Stacked Marketer’s 2024 Annual Report

Key Data 

Letter From The Crew

If you’re reading this, there’s a big chance you are already familiar with us… 

If you’re new, here’s a quick intro to our products.

Stacked Marketer newsletter: a free marketing-focused newsletter with carefully curated news, trends, tech, and actionable advice for the modern marketer… The marketer stacked with a complete set of skills that makes them able to drive measurable key results, for small to big businesses.

Stacked Marketer Pro membership: a monthly membership that includes reports, premium content, courses, and a community to help you discover new marketing ideas, angles, strategies, and tactics. Stacked Marketer Pro gives you in-depth analysis every month so you can gain clarity on what’s working, and what’s not working.

Psychology of Marketing: a free weekly newsletter explaining one psychological effect and showing three tactics for how to use it in your marketing and business.

Tactics: a free weekly newsletter bringing you practical tactics to grow your agency, career, business, campaigns, and online shop. These tactics come straight from our research for Stacked Marketer Pro.

This is our sixth annual report. You can read our past reports below:

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Why are we doing this report?

Starting with our very first annual report, we had 4 reasons:

1. We want to set the tone for more transparency in an industry where there are plenty of snake-oil practices.
2. It keeps us accountable because we will not share only numbers, we will share some of our thoughts and plans for the future as well.
3. We wanted to show something of a live case study for a business that started from zero not so long ago and put real numbers out there, whether they are impressive or not.
4. We think many of you are very smart marketers and business people who will end up giving us priceless feedback. It’s already been useful for previous years’ reports and we will keep doing it.

How should you read our numbers?

Emails sent – The number of recipients over the year. It’s the product of subscribers times the number of newsletters sent. In 2024, we sent 16.4M emails, including Tactics and Psychology of Marketing.

Open rate – How many of those 16.4M emails were opened. We look at unique open rates, meaning that we check individual openers.

Our 2024 average is 50%, lower than the 51.4% average from 2023. 

But that doesn’t mean less people are opening… We’ll explain after we also touch on the clickthrough rate.

Click-to-open rate (CTOR) – How many unique openers clicked on at least one link in the email. 

We adjusted to this metric from CTR because it’s the most commonly used in the industry now and we noticed people too often default to CTOR even when they call it CTR.

Our average for 2024 was 3.15%. As a comparison, our CTOR for 2023 would have been roughly 5.1%.

In our case, the decrease in CTR is not actually a decrease. In late 2023, we implemented more filters to remove bot clicks from our stats, and 2024 is now a full year with a very aggressive bot clicks filter.

We also clean our list of inactive AMPP users every day, so our automatic opens are kept to a minimum.

In other words, we’re left with real people with real intent as much as possible.

Unsubscribe rate – How many unique recipients unsubscribe from our emails with each campaign. 

There’s been virtually no change here with 0.14% in 2024 vs 0.15% in 2023.

And as usual, around 33% of unsubscribers are people who have left the marketing industry, so there’s nothing that would really convince them to stick around.

Revenue – Quite self-explanatory, it’s all the income from newsletter sponsorships and partnerships, and Stacked Marketer Pro.

Operating expenses – This includes a mix of tools that we use, team salaries (including founder/management salary), technical development, marketing, and occasional T&A expenses.

Early 2024 still has some significant tech and product investments we made, which we will break down more later in this report.

We removed average revenue per subscriber per month starting with this report. With three newsletters mostly supported through ad revenue, and a premium membership in Stacked Marketer, the revenue per subscriber per month doesn’t quite fit with the reality of our revenue streams.

2024 Goals vs Reality

You could say that from 2023 to 2024 nothing changed… In other words, lower budgets, tighter KPIs, and generally a tough environment.

In some regards, it was worse than 2023 given the decrease in revenue and increase in losses.

In others, it was better because our expenses were significantly decreased once we finished the biggest developments.

You can read more about all this here.

Let’s look at things deeper.

Reflecting on revenue

• Target: $1,000,000
• Result: $517,500

The first year with a decrease in revenue, and significantly off our initial target.

We were wrong about two main things:

• We underestimated how long it would take for marketing budgets to recover and KPIs to loosen up.
• We overestimated Stacked Marketer Pro growth given the developments we made.

So, both our ad revenue and paid membership revenue came below our initial targets.

Reflecting on subscriber base 

• Target: 150,000+ across all newsletters
• Result: 97,000+

This was not a surprise once Q2 2024 showed no signs of improvement when it comes to ad revenue.

