The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
How to Grow Your TPT Email List From Scratch
You don’t need a giant following to build a powerful email list—you need a clear plan, the right tool for your stage, and a freebie your audience actually wants. We walk through a practical, teacher-focused roadmap to get from “mom + 50” to thousands, with real numbers, platform trade-offs, and a system you can set up in a weekend. If you’ve been stuck wondering whether Flowdesk or ConvertKit fits your workflow and budget, we compare simplicity versus automation, how pricing changes impact growth, and why a generous free tier can help you reach profitability before you ever pay a bill.
From there, we design a high-converting opt-in: an exclusive, classroom-ready resource tied to your best product lines, presented on a clean landing page with a single clear action. Then we craft a three-email welcome sequence that delivers the freebie, builds trust with quick implementation tips, and gently introduces related resources without feeling pushy. We also share the ten-cents-per-subscriber-per-month benchmark so you can evaluate ROI and stop second-guessing your tool costs as your list scales.
Traffic doesn’t have to be chaotic. We lay out steady sources that compound: product insert opt-in pages inside your resources, notes to TPT followers, a supporting blog post with Pinterest pins, and social posts that demonstrate the freebie’s value in seconds. When you’re ready, add strategic collaborations and freebie swaps to accelerate growth with aligned audiences. The result is a repeatable engine that moves people from discovery to trust to action—and puts you in control of your audience, not the algorithm. If this playbook helps, follow the show, share it with a TPT friend, and leave a quick review telling us your current list size and next milestone.
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Welcome to the Rebranded Teacher Podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author, and seller on Teachers Pay Teachers, and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPT businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started. How do I grow my email list from scratch? How do I go from having not started, or maybe from having 15 subscribers to having 5,000, 10,000, or even 15,000 email subscribers on my list? How do I do that? Well, we're gonna break it down from start to finish in this episode today. So whether you haven't begun your email marketing yet, or you've made the first steps, but you're still stuck with your mom plus 50 other people on your list. This episode is for you. Let's get started. Step number one the very first thing that you have to do is you have to choose an email marketing platform. Now I'm gonna give you two options. There are a plethora of options out there. These are the two that are the most popular in the TPT world. I have accounts for both of them. I use one of them for one of our businesses, and I use the other one honestly, mostly just for demonstration purposes because it can kind of get a little pricey. But I personally use something different from these two platforms. However, it's not available to the general public. I use Kartra. Kartra is not a platform that I would recommend for just email marketing. It's an all-in-one. I host my memberships on this platform, web pages, sales pages, webinar. You know, it's kind of an all-in-one kind of thing. So I don't recommend it because it would be way too expensive to use just for email marketing. But having said that, I do have accounts for both of these email marketing platforms, and that is kit and flowdesk. Now I'm gonna preface this by saying that Flowdesk is going to raise their prices. I've heard anytime now, like literally from the time of me filming this, I think it's like within the next month, month and a half. I think it was either in October or November. I haven't seen what the pricing is going to be, but I'm told that their pricing structure is going to change. Right now, the reason that it's been so popular with so many TPT sellers is because it's really simple to use. It's a very, very simple platform. Like if you like simple, straightforward, not a lot of ways to mess something up, Flowdesk is gonna kind of be your go-to. That's what you're gonna want to go for. Flowdesk is it. But the main reason people loved it was because there was no subscriber cap. So most platforms have you pay for the number of subscribers that you have. So the more subscribers you have, the more you pay. So if you have 10,000 subscribers, you're gonna pay more than someone who has a thousand subscribers. If you have 20,000, you're gonna pay more, etc. Flowdesk historically has been one flat rate, no matter how many subscribers you have. It's gonna cost you the same no matter what, but they are changing that because you know what? They're losing money. Every other place in the business has a different model. And so I think that they're starting to see the grass screener. I don't know what that pricing structure is gonna look like, how it's gonna compare to, say, kit. So I would say that if you're watching this, go click on the link. If you're interested in Flow Desk, something super simple and a flat rate, you could go and click on the link. I have an affiliate link for Flowdesk down inside of the description and you can see if that flat rate is still available right now at the time of this recording. It's$35 a month if you pay yearly. And it doesn't matter how many subscribers you have. But the caveat to that is if you have zero subscribers, you're paying$35 a month. So even the way that they have it set up right now, yes, you could do a free trial, but that only lasts for so long. And it doesn't matter if you have zero subscribers, 50 subscribers, 85 subscribers, or 85,000 subscribers, you're still paying$35 a month. To me, the downside to that is if I'm just slowly dipping my toe in email marketing, I don't want to spend$35 a month to grow my email list if I'm gonna be getting like 20 new leads a month, right? I have a general rule. Okay. My general calculation is at some point a healthy email list should be earning me 10 cents per subscriber per month. So if I have a list of 10,000 people on my email list, I should be able to average over the course of a year, average about$1,000 a month from that email list through various offers. That doesn't just mean TPT. It means if I am monetizing my list effectively, I can expect that throughout the course of the year, I'm going to make about$12,000 from an email list of 10,000. That's what I'm going to expect. What that means is if I have a hundred people on my email list, I can expect that I'm going to make about$10 a month. So if I'm trying to make up that$35 a month, then I'm going to need about 3,500 people on my email list in order to make that amount of money. Okay. On average. So I would say that I wouldn't expect necessarily that my