Four Years of Email Marketing, By the Numbers

I built and ran the email marketing for my own freelance coaching business, MeltzerSeltzer, from 2022 to 2026. When I closed the business, I pulled the full data set before shutting down the account. Here's what four years of running one list end to end actually looked like.

The Snapshot

My strategy drove 17,455 form visitors into 2,201 opt-ins across a mix of freebies, waitlists, and challenge signups!

Growth Over Time

The growth wasn't steady. It was slow for two years while I was using Instagram as my primary attraction marketing.

Then jumped nearly 5x in 2024 once I started using LinkedIn content marketing and launched a recurring freebie funnel and a cohort based challenge.

Both the challenge and my LinkedIn content stayed the backbone of list growth through 2025 and into 2026.

List Health, Read Correctly

The average newsletter open rate dropped from 65.2% in 2022 to about 41% by 2025. On its own that number looks like decline. It isn't.

A list that grows nearly 20x in size will always dilute its average engagement, since it's pulling in cold freebie downloaders and warm buyers into the same pool. The number that actually matters is that the list still averaged 42.5% open and 3.6% click overall, beating industry benchmarks the entire time, even at its most diluted. Scale did what scale does. It didn't break anything.

What Actually Performed in the Inbox

Practical, specific content consistently beat general updates. Newsletter sends like "How I built my website (Notion and Super)" and "Stabilize your freelance income" pulled 43 to 54% open rates and 6 to 7% click, well above the newsletter average.

The single best performing sends across the entire account, by a wide margin, weren't newsletters at all. They were early access waitlist emails for a paid challenge launch, hitting 56 to 57% open and 12 to 20% click. Scarcity and advance access framing outperformed everything else I sent in four years.

Automations Did the Heavy Lifting

One off sends are one thing. Automated workflows are where the real numbers lived.

A few standouts:

Inside these sequences, the delivery email consistently did almost all the converting. On the two biggest funnels, click rates collapsed after email one (from 63% down to single digits, and separately from 18% down to 1%), while open rates held up much longer. People kept reading. They stopped acting after the first email delivered on its promise. That's a pattern worth knowing before writing email four of any sequence.

Lead Generation, Form by Form

Across 17,455 total form visitors, the list converted at a blended 12.6%, but that number hides a much sharper pattern.

Named, specific outcome freebies drastically outperformed generic signup pages:

• Get Clients Guidebook freebie page: 4,738 visitors, 1,009 opt-ins, 21.3% conversion, nearly half of every opt-in the business ever generated
• LinkedIn Challenge series signup: 530 visitors, 59.6% conversion
• Business Audit Workshop signup: 78 visitors, 53.8% conversion
• General newsletter signup page: 6,227 visitors, only 4.5% conversion

The lesson held every time. A specific promise beats a generic invitation to "join the list," even when the generic page gets far more traffic.

Revenue, Split Three Ways

Total gross revenue across the account came to $38,468.77 over 655 transactions, and it broke down almost evenly across three different models:

A $23.55 average subscription and a $584 average installment plan ended up contributing roughly the same total revenue, just through very different volumes. Revenue peaked twice, in September 2025 and February 2026, both tied to challenge launch windows, which lines up with the same scarcity and early access pattern that showed up in the inbox data above.

What This Shows

Running this list for four years meant owning the entire system: writing the copy, building the automations, creating the visual designs and graphics, testing what actually got opened and clicked, and tying all of it back to real signups and real revenue, not vanity metrics. The patterns that showed up here (delivery emails as the true conversion point, specific offers beating generic ones, scarcity outperforming everything else) are the same principles I'd bring into email marketing for any brand.

Data pulled from Flodesk analytics exports and Circle transaction records, July 2026, prior to account closure.

📚Blog🏕️Appalachian Trail 🎙️The Guidebook Podcast👩🏻‍💻Digital Marketing for Outdoor Brands📲Rachel Meltzer | UGC Creator for Outdoor + Travel Brands

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