How To Send 1 Million Emails For $100/Month

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric break down how to send 1 million emails a month for $100 using Amazon SES, why deliverability beats price when choosing an email provider, and the shared IP neighborhood trick Neil uses to protect inbox placement. They also unpack the "reply guy" strategy for going viral on X without followers, how social algorithms now reward interest graphs over follower counts, and why Neil stopped blasting YouTube videos to his full email list after the algorithm flagged it as bot traffic. A practical episode on cutting email costs, growing reach from zero, and gaming algorithms the right way. Key takeaways ◾Cheap email providers work, deliverability decides revenue ◾Reply guys win on X without big follower counts ◾Social algorithms reward engagement, not follower size Chapters 00:00 Send 1M emails for $100 a month 00:41 Email provider pricing breakdown 01:36 Why deliverability beats price 01:49 Shared IP neighborhood strategy 03:08 SendLayer mention 04:08 Reply guy strategy on X 05:52 ClickFlow AI SEO break 06:36 How to be a reply guy 07:27 Followers don't matter anymore 08:41 How social algorithms actually work 09:27 Email blasts for YouTube launches 10:23 Why blasting hurt Neil's videos 11:21 Neil's email review workflow 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟 Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 million downloads. Each episode delivers actionable marketing tips and strategies from two entrepreneurs who truly practice what they preach. The show is hosted by Eric Siu, founder of Leveling Up and Single Grain, and Neil Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and recognized by Forbes as a Top 10 Marketer. 🎙️ Learn More About the Hosts Eric Siu – Leveling Up: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/@neilpatel 📩 Free Resources Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/ ✅ Subscribe for Daily Marketing Insights!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Neil, do you want to know how to send 1 million emails for $100 a month?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Yes. Wait, send 1 million emails or have a million contacts, just to be clear on this?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Send 1 million emails per month. So obviously, when you're paying a lot of these different services, it gets pretty expensive when you're sending a million. But I'm going to show you how you can send a million emails per month for $100 or less. Ready?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Yes. I'm ready. I'm actually paying attention to this one.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  All right. Wow, Misty doesn't pay attention.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but like, when I say I'm paying attention, I always pay attention to Eric. It's more so, I'm getting close to my screen, because I want to actually see how I can save.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  When there's a discount, Neil's in.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Six figures a year.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Here's how you can save, here's how you can send 1 million emails a month for $100, okay? So if you're sending a million emails per month using Postmark, that's $1,206 per month, okay? $1,206. If you use Resend, it's $650 a month. You send grade, $600 a month. You use CloudFlare, $354 a month. If you use Amazon SES, and I don't know what SES means, but it's $100 a month. So SES and CloudFlare are now the cheapest email providers, right? So he's basically saying, hey, look, so Amazon has this, CloudFlare just launches for $354 a month or so. But it's getting cheaper to send emails, which makes a lot of sense, because AI does make things deflationary.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  So my viewpoint is, I'd rather spend, I don't know how much I spend on email, but call it Over a hundred thousand a year, substantially more than that.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  I'd rather spend five, six X this than to take the hundred dollar option. You want to know why?

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Stability, reliability?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  No, I bet you Amazon is very stable. The problem with email is all about deliverability. It's actually very hard to get your email into someone's inbox. So what I do is I look for email providers that have shared IP addresses. And they let me pick which neighborhood I'm going to be on. So think about who the other parties are that are sending emails.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Would you agree as marketers, we're probably more aggressive than most businesses, even though we just had a discussion how we don't pitch hard?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Okay, I agree with you on that, too. So what I do is I look for shared IP with people who don't send hard emails at all. And they try to just send educational and they barely pitch anything. Because then when I pitch and I'm harder, my deliverability is still great because the other people on my block or my IP address are much cleaner than I am. I pay extra for that, by the way.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Like I look for that in any email provider that I use.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  I think that's a great, that's a great tactic to, to use. I would also say this, Neil. I mean, look, levels here is, is when you think about Cloudflare, they should be, and Amazon, um, there, there should be pretty good deliverability. He's like, look, it's all the same, but obviously you have to do your own research here. And then you have other people like Nick Gray. Cloudflare deliverability should be, right, very good and S tier. So I, oh, look, Syed, our, our friend Syed here, uh, came in. I think Syed launched something over here. Oh, we should talk about this. So for transactional email, if you guys are interested in trying out Sendlayer, I can probably give you a better hookup rate for bulk email. And we are not a reseller of either of those. Oh, that's interesting, right? So I don't even know what Sendlayer is.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't need, oh, yeah, yeah, look at this. Reliable email deliverability made easy.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I bet you he's an investor. Is he investing through his ventures?

