Liz Wilcox is an email marketing strategist best known for her $9 Email Marketing Membership, which gives more than 4,000 members the templates, subject lines, and swipe copy they need to write newsletters people actually open, click, and buy from.
She was also a contestant on Survivor, where she finished in fourth place.
This is an abridged version of our conversation. Listen to the full episode right here, or find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
How did you end up in email marketing?
This one doesn’t have a polished answer. I started as an RV travel blogger. I had an almost two-year-old, my husband was in the military at the time, and we bought an RV because we both hated spending money and cleaning. So why not live in one?
I started Googling how to take care of the RV, and I realized people were making money from RV travel blogging. I thought, surely I can do that. So I started listening to podcasts and webinars and reading blogs, and everything always came back to the same thing: email. You start a podcast to get people on the email list so you can sell a digital product. You start a YouTube channel to get them on the list so you can have a membership. It was all to funnel people onto the email list.
So I started my travel blog, and mama didn’t raise no fool. I started the email list the same day. A few years later, I launched a digital course, and this is where things got spicy. I had a waitlist of 141 people, I did the typical Monday-through-Friday open-close cart, and I made 141 sales. You don’t have to be good at math to know that conversion rate. That’s when I realized maybe RV travel isn’t the thing I’m supposed to be teaching. Maybe I know something other people don’t about email marketing.
When you first started building an audience, how did you get people on the list?
Listen, y’all, three words: loud and proud. Just go on the internet and start talking to people. I didn’t even know you could buy courses on how to start a list. I was in the RV travel space.
I started seeing what other people were doing, and they were all promoting their email list. I’d listen to their podcast, and they’re promoting their email list. How did I get on that webinar? Because they promoted it first. They were doing partnerships. I thought, I need to steal that. Steal like an artist.
So I went into Facebook groups where collaborations for RV travel bloggers were a thing, and I started asking people: you’re growing your blog, I’m growing mine. How about you write a blog for my site, I write one for yours, and at the end we both link to our email lists? Then I started doing the podcast circuit. You have a podcast? A YouTube? You go live on Facebook? Can I come?
And y’all, I was so shameless. I didn’t know you were supposed to be embarrassed or have hesitations. I didn’t have time to feel shame. I’ve since built three businesses, and it’s always about the same thing: how can I be visible, how can I put myself in the right rooms, and how can I make connections so people share my stuff? I’m down with OPP: other people’s podcasts, other people’s platforms. And you should be too.
What have you chosen not to do to grow?
I’ve chosen not to be on social media. I mentioned Facebook groups, but I’m not going in posting videos or going live every day. I wasn’t building my own platform. I was going on other people’s. And I’m still doing it today. You’re listening to me on this podcast. It’s not my show. I’m not editing this, I’m not worried about whether you heard something in the background.
I wasn’t focused on follower counts or views, or making money with advertising. I knew the money was in the list, because people I trusted told me that. I could cut out all the middleman stuff.
But most people aren’t like me. They want to work a little more, or they enjoy having a podcast, or they don’t live in 200 square feet with a toddler and a husband who couldn’t care less about their business. I had to be extremely picky about my time. I knew collaborations, that OPP, were where I needed to spend it, so I could get people on a list and talk to them directly, without worrying about algorithms or SEO.
Tell me about the $9 membership and how it came to be.
It’s all about beginning with the end in mind. About a year after I went all in on email, I was taking clients, because your girl needs to eat. I was writing emails for them, and I knew that’s not how I wanted my life to be forever.
Here’s the thing: those clients didn’t care about my email list. They were already making money. I was taking them from six to seven figures with my words. But those beginners I was building my email list with, the ones who think they hate email but know they need it, are the people I really wanted to serve. That was me when I started.
I also didn’t want client work, because what I provided was good, but the service was meh. I care about my business more than I care about yours, especially if you’re already making multiple six or seven figures. You don’t need me.
So I asked, what can I offer these beginners that eventually gets me out of client work? I came up with a $9-a-month membership where I write your weekly newsletters for you. Most copywriters don’t want to sell newsletters. There’s no money in it. The money’s in sales. But when I charge less, I don’t have to work as hard. If a client paying me $10,000 or $20,000 emails me, I’m keeping the lights on. If a member paying $9 emails me at 4:59, that can wait till morning. It was about setting up the life I wanted. Five years later, we have close to 4,000 members, and that affords me a lot of time freedom.
How did you decide to stick with this instead of chasing the next shiny thing?
I knew it was the path to time freedom, and y’all, I don’t say that flippantly. I grew up extremely poor. To this day I support three households on my business: my mom’s life, my sister’s, mine, and my daughter’s. When I was in high school, I lived in a one-bedroom trailer with seven people.
I had seen so many family members trade time for money and still end up with nothing. My time is worth so much. That made it easy to shake off shiny object syndrome, because I had my eyes on the prize. Everybody and their mother is out there telling you to be on Pinterest, Threads, Instagram, email. Just pick the thing you know you can do and go for it.
“You cannot let even yourself distract you from the life you want.”
