Using Kit, Abbey Ashley grew her business to over $2 million in annual revenue and 193K email subscribers. She now has a team of 11, all working together to achieve what she calls “the freedom life.”
This is how she did it.
The challenge: Needing revenue that wasn’t tied to hours or location
Abbey Ashley started her own business as a virtual assistant in 2015 when she found out she was pregnant with her second child. She wanted to be able to work from home and spend time with her new family, and she thought starting her own virtual assistant business could be the answer.
She began the business while pregnant, and, always a hard worker, she started getting clients right away.
Then, one client changed her life.
He was a course creator, and she was blown away by his business.
I saw behind the scenes of how powerful having an email list could be; he would launch courses and make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a week.
She started building an email list right away, even though she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it…yet.
The solution: Use Kit to build an email list
Abbey started growing her email list on Kit early in her creator journey after attending the Craft + Commerce conference.
It felt like people really cared, and it didn’t matter what level you were at in business; I was a smaller business owner at that time, and I felt just as important as the people on stage.
That instantly hooked me to Kit and has kept me as a Kit user throughout all these years.
The software is incredible, but what always brings me back to Kit is the team culture and the way they serve people.
Abbey built her first 1,000 email subscribers by teaching everything she learned about starting her own virtual assistant business and creating opt-ins using Kit landing pages.
It was very grassroots; it took me almost a full year to get those first thousand subscribers. It was grueling, but I made it my number one focus. And once I got there, it definitely paid off.
The strategy: Create your own product, build genuine relationships with subscribers, and earn more with an automated flywheel in Kit
Once Abbey built her first thousand subscribers, she grew her business to seven figures using Kit and these strategies:
1. Ask your subscribers what they want from you
Once Abbey had her first subscribers, she sent a simple email asking them one question:
“Hey, what would you want to learn from me?”
They responded by saying they wanted to learn how to build their own virtual assistant businesses, and she created her first course to help answer that question.
She launched it in December 2016, and it made $41K in the first year. In 2019, it made its first million and continues to make millions each year.
2. Serve first, sell second
Abbey grows her list continually with free offerings, and it’s important to her that everyone who comes onto her list is helped—even if they don’t make a purchase.
She sends out a weekly newsletter packed with information to help people become virtual assistants and values the relationships she builds with her audience through her content even if they never make a purchase.
She also loves using the email designer in Kit to send those emails.
Kit helped us increase our sales and our effectiveness with the ability to make our emails both deliverable and beautiful at the same time.
3. Build genuine relationships with subscribers
Inspired by Craft + Commerce, Abbey tries to meet up with subscribers whenever she is traveling.
Anytime I go to a new city, I can search subscribers by zip code in Kit. I’m going to Kansas City this weekend, and I just emailed 500 people and said, “Hey, if any of you want to meet me for coffee…”
I’m able to take this online platform and turn that into a real life connections through the tools Kit has. And meeting in person is like nothing else. It makes you realize that every subscriber is a name with a story.
4. Set up an automated funnel to sell your digital products
For the people on Abbey’s list who are ready to buy, she has a funnel set up in Kit.
This is what it looks like:
Step one: People find Abbey’s content organically on YouTube or via her Facebook group and subscribe to her email list to get something free she’s created, like a free webinar or checklist.
Step two: They receive the free content and get an email sequence that leads them to watch a high-value, hour-long, free training video.
At the end of the training, Abbey pitches the course.
Step three: A few more emails are sent out after the free training only to those who didn’t buy the course to give them more information.
Step four: After that seven-email sequence ends, everyone is added to what Abbey calls her “regular rhythm,” where they get the high-value VA Weekly newsletter every Tuesday.
Then, a few times throughout the year we relaunch the course. I know people are like, “launches are dead,” but I love course launches. I think they’re fun. Your business should be light and easy and fun. So if it’s fun to you, do it.
5. Use tags and segments to personalize content and get valuable feedback from non-buyers
After a launch, by using tags in Kit, Abbey can identify the subscribers who clicked on the links to learn more about the course but didn’t actually purchase.
At the end of every launch, she sends a special email only to the people who clicked but didn’t buy and invites them to an hour-long group Zoom meeting with Abbey and a few members of her team.
On the call, we’ll say, “Hey, we know that you were really interested in buying, but you didn’t this time, and that’s okay. We just want to know how can we serve you? What would be helpful?”
People show up to these calls, and the information Abbey gets helps her flywheel turn again and again, giving her ideas for more content to create in her newsletter and ideas for how to make her sales emails more effective in future launches.
And while these calls were truly designed to get feedback and not as another sales pitch, many of those who attend these feedback calls end up buying the course on the call.
Result: Millions in course sales, 193K+ email subscribers, and a sustainable business that creates jobs
Abbey’s email list and income has steadily grown since 2016. In her first full year of doing courses, she made around $67,000; her highest year to date was $3.8 million.
But her focus now is on sustaining her business and her team of mostly working moms. It means a lot to her to provide remote jobs (with four-day workweeks) to other moms like her who are looking for more flexible work.
And while she’s grateful for the high-growth years in her business, she loves that her flywheels give her more sustainability and the ability to “just get back to having a lot of fun while we’re doing it.”
Kit, she says, helped make that possible.
We project everything off of our email list. It is our number one KPI, our number one indicator. We’ll literally look at our launches and base how much money we’re going to make on how many email subscribers we have.
And for Abbey, that sustainable revenue allows her to keep her team employed and extend what she calls “the freedom life” to the subscribers on her list and the buyers of her course.
That is why I wake up and do what I do.
I was talking about loving my job once, and somebody almost laughed at me, saying, “Yeah, you don’t love your job. Nobody loves their job.” It honestly made me angry. Why do we spend most of our time on earth doing something we don’t even enjoy?
So, for me, the freedom life is the ability to have a life I actually love.
Kit has changed my life. Being able to grow an email list might seem like a really practical thing, but for me, every single name on our list is a person and a life that I’m impacting.
I feel like Kit’s entire system is made to help us actually serve people well, which is what we want to do.