• 4:07Speaker 00

  It's probably in his portfolio. It's probably in his portfolio. But I think it's, it's, um, look, that is a big thing. And I, I do think it's worth, like, if you're listening to this right now and you're starting out, it's probably worth checking out Cloudflare and Amazon. And then Neil, you may, maybe you can test it on one of your smaller things, but, um, it's interesting to me. Look, we, we're paying six grand a month for eight million emails on Mailgun. And this guy's like, bro. So anyway, um, I think before you make the change, yes, look into deliverability. It's not always about price. You want to make sure, in my mind, sure, stable, secure, reliable. But in this case, Neil's right, deliverability too.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. So check this out. Uh, on Eric's screen, you can see how this X post got 2.2 million views. I believe this 2.2 is kind of small for me to read. Is that correct?

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's 2.2.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So we all talk about posting on social media, whether it's X or whether it's LinkedIn. You don't need a follower account to do well. You can just do what Syed did. What Syed did is, and I don't know what his follower count is, but it's probably decent. But what he did is he went on a thread that was really popular and blowing up, and left a comment about another product. When he left that comment, how many views does it have or does it show, Eric?

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does show. So just so everyone knows, Syed has 106,000 followers on, um, on X. And then, so he posted and 1,800 people saw that.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  That's a lot. And that's 1,800 potential customers. So you should go and see what threads are really popular in your space. And just go and respond. And I don't know why too many people don't do that. It's an easy way to generate more revenue through social. And everyone's like, oh, I don't have the followers. It's not going to work. It, you don't need any followers. You just need to ride the coattails of other popular threads and leave a response that's helpful. If you notice here, Syed's response, he talked about a product. He talked about how it's a better deal, if I'm not mistaken, than the others. And it's reliable. Um, and it wasn't too aggressive, but it was very relevant.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  If someone was talking about using AI and how AI is changing the world, and then he's just like, "Oh, you should check out this email solution." That's too aggressive, right? And that's not related. Syed's not doing that. But the example that Eric shared is a prime example of what people should be doing with social media to just drive more sales if you don't have followers. Quick break for SaaS founders listening. You know how content marketing works. You know how AI SEO works. And you've been seeing competitors ranking for your keywords all day long. But you don't have the time to write and hiring a content team feels premature or just out of the budget. That's exactly why we built ClickFlow. It helps create AI SEO content that actually sounds like your brand. We're talking thought leadership.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  We're talking product content, comparison pages, without having to add more headcount. It also helps you do things such as building FAQs, internal linking, and telling you which old posts are hurting your domain. One user reported saving 90 hours per month, and that was a part-time employee. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. Scale your content without scaling your team. Back to the show. So Neil, you know what that's called?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Responding to participating in the community?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  No, it's called Reply Guy. So a Reply Guy is someone that just sits on like X or LinkedIn, for example, just replies to relevant posts. So being a Reply Guy in the beginning, when you have no followers, to Neil's point, will get you a lot of views. And like, sometimes I would reply to someone and like, someone's like, "Oh, this is how I'm using AI." And I think this was a couple of months ago when my X account wasn't really doing much. I responded and whenever I replied to someone, I would get like 40,000, 50,000, 70,000 views or so. But whenever I posted something from scratch, and like, this is months ago, I would barely crack like 500 views or so. Now it's a different story because I think the algorithm's moving in my favor. And now when I post it, but like, I had to be that Reply Guy initially, and then I had to be a lot more consistent.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  And then you start to get the reach. And the other thing I'll say too is, you don't necessarily need a lot of followers for a lot of views today because of the way X works or the way like a TikTok or Instagram reels or Facebook reels, they just, it's not just social media anymore, right? We call it, it's more based on the interest graph, right? And so if you post something really good, it's going to get a lot of views. And it just, followers don't matter nearly as much as they did before. I think even when you look at like a YouTube, like a short, for example, YouTube long form, I think followers still matter a little bit, but not as much as before, right Neil?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Followers matter very little. So, social media has become democratized. It doesn't matter if you have a million followers or a hundred. You guys have all seen the girl that says, "I'm looking for a guy in finance," right? Six-five, blue eyes, or something like that, that went viral. And then she did a song, I believe, with David Guetta.

