Taking Over Email Love: 2023 Recap

In May, Rob Hope from One Page Love hit me up with the opportunity to acquire Email Love. He wanted to focus on One Page Love and offload the other properties he had built over the years. I told him I had to think about it, but I'd always been a fan of Email Love and it was way better than an existing site I had been building.

So, I jumped at the opportunity and have been feverishly working to make it one of the best places on the internet for email design, code, and content inspiration. It’s been a hard but enjoyable slog and I’ve learned a lot in the process.

Here are a few of the highlights and things I've learned along the way.

2023 Highlights:

• Curated 670 new emails
  I’ve stayed fairly consistent by being able to flag emails I like on my phone and getting them live on the site every morning. Doing a little bit every day is the way to go.

• Optimized the email posting process with Zapier
  I supercharged the creation and distribution of Email Love content with
  Zapier. This enables me to quickly capture an email from Gmail, take
  a screenshot, upload it to Wordpress, and post to Linkedin, Facebook,
  Instagram, and X within minutes. This process could previously take
  30+ minutes for a single email and now it can be completed in less
  than 5 minutes for most emails. Shout out to urlbox for building an awesome screenshot API!

• Interviewed 33 email peeps
  Every month I interview someone from the email community. I ask how they got into email, what their favorite email campaigns are, how they manage work/life balance. This helps me generate interesting content every month and the people I feature help share the content to their network. It's a win/win and I've met some great people this way.

• Added search functionality to the site
  I had my developer add basic search functionality to the site, making it easier for browsers to find new emails.

• Found Email Love’s first sponsors (Thank you, Beefree, Kombai, and Customer.io)
  I have previously spent 10 years working for ESPs like Campaign Monitor, Emma, and Sailthru. So, I got in touch with contacts that I’ve made over the years and was able to find people willing to give my sponsorship packages a shot. This is a part of Email Love that I hope to grow significantly in 2024.

• Added Email Love Services
  In addition to sponsorship, I have added agency services to Email Love. So far my clients have mostly come from Upwork or my own network, but I hope to drive inbound leads for these services as the site traffic grows.

• Started working on a product that you’ll be hearing about soon
  I’m also building a product that many people in the email community will find useful. The plan is to market and grow this product through the Email Love website.

• Doubled site traffic Site
  Increased from 2-3K unique visitors per month to 5-6K, and the email list is now over 3K. So, Email Love is still relatively small but growing at a healthy pace.

(I only have analytics from July 2023)

LinkedIn has surprisingly turned into one of my best channels with almost 2000 followers on my page and one of my top traffic sources. The community on LinkedIn is also closely aligned with who my services and product are aligned with, so I plan to keep investing in that channel in 2024.

I’ve also had countless email replies, Twitter follows, and Instagram likes, and for that, I wanted to thank you! The support of the email community is what keeps me going.

So, what’s in store for 2024?

In the upcoming year, my goal is to introduce over 1,000+ new emails to the site, conduct interviews with 50+ email professionals, and continue refining the user experience. I aim to solidify Email Love as an indispensable resource for anyone involved in email marketing, design, or content creation.

Thanks for reading and cheers to Rob for giving me the opportunity to keep Email Love alive and kicking.

Have a great New Year everyone.