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Best Way to Grow Your Email List [3 Year Case Study]: Bundle vs. Summit vs. Podcast
Wondering the best way to grow your email list for your blog?
Growing your email list as a blogger can be a major pain in the ass. Everyone tells you to have an opt-in freebie, so you create one and put it on your site. But then what?
You need organic traffic to make that freebie work, and let’s be real, it’s tough to get when you’re just starting out.
I accidentally stumbled upon an experiment that got me thinking. I decided to take detailed notes and see how three popular list-building methods, which don’t require an existing audience, could help a blog grow an email list.
The three methods I compared are Bundle (Lizzy’s Christmas Party), Summit (Blogger Breakthrough Summit), and podcast (Niche Pursuits). Yeah, I know they’re not travel-related, but even travel site owners have jumped on these bandwagons and hyped up their travel sites.
Now, I was promoting She Knows SEO on all these platforms, so I had a front-row seat to see which one would bring in the most success.
And by success, I mean $$$. Sure, having email subscribers is great, but they don’t mean squat if they’re not making you money. So I’ll be comparing things like total email subscribers, unsubscribes, open rates, click-through rates, and course sales (because tracking affiliate sales on an individual basis is a pain).
To evaluate the success of each method, we’ll examine several key factors.
For me, success means generating revenue. While email subscribers are essential, it’s equally important that they contribute to your bottom line.
This can be achieved through affiliate sales, course/product sales, or pageviews for ad revenue (or to get you closer to an ad network’s requirements). Since this site doesn’t display ads, I’ll primarily focus on the first two factors.
Here’s what we’ll compare for each method: total email subscribers, number of unsubscribes, open rates, click-through rates, and course sales (as it proved challenging to track individual affiliate sales without implementing UTMs in time).
But before we dive into the juicy comparisons, let’s take a closer look at each method separately. Get ready to uncover the best way to grow your email list!
3 Methods to Grow Your Email List
Method 1: Bundle
Lizzy’s Christmas Party (Elizabeth Goddard) ran for a few weeks in December 2022, but people could sign up until January.
It had a free and paid bundle. I contributed to both with 2 different products, my Dominate Your DA ebook and my, now retired, Jasper.ai Course for Bloggers.
Total subscribers: 1602
Unsubscribes: 206
Average open rates: 39.30% from the regular, 39.63% from the premium
Average click through rates: 5.2% from the regular, 3.82% from the premium [These were much lower until 2 weeks ago. I believe once people started getting fewer emails from all the participants]
Income earned: $147 (from 1 sale of a course)
Analysis
Lizzy’s Christmas Party bundle is incredibly well run. BUT it’s full of over 600 things.
That means people get FOMO and sign up to everything, even if it’s not hyper relevant to their niche or their needs.
I submitted my Dominate Your DA Ebook to the free bundle and my Jasper.ai Course for Bloggers to the premium goody bag.
Both converted decently well, but not nearly as well as some of the people on the 1st page of her list of things (I believe most got over 15k new subscribers).
AND because I couldn’t do an upsell (Thrivecart requires a credit card to have an upsell on the screen, even for a freebie. That was against her rules, even though other people got to do upsells on their sales pages with other platforms), that meant no income generated from these sales.
I had an email funnel, but when you get over 600 emails in a day, you aren’t exactly opening them to check, now are you?
Because people get so many emails from the bundle and tend to sign up for things that they’ll never even use, they aren’t my ideal audience.
That means lower open rates, lower CTR, and fewer purchases of my products or affiliates.
This is something I’ve seen before from bundles where people just get too overwhelmed by all the things and don’t really have any of your personality to go off of.
So they overlook you.
While bundles can mean a massive influx in subscribers, they aren’t the best way to build a die hard fan group or to sell things.
Method 2: Summit
Liz Stapleton ran the Blogger Breakthrough Summit at the end of January. I led a 30 minute section on Google ranking AI content and how to write it with Jasper. My session was above average for attendance, comments, and engagement rates.
I submitted a freebie but no paid course to the VIP pass. The freebie was my, now retired, free Jasper Commands Ebook.
Total subscribers: 169
Unsubscribes: * I’ll be honest I forgot to track this. That’s my bad. I didn’t see a lot around this time so I believe it’s under 20.
Average open rates: 44.65%
Average click through rates: 5.34%
Income earned: $885 from course sales + 2 sign ups for Jasper.ai (I can see the emails so that made this easy to track). This isn’t including the $200 and change I made in sales of the VIP pass (which surprised me since I didn’t really promote it until the end when I saw people were buying it from me)
Analysis
The Blogger Breakthrough Summit was the first blogging thing I ever saw and participated in. I upgraded to the VIP pass all those years ago and met some of the people who I still follow today.
This fixes one of the issues of the bundles, in that people put a face to a name. So they get to see me actually teach something and learn about who I am.
That meant the people who subscribed tended to be on par with my ideal audience. They also clearly knew my teaching style after having seen it.
I did go pretty niche with what I taught, to be honest, so that probably limited my reach a bit (let’s be real, people still are terrified of AI for some reason. Saying it is akin to saying Beetlejuice 3x or something).
But the people who attended and then bought my Jasper course (and some bought my ebooks) were my target audience.
Summits > bundles for sales and for attracting your ideal audience.
My upsell emails worked well and I was able to have an upsell on the download page for my freebie.
If the bundle had been more targeted, maybe that would have helped it earn me even more and get more subscribers. But this targeted summit with a hyper niche topic worked well for me.
