Most online business case studies go something like this: big ticket offer → complex funnel → six-figure launch → rinse and repeat. Liz Wilcox‘s story doesn’t go like that – at all.
Liz charges $9 a month for her membership. She’s done so for five years. And has no plans to change it – because that $9, multiplied by 4,000+ members and stacked across half a decade, has now generated nearly $2 million.
Liz is the 90s-obsessed, self-titled “Fresh Princess of Email Marketing,” a single mom who grew up without much money and started an RV travel blog because she needed some, before pivoting to email marketing. And she’s done all of it with a couple of hours work a week, and a checkout and email infrastructure simple enough to run completely on autopilot while she was filming the 46th season of reality TV show Survivor.
Here’s how Liz did it – proving the naysayers wrong who said the offer was underpriced.
| By the numbers → Nearly $2 million ($1,949,266) in total membership revenue since February 2021 → $600K+ from the membership in 2024 alone → 4,000+ active members → ~100-150 new members joining every month → $1,000 average daily revenue for 100 consecutive days while filming Survivor → ~2 hours per week spent running the membership → 100-400 affiliates paid out automatically every month via ThriveCart → $80,000+ in annual pass renewals in a single month |
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From RV sewage stories to email marketing expert
Liz is upfront about why she started her business. “Full disclosure, full transparency – I’m really passionate about cash,” she says. “I love money. I grew up really poor and we never really had money.”
In the mid-2010s, she bought an RV, started a travel blog, and decided from day one that email was going to be her engine. “All I heard was email, email, email,” she recalls. “You do the blog to get people on the email list. You do YouTube to get them on an email list. So the day I started my travel blog was the day I started my email list.”
Her first product was, by her own admission, questionable. “I had a book about poop,” she says. “It was an RV travel blog. If you’ve ever seen an RV, people drive with their sewage down the road. So I created a collection of funny stories about RV life.” She priced it at $10, sold it to the 300 people on her email list, and made a few thousand dollars in the first few months. A company later picked it up and paid her $7 for every new lead it drove to their list.
That was the moment it clicked. She was good at email. Maybe better than the travel blog.
The next proof point came when she launched her first proper digital course. She’d spent months building the waitlist. She’d sent email after email to a small but engaged list. When she opened the cart, 141 people were on the waitlist – and all 141 of them bought. “At the time, I didn’t even know that was remarkable,” she says. “I come from an education background, not a marketing one. The same way I’d want all my students to pass the test, I wanted all my subscribers to purchase so, to me, a 100% uptake rate seemed normal.”
When she started telling people, the reactions changed everything. “People were like ‘Oh my gosh, Liz – how did you do that? That’s impossible.’ But it clearly wasn’t because I’d just done it,” she recalls.
So in 2019, she sold the RV blog and went all in on email.
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The $9 price point everyone told her to change
Here’s the part of Liz’s story that makes other online business owners do a double-take.
When she launched her Email Marketing Membership (EMM) in February 2021, she set the price at $9/month. And every person around her told her she was wrong. “My business coach at the time was like, ‘What are you thinking? It has to be $50.’ No. ‘$40?’ No. ‘$19?’ No. ‘$10?’ No.” The pushback didn’t stop. It still hasn’t.
But Liz wasn’t being naive. She was being deliberate. As a former educator, her core belief is that everyone has a right to learn – including people who can’t explain a $200 monthly subscription to their partner. “When I was first starting out and I literally had no job and no money and no support from my then-husband, I would have spent $9,” she says. “I could have explained that purchase to my husband: ‘Yeah, okay, I bought this $9 thing.’ That’s why the price is $9. That’s why the price has been $9 for the last five years. And that’s why the price will never not be $9.”
The math works out differently than people expect. $9 x 4,000 members is $36,000 a month. $9 x 4,000 x 12 is $432,000 a year. Add the annual pass option, workshops, upsells, and order bumps, and you’re well over half a million dollars a year. In five years, the membership alone has crossed $1.9 million.
To her fellow coaches and entrepreneurs who balk at the price point, Liz has this to say: “I do know my worth,” she says. “But I also live in the real world. I know that just because you believe you can achieve something doesn’t mean there aren’t real-world roadblocks in front of you – and money is one of those.”
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She sells email with email: the living proof of concept
There’s a meta quality to how Liz runs her business that her students find relatable. She uses email marketing to teach email marketing. Her primary growth channel is email marketing. She is, quite literally, a walking advertisement for her own product.
“For every dollar I spent, I got $250 in return from email in 2025,” she says. Her newsletter goes out consistently. Her welcome sequence sells. Her email list – around 15,000 subscribers – is the engine behind everything: new members, workshop registrations, affiliate relationships, and the flash sales that kept her revenue steady even when she was completely unreachable.
When someone joins the Email Marketing Membership, they get access to a full template library for weekly newsletters, a new email newsletter every single week, a monthly Q&A with Liz, and quarterly guest experts. It’s everything she teaches people to build for themselves – packaged as a recurring product people pay $9 a month to stay inside.
