From 9,000 to 97,000 Subscribers: The Growth Journey of Stacked Marketer

Today, we are overviewing our first newsletter: Stacked Marketer by Emanuel Cinca. This letter overviews the journey of Stacked Marketer from 2018 to 2024. Over the past 6 years, Emanuel has grown this newsletter into a trusted resource for marketers worldwide.

Stacked Marketer’s Growth Story

2018-2019: Starting and Rebranding
Founded in April 2018 under the name "What The Aff", it was later rebranded in 2019 to "Stacked Marketer." The original name confused the audience and was too narrow in affiliate marketing only. He wanted to be more than just an affiliate marketing newsletter and to become the go-to resource for marketers across all disciplines.

A key finding in his monetization experience was selling advertisements in packages of 3 to give exposure to various ad styles to see what best reaches each advertisers’ respective clients best. Through this experience, repeat sponsor rate was strong at 40%. This reduces the need to find a new sponsor every single week

• Emails Sent: 1.7M

• Open Rate: 43%

• Subscribers: 9,061 (end of year)

• Revenue: $153,100

• EBIT Margin: 18%

The goals for 2020 is to reach 20k subs and $250k revenue next year

2020: Growth Amidst Global Challenges
The pandemic brought uncertainty and opportunity. In 2020, he doubled down on growth and innovation. This third year was focused on growth with referral system updates, media buying and building a business model in content and marketing that could be scaled.

The referral system was expanded to have more prizes at more, lower tiers to make rewards more attainable. Referrals helped offset the struggles in Meta advertising, which brought inactive subs and was a waste of funds vs 2019 successes.

An early sponsor sales strategy was to look at conference sponsors. These sponsors were previously reaching their targeted audiences in person and Stacked Marketer provided a way to continue reaching their audience during the shutdown. This is still a great way to source proprietary sponsors yourself

• Emails Sent: 3.3M

• Open Rate: 47%

• Subscribers: 16,621 (+83%)

• Revenue: $186,205

• EBIT Margin: 23%

The goals for 2021 are to create better content, and more of it, to launch premium subscription

2021: Milestones and Monetization
2021 was a breakthrough year for Stacked Marketer in monetization. He continued growing the audience, but the key focus was revenue, which grew 97% year over year.

Key revenue initiatives included the introduction of Stacked Marketer Insights, a premium membership offering, later rebranded as Stacked Marketer Pro. This monthly membership includes deep dives, premium content and a community to discover new marketing ideas, angels and strategies.

• Emails Sent: 4.7M

• Open Rate: 48%

• Subscribers: 21,334 (+28%)

• Revenue: $366,000 (+97%)

• EBIT Margin: 27%

The goals for 2022 are $600k of revenue and 30k subscribers. Looking 2 years ahead he’s target $900k revenue and 50k subs

2022: Explosive Growth and New Challenges
If 2021 was a year of milestones, 2022 was a year of explosive growth. The subscriber base doubled to 48,646, and revenue soared to $685,000.

Following the success of the premium membership, he expanded their offering to include courses and reports to provide deeper insights into marketing strategies.

Declining clickthrough rates were a negative sign for advertisers and Apple Mail Privacy Protection changes distort open rates. Clickthrough is an important metric for advertisers to understand what portion of readers are engaging with content, like ads. The open rate also jumped with Apple’s new policy to mark all emails as opened.

Private sponsorships tend to be ~$100CPM with his audience. He tries to book out 3-4 weeks in advance to avoid having to discount a last minute sponsorship. Through price discovery, he build up a catalog of potential sponsors for last minute discounted sponsorships

• Emails Sent: 7.9M

• Open Rate: 55%

• Subscribers: 48,646 (+128%)

• Revenue: $685,000 (+87%)

• EBIT Margin: 33%

2023: Resilience in Unpredictable Times
In 2023, Stacked Marketer acquired two additional newsletters for its growing media business: (1) Psychology of Marketing in Apr ‘23 and (2) Tactics in Dec ‘23. Psychology is a weekly newsletter explaining psychological effect and showing three tactics for how to use it in your marketing and business. Tactics is a weekly newsletter bringing practical tactics to grow your agency, career, business, campaigns, and online shop.

He raised €250,000 in investment at €3M valuation in Oct ‘23 and in advance of the second acquisition. All of this money was reinvested into the company in exchange for <10% ownership.

He fell short of the $1M revenue target due to slower than expected growth in both subscribers and revenue. Economic pressures, including higher interest rates and inflation reduced advertiser marketing budgets and posed significant challenges to media businesses and consumers.

• Emails Sent: 15.5M

• Open Rate: 51%

• Subscribers: 60,012 (+23%)

• Revenue: $715,000

• EBIT Margin: -9%

2024 expectation was for rebounding marketing budgets and rates that would benefit the growing reach.

2024: Reflection and Recalibration
Emanuel simply summarized 2024 as unchanged vs 2023. Subscriber growth remained expensive and advertisers remained limited. He downsized to reduce the cash losses in the first half, and made the decision to hold off on aggressive growth for the more affordable Q1 market.

• Emails Sent: 16.3M

• Open Rate: 50%

• Subscribers: 97,842 (end of year)

• Revenue: $517,500

• EBIT Margin: -26%

Looking Ahead to 2025

Entering 2025, the focus is on sustainable growth, innovation, and community. Goals include:

• Reaching 150,000 subscribers across all newsletters

• Achieving $750,000 in revenue

• Maintaining a 20% EBT margin

The journey from 2019 to 2024 has been bumpy, but through it all, Emanuel stayed true to the mission to empower marketers with actionable insights and strategies.

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Warmly,
Abe Colwell
Creator in Public