·S1 E95
From 1% to 4%: How Carissa Erzen Rebuilt Her Email Foundation and Finally Knows Her Audience
Episode Description
Episode Summary:
The one time I've been to Germany, I went to Berlin and Dresden, and then out to western Germany to see family. Their cemeteries over there are gorgeous — so well kept, all flowers and bushes. One afternoon my family wanted to walk through an old church and the little cemetery beside it, and one thing really surprised me — the last names on those headstones were the same ones I grew up with in small-town Nebraska: Busing, Hansmeier, Hermsmeier, Tegtmeier — and then Grummert. It was like a whole German village had picked up and moved to southeast Nebraska together.
So I've got a real soft spot for what Carissa Erzen is building. She runs Humbly Homemade, a blog for authentic German baking — cookies, cakes, breads, pastries — and it's such a delightful, specific niche: it lets people revisit the flavors of their childhood, or the years they lived there. Or people like me, who never lived there but want to make something that actually tastes like the Germany our families came from.
Carissa is also my client. We rebuilt her email foundation together last fall — and it's the kind of turnaround I love to point to. When she first came to me, her list had just crossed a thousand subscribers, but her open and click rates kept sliding. She was doing all the "right" things and still felt like she was sending into the void, wondering who was even on the other side.
So we gave her the pieces she was missing: a welcome sequence (she didn't have one), a lead magnet that actually solves a problem, a cold-subscriber cleanup that keeps her list healthy on autopilot, and segmentation simple enough to keep up with. Now her newsletter click rate has gone from about 1% to 3–4%, her open rates are the highest they've ever been, readers reply from as far away as France, and she's sending four emails a week without people unsubscribing. Best of all? She finally knows who's on her list.
In this episode, you'll learn about:
- Why Carissa says a welcome sequence isn't optional anymore — and what hers now does for every new subscriber
- How the Duett team taught her to create and market a more magnetic lead magnet
- How cleaning her list (and cutting it in half!) made her deliverability and engagement stronger
- The simple segmentation that lets her send more emails, not fewer, without losing subscribers
- How knowing her audience has become a content flywheel — replies, requests, and recipes people actually want
- The weight that lifted when she realized email is hers — a channel no algorithm can throttle, driving her own blog traffic on her terms.
Check out this episode's blog post
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