Method 3: Podcast
I was on Niche Pursuits in December – legit a dream come true since it’s my favorite podcast of ALL TIME! (well, outside of Redhanded for my murder fix and Off Menu for my comedy/food fix).
I was mostly on this for the thrill, not for any benefit. But then, bam, it turned into an email growth magnet!
That’s what really prompted me to do this comparison.
Total subscribers: 245
Unsubscribes: Under 10 (I also didn’t track this super well tbh. But I did have to block 3 people for spam so that makes this a bit higher)
Average open rates: 64.65%
Average click through rates: 14.81%
Income earned: Over $15k so far (courses + 1:1 sales) + tons of affiliate income
Analysis
Yes, Niche Pursuits is a bigger podcast, especially in the blogging world.
Even so, I only got over 250 subscribers from it (so far anyway. I’ll talk about that in a minute).
I had to do 0 preparation for it. I didn’t have to provide a freebie if I didn’t want to, but I heard someone else do it and I wanted to try it out. And it’s evergreen.
Unlike the other bundle and summit where I had to do up proper presentations and sales pages, where they stop running at a certain date, and where I’m one face of dozens or hundreds in the crowd, I was the solo guest for this podcast.
That meant people weren’t overwhelmed by allllll of the other people out there.
It also means they can continue to listen for weeks or years to come. I keep getting new subscribers every week from the podcast!
Best of all, these are people who are ready to buy.
I sold copies of all of my courses and many 1:1 services/coaching thanks to the podcast.
In fact, I’ve been turning people away cause I’m above my capacity as is! It’s one of the reasons why my 1:1 coaching is now only open a few times a year.
I’ve been on podcasts before and I’ve found similar things. People are super engaged because they really got to know you during the 30 mins – 1 hour episode.
And podcasts typically require much less work on your part.
You can go on without products to sell, even, and just promote your site.
These also result in the best backlinks of the three (an added bonus!).
Overall, I definitely think a small but mighty email list is key. It’s why I prune my email list regularly of cold subscribers (I’m not paying an extra $20 a month for people who don’t open my emails just so I can say my list is 20k+ or something).
Bonus: they offer great backlinks which helps with DA growth!
So Which Is the Best Way to Grow Your Email List?
Pretty clearly Niche Pursuits.
Sure, the bundle got me a ton of email subscribers, but they’re not nearly as engaged as the rest of my audience and actually bring down my open rate/click rate averages a lot.
I also had to start paying for my email list because of them.
And they don’t really bring me any income.
Niche Pursuits brought in less than ¼ of the subscribers, but over 10x as much income!
2026 Update: Which Lasted the Longest?
Hello from the future! Oooo 🤣
I haven’t had time to redo most of this piece yet, so cut me some slack. This post is a lil out-of-date format wise. But let’s focus on the key stats.
As of February 2026, here are the stats:
Bundle:
I was shocked to find out that of the 1200-odd people that joined my list from the 2022 Christmas Party, 1,013 are still on my list!
(And to be clear, I scrub my list at least every 6 months.)
Now, some of those may have already been people on my list, cause I did promote it pretty hard. But even if we say 50% of them joined my list for the first time from the bundle (I think that’d be under reporting it, to be honest) that’s still a pretty epic retention rate!
I would have to go through each one individually in Kit to see if they went on to buy anything after 2022. Not gonna lie, I do not have the time or energy for that.
It may also get skewed as the following year in 2023, I was in the same bundle again. So some of them may have been reintroduced to me at that point and then may have gone on to make a purchase.
It’s a bit of a murky area income wise, so I’m gonna focus on the subscriber retention, cause I’m still kinda shocked by it!
Summit:
Unfortunately, past Nina decided to re-use the email tag for the Blogger Breakthrough Summit for 2023 and 2024, so I have no way of tracking those students to now.
My email tag for the Jasper ebook was also something I went on to use at scale, so I can’t but sure if the students came from that specific summit.
I did some attempts at filtering as best I could and it looks like 62 subscribers have stuck around from the summit for 3 years.
I figured that out by filtering for subscribers that matched the ebook tag from the time of the summit, and tried to verify it by cross referencing it with the re-used summit tag.
It’s not perfect, but it seems reasonable to assume that of the 169, about 62 are still actively on my list.
I never get people referencing this as a way they found me.
To me, more than subscriber numbers, the lack of memorability is key. People don’t talk about finding me via this summit, and I can’t track if they did from past feedback forms (yes, I checked. I loveeee data!!).
Podcast:
The podcast is harder to track, because I turned that freebie into my general freebie.
So instead, I’ll go off of anecdotal evidence.
It’s been 3 years and I still get people telling me they just found me from Niche Pursuits.
Many of my Profitable Part-Time Blogger students have told me that that’s the first time they discovered me.
While I don’t have concrete data on the exact number of sales or the exact number of downloads, I think the fact that people remember the specific podcast they found me from pretty remarkable.
And the fact that at least every other month, someone joins my free Facebook Group and tells me they found it from “the Niche Pursuits podcast.”
So 3 years later, the podcast is still the winner for income!
Conclusion: Best Way to Grow Your Email List
Podcasts clearly came out on top of summits and bundles in this case study. So what can we do with that info?
Here are your action steps:
Grow your email list by creating a quick freebie in Canva and pitch 5 podcasts.
You’ll thank me when you get a die hard audience who you can easily sell products and affiliates too!
(Tip: to pitch, check their site for a contact section and suggest yourself. You can also message them on social media. Most will have a guest intake form somewhere, but Niche Pursuits I just emailed the general contact form. Shoot your shot!)