email list is going to be profitable. If I'm paying$35 a month, my email list may not be profitable until I'm at around or about 3,500 subscribers. And that may take me a while to get there. To me, that is a con in the Flowdesk department. The other con in the Flowdesk department for me is that it's a little bit more limited in its automations. And so while it's simple, it's effective, it's really great, and you can do a lot of things with Flowdesk. We use Flowdesk for one of our businesses, separate from Kartra. So while it's simple and effective and it can be used really easily, I find that there are just other things about kit that I like a whole lot more. Number one, you can have a free account for up to 10,000 subscribers. So if we run that math of if I have 10,000 subscribers, I should be averaging about$1,000 a month. Once you get to 10,000 subscribers, convert kit, which by the way, I don't think they had raised their prices in like 12 years. Okay, so it's been a very long time. They just recently raised their prices. They hadn't done it in a long time. So if they haven't raised prices in like 12 years, they're probably not going to raise them anytime soon. But currently it's about$140 a month,$141 a month, I think, for your first 10,000 subscribers if you're on the paid version, or excuse me, 15,000. So once you hit that 10,000 threshold, it's$141 a month if you pay yearly. It's a little bit more if you pay by the month, but you should be expecting to make somewhere in the neighborhood of$1,000 a month. So well over that$140 threshold, right? You're making way more than what you're investing. So where you can see in the long run, if I have something like Flowdesk, and again, their prices are going up and they're changing their pricing structure. So I don't know what that pricing is going to look like. I would assume just based on their current model that it's probably going to be less than kit, but they also have less features than kit. So that would kind of make sense to me. But yeah, either way, if you're doing kit, then once you hit you go over that 10,000 subscriber threshold, while$141 is a lot more than$35 a month. It is in the long run, I feel like it's worth it once you get to an email list of that size to be able to do some of the things that you can do with kit that you can't do or certainly can't do as easily with Flowdesk. And I think it's worth the fact that you can get started and have up to 10,000 email subscribers for free. So that is one of the big, big perks to me is being able to start for free and being able to grow your email list and get it to a point where it's profitable before you have to start paying money for it. So that is huge. So I have affiliate links for both kit and flow desk down inside of the description. For convert kit, you get a free trial. And for Flow Desk, I think you get like 50% off your first year right now. Now, once they change that pricing structure, I don't know what the offer is going to be, but there will be some sort of offer. When you click on that Flow Desk link, you'll get a little, you'll get a little something extra when you sign up from either one of those links. But first things first, you have to choose an email marketing platform. Now don't feel like you're locked in, but do spend a little bit of time doing some research on this and choosing which one is going to be best for you long term. Once you've chosen that, you're going to need a couple of things. So here is what you're going to need. You're going to first need a freebie. So this would be called like an email opt-in. You're going to need something to incentivize people in your audience to join your email list. And that's going to be some type of freebie. Now, this could be a multitude of different things, but for the vast majority of TPT sellers, this is going to be a free product. It's going to be really simple. I would just create something. The main thing that you need to know is it needs to be a free resource and something that they can't get anywhere else. I would not offer it on TPT for free or for paid. Like I would have it be exclusive to joining my email list, and it needs to be something that your audience would be interested in. And ideally, something that is similar to or part of a product line that's currently in your store. And then you need a form or a landing page. And this is just going to be a simple place that people can use to join your email list. It's going to look something like this. So Flowdesk has these templates, and so does pretty much any platform that you might use. But like I'm going to show you Flowdesk kit has these as well. They have these little templates that you can use to create an email opt-in, like landing page where you would put like a product, a picture of your product here that you're offering for free, like free unit rate mystery when you join the email list. Tell them a little bit about it. They type in their first name, their email address, and then they can join your email list. I like this one just a little bit better. Click something like send me the mystery, moves on. One thing that I don't love is that I feel like Flowdesk doesn't have a lot of great options for like square images. But like this one, I wish I could make this a whole lot bigger, but unfortunately I can't. They're pretty easy to create. They're honestly really simple to put up. And again, convert kit, or excuse me, kit, um, formerly convert kit, flowdesk, they both have forms for this. They they both have it included inside of their platform, and they're really easy. They have templates, like kind of plug and play templates that you can use to create these really simply and really easily. The next thing that you're going to need is a simple welcome sequence. So you're going to want to create an automation or a welcome sequence. And I and I think FlowDusk calls this a workflow. And then kit calls them automations. You'll hear them also called like welcome funnels or welcome sequences or something like that. But this does not have to be complex. It can be a simple one to three email sequence where you basically say, Welcome, here's your free resource. And then maybe the next email is here's a little bit about me, and like three tips for using the resource that I sent you. And then maybe another email that says something to the effect of here are three ways that you could use this resource in your classroom, or three resources like this resource in my store. Anything that you can offer a value to them after they join that's related to the product that they opted into. So just a really simple welcome sequence for them after they join your email list. And then finally, you're going to need a way to advertise your freebie so that people will join your list. Like you need a way to actually get people on your list because they're not just going to like happen upon your landing page and all start joining your email list. