Email Marketing Masterclass | How To Make Money With Email Marketing

Most people treating email marketing like a chore end up sending the same cookie-cutter template as everyone else, watching their open rates crater, and wondering why nobody is buying. The good news: email marketing is not complicated when you have the right system. In this conversation, Alston Godbolt sits down with Ron Mackey, known on TikTok and YouTube as The Email Coach, to break down the exact strategies Ron uses to help business owners write emails that get opened, build real relationships, and make money without coming off as pushy or fake.

Ron has a background in mathematics and computer science, so he thinks in systems. He built his email approach over six to seven years, and Alston tested his advice within hours of finding him on TikTok. It worked. This post covers every question from their 45-minute conversation, from how to structure your first five autoresponder emails to the unconventional from-name trick that gets people clicking out of curiosity before they even read a word of your copy.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The exact 5-email welcome sequence Ron uses for digital product sellers
How to write sales emails that entertain first and sell second
The subject line research method that takes under five minutes
Ron’s 4-week monthly planning framework so you never stare at a blank screen again
The lead magnet naming trick that spiked Ron’s conversion rate overnight
Why the $1-per-subscriber rule is misleading and what to track instead
The from-name trick that makes people click emails before reading a single word
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The 5-Email Welcome Sequence That Actually Converts

When Alston asked Ron how many emails should live in an autoresponder, Ron’s answer was simple: five. Not 20. Not 365. Five, with a specific purpose for each one.

Email 1: Deliver the thing. Whatever you promised in exchange for the email address, send it immediately. Ron sees too many people either not delivering at all or pulling a bait-and-switch. If you promised a checklist, send the checklist. Then tell subscribers you are going to be emailing them about a few other things. That is the whole email.

Email 2: Six hours later, “Did you get it?” This email does double duty. First, some emails land in spam or the Promotions tab. This follow-up catches people who missed the original. Second, when subscribers reply back, inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo see that exchange as proof the relationship is real. That reply signals to the algorithm to put future emails in the primary inbox, not buried in promotions.

Email 3: Your hero story. People want to know who you are and why you do what you do. This is the origin email. What happened to you? What made you start this? What makes you different from the other ten people in your niche? You do not need a dramatic story. You need an honest one.

Email 4: The belief builder. Every niche has a thing that everyone else is doing wrong. This email shares the belief that sets you apart. If you are in fitness, maybe you believe that most workout programs fail because they ignore recovery. If you are in personal finance, maybe you believe that budgeting apps solve the wrong problem. State your belief and explain why you hold it.

Email 5: The soft offer. By this point, subscribers have received what they asked for, confirmed the relationship, heard your story, and understood your worldview. Now you mention your paid offer. Not a hard sell. Something like: “I have this course that goes deeper on everything we have been talking about. Would you like to be a part of it?” Then give them a link.

After those five emails, move subscribers into your broadcast list. Ron’s point is direct: your daily writing will almost always be better than anything you pre-scheduled three months ago. Keep the automation short and lean on your ongoing relationship-building emails to do the heavy work.

How to Write Sales Emails Without Feeling Gross

This is the question Alston admits bothers him most. You need to sell, but you do not want every email to feel like a used-car lot. Ron’s solution comes from email marketer Ben Settle, and the concept is called infotainment.

Infotainment means you entertain first. You tell a story. Maybe something happened in the news. Maybe your favorite sports team just made a trade that made no sense. You start there, you build the story out, and then you make a pivot. That pivot connects whatever just happened to your product or your niche. You are not hiding the sell. You are warming the reader up so the offer feels earned rather than forced.

Ron compares it to what you already do on YouTube or TikTok. You open with a hook. You build the content. You end with a call to action. Email works the same way, just in writing.

If you genuinely do not feel like selling that day, Ron has a second tool: the PS line. Write the whole email as pure value, sign off, and then add a PS at the bottom. Something like: “By the way, I also have a course on this topic if you want to go deeper. Check it out here.” That single line can generate clicks from people who skimmed the email and scrolled straight to the bottom. And if they click through to your site but do not buy, that is when your cart-abandon automation takes over and does the harder sell work for you.

The one rule Ron is firm on: one call to action per email. One thing you want the reader to do. One link. One destination. Multiple CTAs split attention and kill conversions. Write one email, to one person, about one thing.

Subject Lines: The Make-or-Break Moment

Ron says he spends more time on subject lines than on anything else in an email. His reasoning is hard to argue with: the best email copy in the world does nothing if nobody opens the message. The subject line is the gate.

His go-to research method is free and takes five minutes. Open YouTube and look at what the biggest channels in your niche are using as video titles. Those creators have spent years and millions of views learning what makes people click. You are not copying their titles. You are borrowing the structure, the curiosity angle, the emotional trigger, and adapting it to your niche and your audience.