• 8:48Speaker 00

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• 9:23Speaker 01

  You guys have all seen the guy who's drinking cranberry juice and longboarding on a skateboard, or whatever it's called, a longboard because his car broke down. And then everyone started buying cranberry juice, and then I believe they bought him a new car or truck, right? What I'm getting at here is, these people didn't have a lot of followers, yet they went viral, and they got millions of views, if not hundreds of millions of views, and created internet memes and sensations. What happens is, if you have content and you put it out there, it doesn't matter if you have ten followers or a hundred followers. What the platforms all do is they show it to a small group of people that they think would be interested.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  If every single one, and I'm giving you an extreme example, watched it, liked it, commented, and shared it, they did all three, then after they showed it to ten people who did that, they'll start showing it to five hundred or a thousand. Now, you may not get all thousand to that, but if you had twenty percent, like it, share it, comment on it, and watch it three times, it starts going viral. Because the engagement is high, and the platform knows that people love that piece of content, so they share it to anyone that they think would be interested. That's how their algorithms typically work.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  Yep. I would also say too, I mean, you've been doing this for a very long time, but when you post something and you want... Like a YouTube, a new YouTube video, like you'll hit your email list and it does give it a nice initial boost. That goes, that goes a long way as well.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I, I stopped doing that.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  So how, how does, so it's just pure organic now?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what Eric's talking about is I would publish YouTube videos three times a week. And this was before they introduced shorts. Now I publish YouTube videos daily. Majority are shorts and my longer form are, are longer than they used to be. And when I used to publish them, I would send an email blast in the first 24 hours. Cause the way a lot of what YouTube's algorithm works for both the searches, because a lot of YouTube traffic is actually driven, not just from people discovering the product in the sidebar or the video on the sidebar, at least for the desktop version. They also discover it by searching on YouTube and then you want to write. If you do well in the first 24 hours, your rankings go up. They recommend you more and your video tends to blow up. So what I would do is I'll take my email.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  List, the hour that the video got published and I would push it out. What ended up happening is, is over time, as my email list grew, YouTube believed that me sending an email blast was spamming and they felt like it was bots or I was trying to game the system. Right? In theory, I was, you know, using the algorithm to my advantage, but they thought the traffic was quote unquote fake. And what we saw is they would stop counting the views because they thought it was bot traffic when it was real humans. And it would actually hurt it. So I stopped. When my email list was smaller, it worked well. But when I started blasting out videos to like two million people, right? When I published the video.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  You need to do like segments, dude.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I, I've never tried it with that. I, I should go back and try it with a much smaller segment of my list, but I'm too lazy.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I think someone on your team should, but probably you're the only one that has control of your email list still, right?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  No, I, I don't send out my emails. Uh, I do review all of the emails.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  So like check this out and I'll actually share this on screen. I think this will be interesting for you guys to actually see my workflow.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  But like, check this out. Hope you're doing good. This is from Colin. This is literally yesterday. Here's next week's emails and charts for webinars. All right. I go through every single email and I go and edit them every single week. I get one group of emails coming from the consulting side of the business. The other arm of my business is software. I get another group of emails once a week for the next week for all my product related emails. And I literally go through every single one for the subject line to the copy to the CTA and I modify every single one. But I don't send them out.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  So yeah, in theories, someone should help you segment just for the hell of it, just to test it.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I should do it.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there you have it. Guys, hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll catch you next week. We'll see you later.