We recently connected with Troy Ericson and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Troy, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
The email marketing & copywriting industry had been broken for a long time until I created the concept of Email List Management. In the past, businesses would hire an email copywriter to write their emails. The copywriter would deliver the emails in a Google Doc. Then someone else would have to upload the emails into the business’s ESP (Email Service Provider) in order to send them. Worst of all, neither of these roles understand email deliverability, which means that you could do all that work, only for the email to land in spam or the Promotions Tab. And to top it all off, copywriters are notorious for turning in late work.
In 2020, I created Email List Management. An Email List Manager is ONE person who writes the email, uploads it to the ESP using best practices, and makes sure that the email lands in the Primary Inbox. Essentially, I learned how to do the job of 3 different people, and built an entire team of Email List Managers at my company, Email Paramedic. Our clients pay less money to get better results versus the old way of doing things.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m Troy Ericson – the creator of EmailListMangagement.com, EmailDeliverability.com, and recently exited Copywriting.org. My team & I have generated over $100,000,000 for our clients since 2020 using our email copy & deliverability skills. We’ve also taught thousands of people through our Email List Management education programs.
We’ve worked with Publishing.com, BioTrust, REPP Sports, V-Shred, Zipify, SmartMarketer, Perry Belcher, 10X Advisor Network, David Meltzer, Sam Ovens, Jason Capital, Joel Marion, Alex Cattoni, Douglas James, Russ Ruffino, and countless others. I even got called the #20 copywriter in the world by Peter Tzemis of Traffic & Funnels.
In addition to ghostwriting & sending marketing emails for over 30+ clients every single day, we also solve email deliverability problems, provide Email List Growth Services, and send cold email campaigns for clients.
I’m proud of our team’s ability to handle the most complex email situations and turn problems into profits for our clients. Because of this, we’re becoming widely recognized as the best email marketing company on the internet. Today, we generate around $260k/mo with this business model.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
In 2019, I was fresh out of a failed college baseball career and picked up a gig running Facebook Ads for an agency. The owners were in the process of selling and were tuned out. I was thankful for the opportunity, but basically running the entire agency myself. I’d managed to close 2 clients and was making $3,700/mo. My parents started to put a lot of pressure on me to get a real job. Around the same time, one of my two clients wanted to fire me.
Instead of accepting defeat like most people would, I refused to be fired. I asked them to give me the honest truth about why they wanted to fire me. Because there weren’t any issues with their ad campaign.
That’s when they admitted that their emails were going to spam – and they couldn’t monetize their leads. So they decided to give up on the campaign.
Fortunately, I had a little bit of email experience from my other client, so I offered to work for free until the problem was solved. That summer, I increased their email revenue from $13k/month to $51k/month. That’s almost a 4x. Just from spam-proofing their emails, sending more often, and writing transformationally instead of transactionally.
At that time, I figured that the red ocean of Facebook marketers wasn’t going to get any bluer, so I went all-in on email marketing instead.
I fully took over my other client’s email list right after that, got in the right Facebook communities, and started attending in-person events. I was always the only Email List Manager in the room so I grew super SUPER quickly. And the rest is history.
Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?
In 2022, I started to realize that tax strategy was important… And if I could acquire an asset that saves me money on taxes AND helps my main business grow, that would be a MASSIVE win-win. Around that same time, an old friend mentioned that his business partners were selling their equity in MailGenius.com.
MailGenius is a free online email spam testing tool used by about 500 NEW people every single day. So I figured that I could buy it, upgrade it, turn it into a freemium tool, generate new MRR, and close clients from it.
The acquisition process was tough. There are all sorts of ups, downs, and dealing with sellers’ emotions. Thankfully, I’m super level-headed, so we got the deal done on the last day of 2022.
Most of 2023 was spent fixing a TON of issues that had cropped up since the previous owners decided to stop spending time & money on it. By October 2023, we finally launched the freemium product.
Since then, MRR has grown nicely, but we spent way too long trying to figure out what type of services the leads wanted to buy. This was primarily a corporate audience, whereas I came from the internet marketing industry, so the learning curve was (and still is) very high, although the branding has really helped too (it’s hard to track the intangibles).
Software is one of those things that you don’t know how hard it is until you try it yourself. I’ve learned so many invaluable lessons along the way that I apply to my career almost every day. We ALMOST have MailGenius to profitability on a monthly basis, with the main cost being the ongoing improvement & development of the software.
Contact Info:
- Website: TroyEricson.com, MailGenius.com, EmailDeliverability.com, EmailListManagement.com, EmailParamedic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yosoytroy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/troyallenericson/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/troyericson/
- Twitter: https://x.com/troy_ericson
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TroyEricson