His formula preference is curiosity-based. Subject lines that make you think “what does that mean?” or “that cannot be right” perform consistently. He also points to classic frameworks: “3 Ways to X,” or “Stop Doing This If You Want Y.”

Beyond the subject line itself, Ron has two delivery tips. First, stay out of spam and the Promotions tab. A perfect subject line is useless if Gmail sorts your email away from the primary inbox. Build deliverability by getting replies, avoiding spammy language, and sending from a domain with a good sending history. Second, email every day. When you show up daily, subscribers start to recognize your name and are more likely to open before they even read the subject line. The goal is to become someone’s “must-read.”

How Long Should Your Emails Actually Be?

Ron’s answer: 300 to 500 words for most emails. You do not need a long-form sales letter every day. You need a story, a point, and a call to action. That fits comfortably in 400 words.

That said, Ron has sent nine-word emails that outperformed long ones, and he has written emails close to a thousand words that also worked. The length matters less than whether the story is moving. If you run out of story at 250 words, stop writing. If the story needs 700 words to pay off, write 700 words.

The bigger issue Ron sees in clients is not length. It is preparation. Most people sit down with no idea what to write and either copy a template that sounds nothing like them or dash off a half-hearted subject line with a bare link. Both approaches hurt your relationship with your list over time. The solution is planning, which leads to the next section.

The 4-Week Monthly Planning Framework

Ron’s system for never staring at a blank screen: sit down on the last Saturday of the month and plan the entire next month in one session. He maps it out week by week with a different promotional focus for each.

Week 1: Low-ticket offer. Push something accessible, either your own or someone else’s as an affiliate. Keep the barrier to entry low and the call to action simple.

Week 2: Affiliate or partner promotion. If you have an affiliate deal or a partner launch coming up, this is the week to run it. Block it in the calendar first, then plan around it.

Week 3: High-ticket offer. Your premium course, your coaching program, your flagship product. Week three is when the audience has been warmed up enough to receive a bigger ask.

Week 4: Freebies and soft sells. Pull back on the direct pitching. Give value, share content, and move any selling to the PS line at the bottom of the email.

Ron’s preference is to promote the same thing all week rather than switching products day to day. Consistency creates the thread that pulls subscribers through multiple touchpoints before they make a decision. Jumping between products creates confusion and breaks trust.

If a full monthly plan feels like too much to start, Ron offers a scaled-down version: every Saturday, ask yourself what you want to promote next week. Plan just those seven days. Then repeat. Either approach gets you out of the “oh no, what do I write today” spiral.

The Lead Magnet Naming Trick That Spiked Conversions

This is the tip Alston said changed his thinking immediately. Ron discovered it by accident in his football coaching business and has since applied it with client after client.

The idea is congruency. Name your lead magnet the same thing as your core paid offer, then position the paid offer as the deeper version. In Ron’s football business, his lead magnet was called the Six-Place System. His paid course was also called the Six-Place System. When subscribers who had downloaded the free version saw the course, they already had a strong emotional connection to that name. The mental leap from “I consumed the free version” to “I want the full version” became nearly effortless, and his conversions jumped.

The contrast is what most people do: a lead magnet called “My Couch Body” feeding into a course called “The Extreme Body.” Those two things feel unrelated. Subscribers who downloaded one do not automatically feel primed for the other. Every disconnect between your freebie and your offer is friction that kills sales.

Ron frames the benefit beyond just conversions. When your entire funnel has one consistent name, you have fewer things to think about and explain. Less mental overhead means you can be more present, in your business and in the rest of your life. He mentioned being able to show up fully for his kids and his wife once he simplified his system. The congruency trick is partly a marketing tactic and partly a quality-of-life decision.

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Should You Scrub Your Email List?

Conventional email marketing wisdom says you should regularly remove subscribers who have not engaged in 90 days. Ron disagrees, and his data backs him up.

His mentor Rosso Lachlan taught him that 85% of the people who ever buy from you will buy after three months or more on your list. When Ron went back and looked at his own football business data, he found customers who bought after four months of inactivity and others who had not opened an email in two months before suddenly purchasing when the timing was right for them.

Ron uses a store analogy. If you walked into a store and the staff immediately started pushing you toward the exit because you were not buying fast enough, you would never go back. But if the store is friendly, lets you browse, and stays helpful without pressure, you will return when you are ready to spend. He wants his email list to feel like that store.

His actual practice: every two to three months, send a re-engagement email to subscribers who have not opened or clicked anything in that window. Give them a reason to come back. If they still do not respond after the re-engagement sequence, then you can make a case for removing them.