We decreased our paid ads spent to a minimum for most of 2024.

While we did get into a better position in Q4 2024, we also know it’s the worst period for a free newsletter to start ads.

Prices are high, and people are bombarded with ads more than any other time of the year.

We also know that Q1 of a new year is some of the best period of the whole year so we decided to stick to the bare minimum for Q4 2024, then increase ad spend in Q1 2025.

Reflecting on EBT

• Target: $200,000
• Result: -$135,500

As mentioned in the revenue section, our negative result is all from the first half of the year, driven by the wrong assumptions around ad revenue and paid membership growth.

Basically, we were spending based on growth assumptions that did not pan out.

Once we adjusted to the reality of things, we had a net zero second half of the year, with a positive trend.

Net zero is not our desired outcome, but we’re pleased we were quick to reverse the negative trend.

There’s also no creative accounting here, no “adjusted EBITDA” which could have put our losses much lower.

With that said, the results from our previous years and our investment from 2023 keep us in a position to invest in acquiring other marketing newsletters that are a good fit, to increase ad spend, and develop our products quickly–the only question is whether or not we find profitable opportunities to do so.

The main lesson from 2024?

For 2023, we said we didn’t adjust as quickly as we should have, and that we will take that lesson with us into 2024.

Well, we have to say we mostly did take this lesson into 2024. We hoped we didn’t need to but when the time came, we think we made the correct decisions given the situation.

What did we improve on compared to 2023?

Content: Data Stories has become the standout category of content. It’s the most popular category on our website and most shared across social media. You can check out Data Stories here, if you haven’t already.

Aside from this, we released a lot of courses and reports for Stacked Marketer Pro. While not everything was a hit there, some of the things were, which is great.

Last but not least, all our free newsletter content has been solid and everything felt like a well-oiled machine.

Efficiency: We’re more focused and doing “more” with less.

Going into the second half of 2024, we had to reduce costs. But it was challenging to do this without having an impact on the quality of the product.

We had to part ways with people on our Crew so naturally there would be fewer things “done”.

But this meant we had to focus on our core value propositions, so we became more focused.

We also became more efficient by creating more automations and AI in our operations.

All our newsletters are still 100% human-written, but we use automations and AI for research, and for easily repeatable tasks that involve passing data from one point to another.

What could we have done better?

Revenue and expenses: Spending a bit less on tech without finishing what was on our roadmap would have been worse, even if it made the year look “better” in terms of net results.

So we think we made the right decision here, given our long-term outlook.

Growth: Again something that was hard to find the right balance or timing for changes. 

We do think with the existing experience, we would do things differently if we have a repeat of this scenario… Hindsight.

What is the outlook for 2025?

We’ve seen some positive but small signals already in the second half of 2024 so we’re cautiously optimistic it will be a better year than 2024.

We plan to stay agile and vigilant. We have the ability to take advantage of opportunities if they present themselves, like acquiring other similar newsletters, or hiring impactful people on our Crew.

But we are also patient when waiting for these opportunities.

For example, for all of 2024, we were on the lookout to acquire other newsletters, but we didn’t find anything worthwhile. So we didn’t make any acquisitions. Which brings us to the first major point for our 2025 outlook.

Growth: Meta Ads will be a focus in Q1 2025. We know it’s usually the best time of the year for a newsletter to advertise on the platform.

And a secondary focus stays on other newsletters. Swaps, paid ads, and acquisitions.

Lastly, SparkLoop’s Partner Network stays in the mix but we don’t see it as something that will move the needle for us.

Revenue: We can’t predict the ad market too much, even with the small positive signs we’ve seen before. We’ll test out ways to improve there of course.

What we do have more control over is Stacked Marketer Pro so we’ll double down on what showed a positive impact there.

Content: Iterative improvement.

Our Crew is some of the strongest out there when it comes to the content we create, so we’re very positive in this department.

But we don’t think we have any instant game-changers.

We’ll just try to be 0.10% better every day.

2025 Goals?

• $750,000 revenue in 2025.
• 150,000 subscribers across all newsletters.
• $150,000 EBT result, which means roughly 20% EBT margin.

We’re not expecting a return to the post-COVID 0% interest rate environment but we do think we can have our best year in terms of revenue in 2025.

And without any major expenses coming up, we think we can combine that revenue with a profitable year with a good margin.