You don’t need a huge email list to grow your business and make money.
There, I said it.
And I mean it.
I’ll say it again for the folks in the cheap seats.
You don’t need a huge email list to grow your business and make money.
Really.
I know this goes against everything you’ve heard for the past decade or so. I heard the same thing.
“Grow your email list and you’ll make more sales…”
“It’s a numbers game…”
“The more people you have, the more chances you have to sell…”
It gave all of us a complex!
There’s this feeling that if your list is small, you’re not succeeding.
Worse yet, there’s this idea that if your list is small, it’s not worth writing to.
No. This is wrong on so many levels.
Here’s why…
It’s Not the Size of Your Email List That Counts
It’s what you do with it.
Yeah, I went there. Sorry (not sorry).
Because it’s true.
I was on 2 podcasts within the last 2 weeks where this came up as an interview question.
It’s always some variation on “A lot of business owners have small email lists. What should they do about that?”
Easy. Write to them regularly. Just like you would if you had a list of 10,000+.
Why?
Because numbers don’t matter.
Engagement does.
You can do more with a small, highly-engaged email list than you can with one that is huge and unresponsive.
I’m going to reveal a personal secret here…
My email list is tiny.
Especially compared to many others in my industry.
Seriously. Here’s a screenshot of my Contacts page showing that I have 553 contacts on my email list.
And honestly, I’m fine with that.
Why? Because my email list is also engaged.
My average open rate is 35%. That means more than 1 quarter of the people on my email list open my emails every week.
When you consider that not everyone opens every single email I send, that means the number of people who are actively engaged with my list is even higher.
That is what you want from your email list.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
True story: I once had a client whose email account was temporarily suspended because their email list wasn’t engaged enough.
They had a huge list! 20,000+ contacts that we emailed regularly. And yes, we had them segmented properly, so people weren’t being bombarded with emails.
And yet…
I found out about the suspension when I went to send our weekly nurture email and discovered that I couldn’t send anything. In fact, nothing was sending. At all.
When I contacted the email service provider (ESP) they said that our bounce rate was too high and it was potentially damaging the ESP’s overall send rate.
Yeah, your ESP will get pissed at you if your list isn’t paying attention to you.
You know why your list doesn’t pay attention to you?
If you’re not sending consistently and/or what you’re sending isn’t serving them.
Email addresses start bouncing for lots of reasons:
- People close down that email account
- People use their work email address and move jobs
- Someone forgets their password and can’t get into the account anymore
- People get bored with what you’re sending and they stop opening your emails
That last one is a bigger problem than you’d think.
If your subscribers don’t find value in what you’re sending, they’ll stop opening your emails long before they’ll unsubscribe from your email list. When their internet service providers/mail clients (like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple Mail, etc.) notice this, these services can stop accepting your emails, causing them to bounce.
Which becomes a problem for you, because your bounce rate is high, which can tank your deliverability. It can also be a problem for your ESP, because your deliverability reflects on their deliverability. Thus the suspension that my client had to fix before I could send emails again.
Candidly, there’s a lot that goes into bounce rates, but that’s a whole different, possibly future, email.
But our engagement was definitely part of the problem. Not enough people were opening our emails, which meant we had a huge list but it wasn’t serving us well.
Once we cleaned the list, (there were a lot of dead email addresses) did some careful re-segmenting and re-evaluation of what we were sending, then started emailing again, our engagement went up. And my client got more sales.
Which is the point of this story.
A Small, Engaged Email List Can Easily Out Perform a Huge One
It’s absolutely true.
I know several business owners who, like me, have small email lists. Some even as small as 150 subscribers.
But, because they email those subscribers regularly, and they send useful content that helps their subscribers solve their problem, they have fantastic results from their email marketing.
This is why, when someone asks me, “How big should my email list be before I start emailing them?” I immediately say, “As soon as you get your first subscriber.”
That first person deserves as much attention, value, and respect, as the 100th, or the 1,000th person on your list.
When you serve first and sell second, you’re automatically primed to start writing as soon as you get your first subscriber, because you want to help that one person solve their problem.
So, you email them. You send information about the solution you have that can help them. You provide them with what they need to make a decision about how to solve that problem.
And that first email subscriber can easily become your first customer.
But for that to happen, they have to remember who you are, why they signed up for your email list, and how you can help them.
This is why I advocate for emailing your list every week.
Attention Spans Matter
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that the average attention span is shrinking.
The average adult attention span is approximately 8.25 seconds, according to a report Samba Recovery issued in 2025. That’s less than the average goldfish, clocking in at 9 seconds. It’s also down from 12 seconds in 2000.
We are all so overwhelmed with the amount of information thrown at us every day that we’re lucky if we can remember what we had for breakfast or whether we fed the cat, much less which email lists we’ve subscribed to and why.
Honestly, the cat will remind you whether she’s been fed. Sometimes, she lies.
You need to do the same thing for your email subscribers. Not the lying part, the reminding part.
That is what your weekly nurture emails are for. They’re that friendly reminder of why someone subscribed to your email list and how you can help them.
And yes, I know that sitting down to write that nurture email every week is hard.
It takes time away from everything else you have to do in your business.
Figuring out what to write every week is so frustrating.
I get it. I really do.
But if you want your email marketing efforts to succeed… regardless of the size of your email list…
It needs to happen consistently.
That is why the Email Writing Accountability Group exists.
To help you find the time every week to sit down and write that nurture email.
To give you the inspiration you need to write something that your subscribers will love and find useful.
To help remind them of why they signed up for your list in the first place and how you can help them solve their problem.
Come join us for a free session of the Email Writing Accountability Group and find out how easy it can be to keep your subscribers engaged and buying, regardless of how big or small your email list is.
We meet on:
- Mondays at 10:00 am PT
- Thursdays at 2:00 pm PT
I look forward to seeing you there and helping you write a fantastic, engaging nurture email to send to your subscribers.
Because that small but mighty email list can do more good for your business than you’re letting it do right now. Use it to serve your subscribers and your business, so everyone succeeds.
Finally, this week’s pictures are of my 3 adorable cats, Irusan, Lugh, and Arawn. None of whom ever get away with trying to convince me they haven’t been fed.
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