He does add one caveat. If your list is in the hundreds of thousands, deliverability and platform costs become real concerns. Dead weight at that scale hurts your sender score and costs real money. But for most people building to their first 10,000 subscribers, scrubbing aggressively is more likely to hurt than help.

How to Increase Your Open Rates

Ron’s number one tip for open rates is the subject line, and he gave a simple self-test: before you schedule the email, ask yourself whether you would open it. Not as the creator who knows what is inside. As a stranger who just sees those few words in a crowded inbox.

If you would scroll past it, rewrite it. If you would click it, send it.

The second factor is deliverability. You can have the most compelling subject line ever written and it does nothing if your email lands in the Promotions tab or in spam. Improving deliverability is a longer game that includes getting replies, warming up your domain, avoiding spam trigger words, and using an email service provider with good sending infrastructure.

The third factor, and the one most people underestimate, is consistency. Ron emails every single day. When subscribers see your name in their inbox often enough, they start to recognize it the way they recognize a friend’s number on their phone. They open without thinking. Ron’s goal is for subscribers to create a custom label in Gmail just for his emails because they want to read him every day without missing one. That is the kind of relationship you are building when you show up daily.

The From Name Trick Nobody Talks About

This is the TikTok tip that originally caught Alston’s attention. Ron changes the “from” name in his email to something that creates immediate curiosity.

If your niche is personal finance, change your from name to “Your Wallet.” Then write the email from the perspective of the wallet itself. The wallet is speaking. The wallet is frustrated. The wallet has advice. Your subscribers see “Your Wallet” in their inbox and think: “What? Why is my wallet emailing me?” They click.

If your niche is fitness, your from name becomes “Your Chest” or “Your Metabolism.” Write from that perspective. “Your chest has been trying to get your attention. Here is what it wants you to know.” The combination of an unexpected sender name and copy that follows through on the bit creates something subscribers have not seen before, which is the point. The number one rule Ron holds is that boring emails do not get read, and this trick prevents boring.

You do not need to use this trick every email. But deploying it occasionally, especially when your open rates dip, can reset subscriber attention and remind them why they signed up in the first place.

Broadcast vs. Autoresponder Emails: What Is the Difference?

These are two different jobs and they need to be written differently.

Autoresponder emails are pre-written sequences triggered by subscriber actions. Your welcome series is an autoresponder. Your cart-abandon sequence is an autoresponder. Because you write them in advance, they need to anticipate what the subscriber is thinking at that moment. A cart-abandon sequence should address objections directly. Email one: “Did you forget something?” Email two: address the price objection. Email three: address whether the subscriber will actually use it. Ron thinks about what is blocking the subscriber from buying and writes directly to that blocker in each email.

Broadcast emails are the daily emails you send to your whole list. These are not about selling a specific thing. They are about being a real person in someone’s inbox. What happened in your life today? What did you watch last night? What frustration did you run into? Start there. Then find the connection to your niche and your audience’s problems. The broadcast is your daily blog, as Ron puts it. Nobody reads blogs anymore, but people will read an email from someone they like showing up in their inbox every morning.

The $1-Per-Subscriber Rule: An Honest Take

Russell Brunson and others have popularized the idea that a healthy email list should generate $1 per subscriber per month. Ron’s response is measured. You can make more than that, or significantly less, depending on factors that have nothing to do with the quality of your emails.

If you have 20 subscribers and sell a $10,000 coaching program, and you close one client a month, your per-subscriber value is way above $1. If you have 50,000 subscribers and sell only a $4.95 ebook with modest sales volume, you can have great open rates and still fall below that benchmark.

The more useful question is whether your emails are building genuine engagement. Are people opening? Are they clicking? Are they replying? Those numbers tell you whether the relationship is real. A real relationship converts when the offer is right. Chasing a dollar figure before you have built that relationship is putting the metric before the work.

Ron also flags the psychological danger of the rule. If you internalize “$1 per subscriber” as a definition of success and you are not hitting it, you may quit emailing altogether. That would be the worst outcome. Showing up imperfectly beats not showing up at all, every single time.

Why Email Grows Your Business Faster Than Paid Traffic

Ron’s closing argument is the one Alston agrees with most completely: email is the one channel you actually own.

TikTok can ban you tomorrow. Instagram can change its algorithm and cut your reach by 80%. A platform that took you two years to build can disappear from your business in a single policy update. But your email list belongs to you. You export it as a CSV file and move it to another provider if you need to. No platform controls that relationship.

Ron believes the combination of organic social media and a growing email list is the most resilient business model available to independent creators. Social media drives new subscribers into your funnel. Email builds the relationship deep enough to convert them. Neither alone is as powerful as the two working together.

