Why I'm all in on emails

If you received my welcome sequence and read it you know my initial thoughts about newsletters.

They always felt spammy, boring and salesy and I didn’t want to join in and do the same.

The most I knew about emails was the endless emails from nigeran princess offering me 1M dollars or daily clickfunnels emails spamming my inbox offering me a “crazy discount never seen before” for the 3rd time that week…

My reasons for being anti it were fair.

And the inbound leads I was bringing from my LinkedIn were great, but….

I started building an email list as per everyone’s request.

20% of my sales for my first cohort came from email.

Around 60% this time around for the launch of literally academy.

The necessity and power of email was crystal clear.

So in this email I’m going to tell you why this is, how to have success building your list and my best piece of advice to growing your list this 2025.

Why I’m all in on building an email list

Harsh truth: you don’t own your social media following you rent it.

So every single day you’re at mercy of the platform to let you post and also show your content to people who “follow” you.

If you look at my typical engagement rate, I get from 1-3k likes per post.

I have 200,000 followers.

If you do the maths, only a tiny fraction of people who follow me see my content and engage with it.

Vs on email, my open rate ranges from 49% to 60%.

And when it comes to lead generation and sales - email is a beast.

• You get direct access to your audience
  Because they subscribed to you, specifically.

• You build authority and credibility at scale
  Newsletters are longer and in-depth vs social media posts

• Content repurposing becomes simpler
  You can turn a long-form newsletter into 5x posts

And my most favorite reason: is community building.

No one knows me better than you guys who read me in long form.

There’s less strictness to how I write, more room to explain and a lot more space for you and me to go back and forth.

How to build your list successfully

There are 3 simple stages to building an email list Kieran talks about inside his new course.

• The build up (tension)

• The launch (release)

• The post-launch (extend)

And each of them were crucial for me when I was building my list.

Although when I built mine I was quite contrarian but that’s just generally my style.

The build-up: Me dropping comments around LinkedIn on how newsletters were outdated, boring and honestly useless... I then said to people I had something better.

The launch: I dropped the most epic post on LinkedIn that drove 5,000 subscribers in less than 24hrs.

The post launch: I wrote a follow up post about the launch and why it was important for me to do this. Making people feel like they could join in on my new mission.

This drove an extra 1,000 subscribers to the list.

If you want me to share it with you, reply to this email and I’ll send you the link to both posts!

My best piece of advice while growing your list…

Focus on building relationships with your readers.

Weeks into building my list i realised that the true strength of email wasn’t just about subscriber size it was about engagement and building loyal readers.

And to do this, you need to make them feel personal - which is why Kieran’s approach works so well..

I stopped worrying about making every email perfect or thinking it needed to be sales-focused. Instead, I focused on creating emails that felt like a conversation, providing insights, sharing stories, and sometimes even struggles.

If you’re not sure if you have an interesting story or fear sending too many emails… I’m here to remind you - people WANT them and people WANT you.

PS: Kieran’s emails are the best emails I’ve ever read so honestly I can attest his course is valuable to anyone looking to actually win the newsletter game and stop relying on the algorithms.