once someone visits a website, getting their email should be a priority. That’s the first step to establishing a relationship.

And once you have an email relationship with someone, you don’t depend on algorithms to reach that person. You own that channel. It all depends now on the quality of the content you provide.

At Starter Story, email is also very important. And Klaviyo, our email tool, plays a big part in our success of growing our email list to over 235K subscribers. I know they’re one of our sponsors, but its tools to capture and nurture emails have truly been key for us.

Game day means payday

Sports fans are counted by the billions. Soccer, basketball, cricket, and field hockey,... all have over 2 billion fans around the world. And they spend $725 on average per year.

It looks like a very attractive TAM (total addressable market) size to me. And of course, offers a world of business opportunities.

Like this guy, who turned his baseball newsletter into a $200K/year business.

More examples:

• This NFL newsletter generates $64K/year of extra income

• This $360K/year podcast

• This guy who makes $96K/year for watching sports

A message from Semrush

How this website grew to 5M visits per year and became a $200K/year business

“Doing SEO is like building a machine—it's going to take a while and you may not see results from that machine for a while. But once it's built, it just makes money constantly in the background.”  - Alaina O’Neal, TheSmokies.com Co-Founder

How did they achieve it?

#1. Ran a Semrush Backlink Audit and removed links from spammy websites. 

#2. Low-hanging fruit keyword strategy approach. Targeting relevant low-competition keywords at first; to quickly grow traffic and build site authority, which lets you rank for more competitive keywords. 

#3. Content optimization. Achieving an average 2.5X increase in pageviews for articles optimized using Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant.

Try Semrush free for 14 days (no strings attached).

Quick hitters

(1) This kid pockets $12K/year in profit with Minecraft. Despite being a 10+ years old videogame, Minecraft is still very popular and many people have built profitable businesses around it.

Like this Standford dropout who makes $60K/year, or this founder who used it to finance his startup,

(2) This couple went from freelancing to running a $480K/year agency. In a world where everything is in English by default or as an almost mandatory second option, you can make a lot of money translating content. Amazon listings, landing pages, app descriptions,... the amount of text published online is endless.

It may not sound sexy, but it’s a space where you can make good money: bought a translation company for $1.2M and now makes $4M/year, this guy went from freelance to $1M in revenue, and this founder started a $480K/year voice over business.

Sponsored by Klaviyo

An email marketer's best friend

Klaviyo is the tool we've used to grow our email list to over 200K readers!

At Starter Story, we add over 10,000 new readers to our newsletter every month, mostly thanks to Klaviyo's opt-in tools (such as popups and advanced logic we can do on our site).

Additionally, we generate thousands in additional revenue every month using their email marketing flows and segmentation tools (really cool stuff if you dig into it).

Obviously, I have to say good things since they are our sponsor... but being 100% transparent: Klaviyo has helped us grow our business in a very meaningful way over the last couple of years.

Get Klaviyo today!

One last thing...

Want to see exactly how 3,000+ founders built businesses with thousands of customers? Join Starter Story to access our business knowledge database.

P.S. Again, a huge thank you to Klaviyo - our sponsor at Starter Story. Try Klaviyo!