He also made a point worth noting: as paid advertising costs rise during economic contractions, businesses that rely on paid traffic to acquire customers will see their margins shrink. Businesses with strong email lists will be largely insulated from that pressure because they are not paying per click for every conversation.

Honest Drawbacks

Email marketing is not frictionless. Here are the real trade-offs to know before you commit:

It takes time to see results. Ron’s mentor’s data says 85% of buyers come after three months or more. If you need revenue next week, email alone will not rescue you.
Daily emails require daily ideas. Ron says it gets easier with practice, but the discipline of showing up every day is real. Most people do not maintain it without a planning system in place.
Deliverability is a technical skill. Landing in the primary inbox, avoiding spam filters, and warming up a new domain require effort that most email marketing guides skip over.
Building the list requires a top-of-funnel source. Email is powerful only after someone joins your list. You still need social media, SEO, or paid ads to bring people to the opt-in page in the first place.
Template dependence is a trap. Copying someone else’s email sequence makes your voice disappear and signals repetition to spam filters. At some point, you have to write in your own words.

Find Your X

Email marketing is one path to making money online. But it works best when it is attached to the right offer, the right audience, and the right income model for your specific situation. If you are not sure which combination matches your skills and schedule, the Platform Proof Finder can show you a personalized starting point in under three minutes.

Take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many emails should be in a welcome sequence?

Ron Mackey recommends five emails for digital product sellers: deliver the freebie, follow up six hours later to confirm receipt, share your origin story, state your core belief, and make a soft offer. You can modify this slightly for physical products, but the structure holds. After five emails, move subscribers to your regular broadcast list rather than chaining them to a long pre-written sequence.

How often should I email my list?

Ron emails every day and believes daily emails are the fastest way to build a real relationship with your list. He frames it as becoming someone’s “must-read.” If daily feels like too much to start, commit to three times per week and build from there. The worst approach is emailing once a month: you become a stranger who pops up occasionally asking for money, and subscribers lose any sense of who you are.

What is infotainment in email marketing?

Infotainment is a concept from email marketer Ben Settle. The idea is that every email should entertain the reader before it sells to them. You start with a story, a current event, or something funny that happened, and then you make a pivot that connects that story to your product or offer. The sell happens at the end of something entertaining, which makes it feel earned rather than forced. It is essentially the same hook-story-offer structure you use in short-form video content.

Should I scrub inactive subscribers from my list?

Ron’s position is to keep them and re-engage every two to three months rather than scrubbing on a schedule. His mentor’s research shows that 85% of people who buy from you will do so after three or more months on your list. Many people go through periods of low engagement and then return when the timing is right. The exception is very large lists in the hundreds of thousands, where dead weight does measurably affect deliverability scores and monthly platform costs.

How long should a marketing email be?

Ron recommends 300 to 500 words as a practical target for most emails. He has sent nine-word emails and emails close to a thousand words, and both have worked when the story was strong. The key is not hitting a word count. It is whether you have said what needs to be said. When the story is done, stop writing. Padding an email to meet a length target is obvious to the reader and kills momentum.

What is the from name trick for email marketing?

Instead of sending from your name or your brand name, you change the from field to something that creates immediate curiosity in the inbox. For a finance audience, Ron suggests “Your Wallet.” For fitness, “Your Chest” or “Your Metabolism.” You then write the email from the literal perspective of that entity. Subscribers see the unusual sender name, get curious, and click. You do not need to use this for every email, but it is a reliable way to reset subscriber attention when open rates dip.

What is the difference between a broadcast email and an autoresponder?

Autoresponder emails are pre-written sequences triggered by specific subscriber actions, like signing up for your list or abandoning a cart. You write them once and they send automatically. Their job is to onboard subscribers and handle objections. Broadcast emails are the regular emails you send to your whole list in real time. Their job is to build an ongoing relationship through stories, personality, and whatever is relevant right now. Ron uses autoresponders for structure and broadcasts for connection.

Should I name my lead magnet the same as my paid course?

Ron strongly recommends it. When the freebie and the paid product share a name and the paid version is positioned as the deeper version of the free one, subscribers who engaged with the freebie feel a natural pull toward the course. The mental connection is already there. When the freebie and the paid product have different names and different concepts, subscribers have to make a bigger leap, and many do not. Ron saw his own conversion rate jump when he aligned the names in his football coaching business.

Sources

Ron Mackey, The Email Coach: theemailcoach.co
Ben Settle, email marketing author and creator of the infotainment concept
Rosso Lachlan, email marketing mentor (cited by Ron Mackey: 85% of buyers convert after 3 or more months on a list)
Russell Brunson, founder of ClickFunnels (cited for the $1-per-subscriber benchmark)
Alston Godbolt interview, Platform Proof YouTube channel

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