The membership has also become the thing she teaches from. “My personal definition of success is to be an example of what’s possible,” she says. Her students don’t just learn the theory – they watch a real business built on those exact principles generating nearly $2 million over five years.
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How ThriveCart powers a $9 business at scale
Here’s the challenge with a $9/month membership at 4,000+ members: the volume of transactions is enormous. Failed payments happen constantly. Renewals need to be managed. Affiliates need paying out. None of this can be done manually.
ThriveCart handles it all. “It’s wicked simple,” Liz says. “For a simple offer like mine, I don’t need anything crazy complicated. And I’m not very tech-savvy. So the fact that I could use ThriveCart templates and mix and match was really helpful.”
Here’s how it works:
Failed payment recovery: At $9, Liz sees a high volume of failed payments. ThriveCart’s dunning sequence fires automatically, sending a series of 3-4 emails to recover the payment. Liz, being Liz, wrote the subject line as “Failed” alongside a melting face emoji – and members write back saying it’s so funny they don’t even mind. “ThriveCart makes it easy because once you set it up, the system triggers the email, which saves a lot of payments,” she says.
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Annual renewals: Liz offers an annual pass option, and ThriveCart handles the renewal cycle automatically. It sends reminder emails 30 days before renewal, excludes members who’ve already cancelled, and processes the payment. “In November 2025, for Black Friday,we had over $80,000 in renewals,” she says. “ThriveCart sorts out all the technical heavy-lifting behind the scenes, which saves me hours, if not days.”
Order bumps and upsells: Her workshops – priced between $12 and $150 – are sold through ThriveCart sales pages with order bumps for complementary products. “You just bought a $49 workshop on welcome sequences – why not add our replies workshop for 50% off?” On the annual pass, she upsells a one-on-one copywriting session through a ThriveCart upsell page, more than doubling the cart value.
Affiliate payouts: Liz pays out between 100 and 400 affiliates every single month – automatically, through ThriveCart. “ThriveCart notifies me if it couldn’t pay someone out, for whatever reason. I log in, hit ‘try again,’ and it usually goes through. For me, doing that many transactions, it’s just so much easier to manage with ThriveCart than doing it manually.”
JV products: She’s a huge fan of ThriveCart’s joint venture feature, which lets her co-create products with collaborators and have ThriveCart pay them out automatically. “I don’t see this kind of functionality anywhere else,” she says. “It’s so underrated and so helpful for someone like me who loves collaborations.”
Explore ThriveCart’s features, including order bumps, upsells, downsells, subscription management, course hosting, A/B testing, affiliate management, and more.
The Survivor test: a business that runs without you
In the summer of 2024, Liz Wilcox “disappeared”. She went to Fiji to film Survivor – the U.S. reality show – and handed over the keys to a business that had to run without her for months.
She spent April and May preparing. She wrote every email she wanted to go out while she was filming. She built the sales pages inside ThriveCart. She made sure Kit (her email platform) and ThriveCart were talking to each other. She briefed her admin, Patricia, on handling the inbox and fielding tech questions. And then she left.
“It really was just those two tools working together,” she says. “Kit and ThriveCart. With a little bit of upfront work, some nurturing on the email side, and bada bing bada boom – I was making $1,000 every single day for 100 days in a row on average.” The welcome sequence was selling. The newsletters were selling. The upsells were upselling. The flash sales ran off the ThriveCart sales pages she’d pre-built. And when she got back and looked at the numbers, her reaction was: “Wow, this is awesome.”
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Liz’s advice for coaches and creators
We asked Liz what she’d tell someone who wants to build a membership or recurring revenue product. Here’s what she said.
1) Put a date on the calendar – and commit to two years
“Memberships take time to grow. They’re a weekly thing. You’ve got to be in it with your people. I started February 16th, 2021, and told myself I’m going to do this until February 16th, 2023. I’m going to find 1,000 members. At $9,000 a month, that was my ‘enough number’. I worked backwards from there.”
2) Know your “enough” number
“A lot of people in my position sell you this dream of making more money and working less – but in reality, they work more and they don’t know what their ‘enough number’ is. I decided to keep it simple, maintain 4,000 members, and get my time back. That was enough.”
3) Don’t think you have to tell stories in emails
“Everybody tells you, ‘Oh, tell stories!’ But you didn’t get into business to tell stories. You got into business to sell products. Give them a personal update – two to three sentences – then segue into whatever you’ve got to say. That’s the story.”
4) Stop waiting to feel ready
“Ready is a lie. What does that even mean? It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done. We can’t get where we want to go if we don’t take the first step.”
5) Love the membership and the people in it
“Who wants to sell something they resent? You’ve got to love what you’re building and who you’re serving. That’s the only way it keeps going.”
Ready to build a recurring revenue business? Join Liz Wilcox and thousands of other successful creators who use ThriveCart to power their sales, memberships, and automated funnels.