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. So we have to have a way to market to get it in front of your customers' eyeballs so that they can see, like, oh my gosh, like, yes, I really want this free resource. I'm going to join their email list and get this free resource. So let's talk about a few ways that you can do that. The very first simplest way, and the way that every, every something that everyone should do is you need a product insert opt-in page. So let me show you what this looks like. It's going to look like this right here. So this is a template that I have available for like my RTA members, but basically like a little cover photo and maybe another image of your resource. Free bonus activity, the product name, you could kind of customize and create your own. This is one that I put in some of my products where they can get any of these when they join my email list. And then they click and it's hyperlinked to join my email list. So I put this as a page in all of my resources. And it's just a really simple way for buyers or someone who's downloaded a freebie to join my email list once they're kind of in my world through a TPT product. I especially recommend this for your freebies. So if you have an established store and you're looking at where do I start first because it seems really daunting, to add an opt-in page to all of your products, then start with your freebies and then your best sellers and then work your way down because that's going to give you the most exposure as fast as possible. Another thing that you can do is you can send out a note to followers on TPT. So if you have followers on TPT, you can send them out a note and say, like, hey, you can go here and you can get this free resource when you join my email list. Another simple way to do this without having to have a lot of marketing experience or have a big social media following is to do a blog post plus some Pinterest pins. So if you have a blog, you can create a blog post for that freebie telling them about the resource and that where they can get it for free, and then create pins that for Pinterest, like Pinterest pins that lead to that blog post. And you could do multiple blog posts for the same freebies, like sling same freebie opt-in, and create multiple Pinterest pins for each one of those blog posts. Now, this is not gonna be fast for most people. For most people, this is going to be a long game, like for sure. With both of these things, especially if you're not getting a lot of traction on TPT and your blog post is new or your Pinterest is new, that's gonna be a long game. However, I did talk to someone who this was their strategy. I talked to her like two weeks ago, and she started this several months back, and she has like 85 email subscribers from doing those two things. So this isn't huge, right? Like 85 is not huge, but it is a pretty steady amount to be getting 15 to 20 subscribers a month organically without any social media, without collaborations, without any of that. Like honestly, that is long term. This is a good strategy because these things are going to grow and compound over time, especially as you get more purchases or get more downloads on TPT and as you continue to add more blog posts and blog pins on Pinterest. So over time it can really add up, but I wouldn't let it be your only strategy. Okay, the next thing you want to think about is social media marketing. Now, this could be social media marketing that you do on your own. You could also maybe perhaps pay or swap work with someone to have another TPT seller do this for you. So if you know someone who has social media for in your niche, you could organize a swap with them. You do this for me, like share my freebie opt-in, and I will do something else for you. You could do something like that, or you could start your own social media marketing, and that would be a really great way to move people from social media onto your email list so that you can contact them at any time. And then finally, looking at collabs slash freebie swaps. So this one would be a little bit more long-term. There are a lot of TPT sellers who will organize freebie collabs to help grow your email list really quickly. You can do things like that. Once you get a certain number of people on your email list, you can also swap with other people who have email lists and say, hey, I'll advertise your email opt-in in my newsletter this week. You advertise my email opt-in in your newsletter next week. And you can kind of switch off and do some of those things on a regular basis. But for sure, number one and number two are going to be the best place to start. And then you're gonna want to move on to any other type of marketing that you have, trying to move people from where you have them, whether that's podcasts, YouTube, social media, over onto your email list, and then finally working with other sellers to help grow your list a little bit faster. So let's go back and review. First of all, you need to choose which email marketing platform that you want to use. Again, the most popular are kit and flowdesk, and you'll find affiliate links to those down below that'll give you a deal with whichever one you want to choose to start with. Next, you want to choose a freebie that you can use for your email opt-in. So choose a free resource that is related to resources that you have on TPT, ideally a part of an existing product line that you know buyers enjoy so that you know that they're going to want to sign up for your email list. Then you're going to want to create a form slash landing page so that they have a way to opt in. And no matter which marketing platform you have, they are gonna have options for you. They're gonna have templates for you, all of that good stuff so that you can quickly and easily create this, and they'll have tutorials for you as well. You're then gonna want to create a simple welcome email sequence, a simple series of automated emails that are gonna go out to your email list once they join. And then finally, number four, you're gonna wanna have ways to advertise that freebie so that you can start collecting email addresses and leads and start growing your email list. If you are brand new to this and you have a question, go ahead and drop it down below. And I will be happy to answer it for you. If you found some ways to grow your email list that you would like to share with others, go ahead and drop that down in the comments below as well. I know that there are so many people who really want to hear from other sellers how they grew their list and how they were able to do it, not only so that they can take those practical steps too, but also so they can feel inspired and know that it's possible. Thanks so much for all of you who listen so faithfully every single week. There are not enough words to thank you for being here and for all of your support over the last several years. Thanks so much, you guys. I'm gonna see you right back here next week.