For three years I ran my online store like a leaky bucket and called it marketing. People found me through ads, bought one thing, and disappeared forever - and my answer was to pour more money into ads to find new strangers. The month I finally did the math on that, I felt sick. This is the story of how one unglamorous, twenty-year-old channel - email - quietly became the most profitable part of my business.
Who I am
I'm Daniel. I make and sell leather goods - wallets, belts, camera straps - from a workshop that used to be my garage. I'm not a marketer. I'm a guy with burn scars on his fingers who learned Shopify from YouTube videos at midnight because a craft fair customer asked if I had a website.
Working for yourself online sounds romantic until you realize you're the production line, the customer service desk, and the marketing department, and at least one of those departments is always on fire. For me it was always marketing. Making a beautiful wallet? Ten years of practice. Getting the right person to see it twice? Total mystery.
The math that made me feel sick
Last autumn I sat down with a spreadsheet to figure out why revenue kept growing while profit didn't. The answer was ugly: on average I was paying the ad networks a painful cut of every single first order just to acquire the customer - and then I was paying the same networks again months later to reach the same person, because I had no other way to contact them.
Meanwhile the actual gold was sitting in my order history: hundreds of people who had already bought from me, already loved the product - one customer had emailed me a photo of his wallet after two years of daily use with the subject line 'still perfect'. I had no way to talk to these people except hoping an algorithm showed them my post.
I wasn't building a customer base. I was renting strangers from Facebook, one transaction at a time.
What I tried before email
- Posting more on social media - I spent evenings making reels that reached a few hundred people, most of whom had never bought and never would.
- A discount pop-up bolted onto my store - it collected addresses into a list I then did nothing with, because the 'sending' part felt overwhelming.
- A big-name email platform a friend recommended - I opened it, saw a wall of segments, workflows and API settings clearly built for a marketing team, and closed the tab within the week.
That's the embarrassing part: I technically had an email list for over a year. Six hundred people who had raised their hands and said 'talk to me'. And I sent them almost nothing, because every tool I touched made me feel stupid.
The turning point
A fellow maker at a market - she sells ceramics, does everything herself like me - told me she made a meaningful slice of her revenue from email, and that she used GetResponse. I asked how big her team was. She laughed and pointed at herself. That was her whole pitch, and honestly it was the only pitch that mattered to me: one non-technical person, doing this alone, and it works.
I signed up expecting the usual drowning feeling. Instead, the first thing the platform asked me was, more or less, what I wanted to do - not which API to configure. I built my first real newsletter that same evening with the drag-and-drop editor, using the AI assistant to un-stick my subject line. I sent it to my six hundred neglected subscribers with an apology and a story about the workshop. Orders came in that night. From an email. While I was asleep.
How I actually use GetResponse now
The welcome series that never clocks off
- New subscribers automatically get three emails over two weeks: the story of the workshop, a guide to leather care, and a small first-order thank-you offer.
- For me: I wrote these once, months ago. They've greeted every single new subscriber since, at 2pm or 2am, whether I'm working or fishing.
Automations tied to what people do
- Someone who clicks the camera-strap email but doesn't buy gets a gentle follow-up with photos from real customers a few days later.
- Past buyers get a check-in email months after purchase - leather ages beautifully, and that's exactly when people want a matching belt.
- For me: this is the 'talking to the right person twice' problem, solved, without me remembering anything.
Landing pages for launches
- Limited runs now get their own simple landing page with a signup form, built in the same tool in an evening.
- For me: the last limited batch sold out to the email list before my ads even started - I actually paused the ad campaign.
What actually changed
I'll keep it qualitative and true: email went from producing literally nothing to being a channel I count on every month, my ad budget now goes mostly toward finding genuinely new people instead of re-renting old ones, and launches stopped being anxiety events - the list gives me a floor of sales I can predict. But the change I feel most is smaller: when I have news, I just... tell my customers. Directly. No algorithm deciding whether they deserve to hear from me.
Isn't email dead?
I believed that too, mostly because my own inbox is a mess of corporate noise. Here's what changed my mind: nobody is forced to be on my list. Every address belongs to someone who bought a wallet or asked to hear from the workshop. When those people get an email from Daniel with a story and a photo of something half-finished on the bench, that's not spam - that's the letter they signed up for. Dead channels don't quietly outsell your ad account.
The new Daniel
The old Daniel refreshed his ad dashboard like a slot machine and felt his stomach drop every time costs ticked up. The new Daniel owns his audience - a list nobody can algorithm away from me, that gets a little more valuable with every order. I still make every wallet by hand. But the business underneath the craft finally has a foundation that's mine.
Should you try it?
If you sell anything online and your customer relationships currently live inside an ad platform you don't control - yes. GetResponse has a free way in, so you can build your first signup form and welcome email without spending anything, and see your own list come alive before you commit. Start collecting addresses today; the best time was three years ago, and I have the spreadsheet to prove it.
Honest disclosure: this is my own experience, on my own paid account. If you sign up through my link I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you - it helps keep the workshop lights on and these write-ups honest. For scores, pricing tiers and a feature-by-feature breakdown, our full GetResponse review is on this site.
- Daniel
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