But here’s what I want people to hear: I gave myself two years. You can’t try something for three months and say it didn’t work. You can’t do it for 90 days and tell me it failed. I told myself, in two years I’ll get a thousand people. Nine dollars times a thousand is $9,000 a month. For a girl born on the east side of Detroit, that was more money than I could fathom. That kept me going. Spoiler: I think it took one year and six days to hit a thousand. I never took a client again.
Going on Survivor meant your business had to run without you. How did that come to be?
This is what time freedom allowed me to do: go on TV, play games, humiliate myself. I could never have gone on Survivor without the business I built. My daughter dared me to apply, and the first thing I did was look at my calendar, because I knew you need to be gone a month or two.
It was about a year, year and a half into the membership, and every month was getting lighter. Most of my time was spent doing podcast episodes and marketing, not actual work. So I thought, I could actually leave this.
What I did was hire an operations manager. She took everything out of my brain and put it into Notion. She mapped out my workflows, my launches, everything I do in a year. We built SOPs, and now we have a routine for the year. I’m hanging out in Michigan right now because everything in the summer is easy. Why? Because I was going on Survivor and wanted the summer off. It just so happens summer off is nice, so we kept it. It was all about being intentional: I need these months off, how do I do that, and work backwards to get it.
AI is the elephant in the room. How is it affecting email?
It makes it so much easier, because AI writes such terrible emails. If you actually write your email without AI, you’re going to stand out. I beg my members: please don’t use AI for your emails. Sure, use it for ideas, maybe an outline or a subject line. But if you can write the email yourself, it’s going to perform better. And I know you can, because AI didn’t exist four years ago and people were doing the hard thing.
I heard Pat Flynn call it the “sloptimization” of content creation, and it’s the perfect phrase. When you challenge yourself to actually write the email, you connect with humans. AI isn’t connecting with us.
On my last launch, I did something cheeky. At the top of every sales email I put a little callout: “This email is brought to you by a real human. No AI was used in the making of this experience.” People ate it up. It was so obviously me. My open rates, click rates, even my replies were awesome.
What’s the difference between using a template and using AI to write an email?
Using a template is the outline. It gives you a place to not start from scratch. It’s knowing the formula so you can do the math problem. Like in seventh grade, learning the Pythagorean theorem, solving for X. The template gives you the formula, and there’s a lot more editing going on. It’s Mad Lib style.
You’re using your active brain. It’s not a passive experience the way AI is. You’re making connections, seeing patterns in the templates as you write. The template might say, “one to two sentences about something you’ve done in the last couple of days.” You have to use your brain to come up with those sentences. AI would just make something up for you, whether or not it’s true. Then you’d probably look at it and think, good enough, I kind of did that. So AI does the math problem for you, where the template shows you the formula and a few hints, but you have to put it together to solve.
Where do people most often get stuck growing their list?
Growing the list, and I say it with love, people get stuck because they think they’re growing their email list, but they’re not doing list-building activities. Just because you posted on social media and hit a 60-day reels streak doesn’t mean you built your list. That’s a social media sloptimization activity. It’s feeding the algorithm. You’re serving the algorithm, not your business.
You have to be incredibly intentional about the content you create so people go sign up. I might have a series called “Here’s a Thought”: instead of spending $49 on some product, why don’t you spend 49 minutes selling your product to someone else? If you need help learning to sell, go to the link in my bio. It has to have a natural segue. And your online ecosystem has to be set up for it: the right link in the bio, everything working properly.
The other mistake, once people start growing: everybody wants to tell you to tell stories. No. It’s an email, okay? Nobody cares. You’re not on stage. Tell a story on a stage, tell it in an Instagram reel. But in an email, get to the point. Somebody opted in to hear about X, so talk about X. Get in, get to the point, and get out. It’s a newsletter, not a novel.
What does growth mean to you personally?
That is a heavy question, darling. Growth to me means a lot of things, but really: am I the best I can be today? My best looks different every day, but growth means I’m getting better at being myself.
You could listen to this episode and think, this lady’s confident, she’s talking fast, maybe stumbling over her words but she keeps going. I’ve done almost 400 interviews, and that’s growth. Every time, I try to get better at stories, jokes, timing. You’ve probably noticed I’m not talking to Brittany, I’m talking to you. That comes from practice.
So every day I try to get up and practice a better version of Liz. I don’t practice growing my business, getting more members or numbers. Of course those matter, I’m very numbers-oriented. But growth is: can I go to bed feeling like I was a better version of Liz today? To me, that’s growth.
Anything else you want to add?
If you’re struggling with email, if you’re thinking, okay Liz, that all sounds good but I can’t really conceptualize it, that’s why I want you to sign up for my email list. Go to lizwilcox.com and hit the hot pink button. It’ll give you everything you need to get started: a welcome sequence already written for you, three newsletter templates so you can see how to get people to reply, click, and buy directly from your newsletter, and 52 subject lines. Writing from scratch totally sucks. I got everything for you.
Listen to the full conversation with Liz Wilcox wherever you get your podcasts.
Liz’s Website: https://lizwilcox.com/