Each email subscriber is worth a lot of money.
But how much exactly?
In this article I’m going to show you:
- How much one email subscriber is worth on average
- How to increase the revenue you get from each subscriber
- Lessons from my personal experience with email marketing
I’ll also show you why we choose Beehiiv to get the highest value from each of our email subscribers.
Let’s figure out how to calculate the LSV of an email subscriber.
LSV stands for Lifetime Subscriber Value.
This means how much profit, on average, does one of your email subscribers bring you over their lifetime.
It is probably a lot more than you think.
First of all, the LSV of an email subscriber depends greatly on the niche and the relationship you have with your subscribers.
On the high end, one email subscriber could be worth thousands of dollars, (yes, literally).
Imagine if you have a list of ultra high net worth people who buy things like private airplanes and yachts. They trust you to recommend good products, vacation ideas, and other high end luxurious things that they might be interested in.
If you email them affiliate links to buy private planes, then your commission could be insane. The same is true if you recommend hedge funds for example.
But I get it, most email lists are not like that at all.
Ok, so what is a typical email subscriber worth then?
It is pretty common for the LSV of one email subscriber to be worth between $10 – $50
I know that is a big range.
I’ll try to break it down a little by email newsletter type. These numbers are estimates based on experience and private surveys.
LSV of one email subscriber
| Type of Email Newsletter | Lifetime Subscriber Value (LSV) |
| Niche Website Selling Consumer Products | $20 – $30 |
| Mass Market Newsletter | $10 – $15 |
| Newsletter with Digital Products and Courses | $40 – $60 |
| One Person With Fun Personality | $5 – $10 |
| B2B Newsletter | $30 – $40 |
Those numbers seem pretty good when you consider that is pure profit just from an email address that someone gave you for free.
The amazing thing is that these numbers can be a lot higher as well, if you learn how to maximize your earnings more.
Of course, you don’t want to try to wrench as much money as possible from your email list, or they will unsubscribe, mark you as spam, or stop reading what you have to say.
You have to find the right balance between generating revenue and providing value. The ideal situation is to look for ways to do both at the same time.
How to increase the LSV of each subscriber
This is both an art and a science.
Your email list is like a goose that lays golden eggs.
You need to treat your audience with respect or they will leave. Be patient. You don’t want to kill the goose!
Some people make the mistake of being too aggressive with their email list.
- They email 5 times a day.
- They keep saying, “This is your last chance to buy…”
- They only email when they have something to sell
- They provide their audience with zero value
On the other hand, many people with email lists aren’t aggressive enough.
- They write interesting emails with a lot of value (Great)
- And that’s it
- They have nothing to sell, no sponsors, nothing to recommend (Ever)
Just because people like reading your emails doesn’t mean you are good at email marketing. The point is to find a sweet spot between providing value to your audience and making money.
You do need to make money at some point!
Fortunately, now in 2024, there are a lot of great options to earn extra money from your email subscribers.
Ways to earn money from email subscribers
- Affiliate links in an email (You earn a commission when people buy)
- Links to sell a physical product (If you have one)
- Links to sell a digital product (You should consider making one)
- Links to sell a course (You should consider making one)
- Sponsored emails (Other people pay to recommend their newsletter)
- Links to join your paid private group or paid private newsletter
All of these ways can potentially earn a lot of money. Combining some of them can do even better.
Let me give you a realistic hypothetical example:
Imagine you are a YouTuber who talks about how to earn money on YouTube.
- You have an email list of 2000 people
- You sell a course for $495
- You email once a week and include a sponsor half of the time
- You recommend a $60 product once a month where you are an affiliate (You earn 40% commission)
- You have a private Skool group for $37 per month where you share YouTube secrets
Now imagine:
- 0.05% of the people in your list buy your course each month
- You earn $0.02 per email from your sponsors
- 0.3% of people buy your affiliate product each month
- 0.05% of people join your Skool group each month
How much would you earn after 1 year?
$5940 from the course
$320 from sponsored emails
$1728 from affiliate sales
$5328 from Skool group
Total = $13 316 per year
Now imagine the average subscriber stays for 3 years.
Total = $39 948 profit from your email list of 2000 people
LSV = $39 948 / 2000 = $19.74
The numbers I gave are actually on the low end for a lot of people. I was just trying to give you an idea of how these calculations work.
With these numbers, you are looking at each of your email subscribers being worth about $20.
Not bad at all.
That means you could also afford quite a lot in advertising to attract new subscribers to your email list (assuming they are the same quality)
But you can make each subscriber even more valuable.
How?
Another way to make these subscribers even more valuable is to use email referrals from Beehiiv.
The essence of referrals is that you incentivize your subscribers to recommend your email list to their own friends with similar interests.
You incentivize them by giving them a free ebook, a free YouTube cheat sheet or something, in exchange for their friend’s email address.
If done well, this can dramatically increase the LSV of your email list.
Email boosts are another new feature to consider. You can pay to boost your emails to another related email list.
Or you can earn money by allowing other people to boost their email newsletter on your list.
My personal experience:
If you’ve followed my or read my bio, you’ll know that I’m a co-founder of 88Herbs, which is a premium natural supplement company. I’m still doing this now.
I also co-founded an English learning podcast that had over 10 million downloads and a paid membership website.
I use email marketing for both businesses.
Because I have partners, I won’t share publicly exactly what the LSV is for each of our email lists, but I can tell you that they are both in the upper end of the ranges above.
When we send out an email to our 88Herbs list, we get several thousand dollars of extra sales over a 36 hour period, every single time.
When I sent out emails, which were conversational and fun, to our English learning podcast list (over 200 000 email subscribers), we would get about 10 people to sign up for our $75 per year VIP membership.
Many of those people would remain paid members for several years. We had other ways of earning money from that list as well.
The point is, I’ve had experience and success sending emails selling digital products and membership websites to a group of non-native English speakers all over the world.
I’ve also had experience and success sending emails to mainly English speakers in western countries, who buy a physical product.
Both times I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how effective email marketing has been. It was a major part of our business for both endeavors.
I know that email marketing is even more effective now because of the tools that are now available.
That’s why we use Beehiiv for email marketing.
- They have a great marketplace of sponsors
- They have awesome templates to make your emails look great
- They have options like quizzes and polls to make your emails interactive
- They are the best email marketing software for growing and monetizing your email newsletter
Since email marketing is so valuable, choosing the right email marketing partner is a hugely important decision.
Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. We might earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s one way to support us and keep things running. We also only put affiliate links we believe in fyi.
