Subscriber Math: Building an Email List That Actually Makes Money

How many email subscribers does a food blog need? It depends on four numbers: open rate, click rate, the conversion rate of whatever you are selling, and the value of each click or sale. Multiply them and you get revenue per subscriber. Divide your income goal by that figure and you have your target list size. This post walks through it with published benchmarks.

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TL;DR:

• Revenue per subscriber comes from four numbers: open rate, click rate, offer conversion rate, and value per click or sale; divide your goal by it to size the list.
• Recent platform benchmarks put recipe-relevant open rates in the high 30s to low 40s and click rates around 2 to 4 percent, with automated emails clicking far higher.
• In an illustrative 10,000-subscriber model, ads alone earned pocket money while product sequences and a paid tier lifted revenue roughly tenfold, so fix per-subscriber value before chasing size.
• Food audiences convert to paid at a modest median of 0.62 percent but retain best of any vertical, at 5.06 percent monthly churn, roughly 19 months per member.
• Grow faster with page-matched opt-ins, an email-me-this-recipe option, short seasonal lead magnets, creator recommendations, twice-weekly sends, and pruning subscribers inactive for 90 days.

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There is a question I heard constantly during my years running research for food creators at Raptive, usually phrased as a sigh: "I know I should be growing my list, but how big does it actually need to be?" The answer most people get is "as big as possible," which is not an answer. It is a shrug with a to-do list attached.

So let's do the arithmetic properly, with the benchmarks email platforms actually publish and your own numbers plugged in where only yours will do. One housekeeping note: this post is the math and the growth plan. If your list already exists and earns nothing, that is a different problem, covered in why most creator lists sit idle. The welcome sequence, where a lot of the actual selling happens, gets its own treatment in the welcome sequence that does the selling. (I go deeper on this in Most Food Bloggers Have an Email List. Few Make Money From It. Here's How to Fix That..) (I go deeper on this in The Email Monetization Mistake Most Food Bloggers Make (and the Welcome Email Sequence That Fixes It).) (I go deeper on this in Revenue Breakdown: Where Top Food Creators Make Their Money.)

What is a good email open rate for a food blog?

For a recipe site, a reasonable expectation in 2026 is an open rate somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s, and a click rate in the neighborhood of 2 to 4 percent, though the published benchmarks disagree with each other more than you might expect. That disagreement is the first thing to understand, because it changes how you should use these numbers.

Here are the niche rows and platform averages with the year of the underlying data, because a 2021 benchmark and a 2025 benchmark are not measuring the same world (Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflated open rates industry-wide after 2021, which is why the older numbers look lower).

Source (data year)	Segment	Open rate	Click rate
Campaign Monitor (2021)	Restaurant, Food & Beverage	18.5%	2.0%
Campaign Monitor (2021)	Media, Entertainment, Publishing	23.9%	2.9%
GetResponse (2023)	Restaurants & Food	38.52%	2.44%
GetResponse (2023)	Publishing	39.89%	5.76%
Mailchimp (updated Dec 2023)	All users	35.63%	2.62%
Kit (2023 data, creators)	All creators	44%	3.7%
beehiiv (2024 data, newsletters)	All newsletters	37.67%	4.59%
HubSpot (2025 compilation)	All industries	42.35%	2.3%

Sources for the table: Campaign Monitor's knowledge base, which also reports a 10.5% click-to-open rate for Restaurant, Food & Beverage on 2021 data (Campaign Monitor, 2021 data); GetResponse's benchmark report on emails sent January through December 2023, which adds a 6.33% click-to-open and 0.17% unsubscribe rate for Restaurants & Food (GetResponse, 2023 data); Mailchimp's all-user average, which includes a 0.22% unsubscribe rate (Mailchimp, 2023); Kit's 2024 stats report, which also gives a 0.5% unsubscribe rate across creators (Kit, 2023 data), with a separate Kit article citing a 43% creator open rate (Kit, 2024); beehiiv's 2025 report on 15.68 billion emails, which notably found automated emails clicked at 13.48%, nearly three times regular posts (beehiiv, 2024 data); beehiiv's 2026 report, which says platform open rates now sit at "41%+" (beehiiv, 2025 data), and its click-through article, which puts the Media & Creator category at 6.17% (beehiiv, 2026); and HubSpot's 2025 roundup, which adds a 5.3% click-to-open rate across industries (HubSpot, 2025).

Notice something. No platform publishes a "food blogger" row. The closest are "Restaurants & Food" (which mixes in your local taco place's coupon blasts) and the creator or newsletter averages (which mix in finance newsletters and course sellers). Food bloggers sit somewhere in between, so use the table to sanity-check, not to grade yourself. And treat open rates as a soft signal. Clicks are what pay you: ad revenue, affiliate income and product sales all happen on the other side of a click.

How much is one email subscriber worth to a recipe site?

The honest answer is that nobody publishes a "revenue per subscriber for food blogs" number, so you have to build it from parts. The good news is the parts are simple, and Food Blogger Pro's 2025 conversation with email strategist Matt Molen lays out the formula plainly: list size, times send frequency, times click rate, times RPM, equals earnings (Food Blogger Pro, 2025).

An email subscriber turns into money on a recipe site in three ways, each with its own conversion step.

1. Ad revenue from clicks back to your site. Every click from an email is a pageview, and pageviews from email are worth more than average. Raptive's traffic-source guide explains that email visitors provide first-party data, and that "repeat visits from email subscribers tend to be more engaged, and more profitable, over time" (Raptive, 2025). In the Food Blogger Pro episode, Molen cites Raptive reporting a 40% RPM increase on identified newsletter clicks (Food Blogger Pro, 2025). The conversion step here is just the click rate, and the value is your RPM divided by 1,000.

2. Sales of something you own. A meal-plan bundle, an ebook, a membership. Kit reports that the average landing page conversion rate for creators is around 2%, with the top 25% of pages converting at 5.31% or better and the top 10% at roughly 11% (Kit, n.d.). The conversion step is click rate times landing-page conversion, and the value is your price.

3. Paid subscriptions. beehiiv's 2026 paid newsletter report gives a median free-to-paid conversion of 0.62%, a standard price point of $10 a month or $100 a year, and, encouragingly for us, the best retention of any vertical in Food & Drink, at 5.06% monthly churn, which works out to roughly 19 months of subscriber lifetime (beehiiv, 2026). The same report puts median subscriber lifetime value between $83 and $230 depending on the vertical.

A food audience is not the highest-converting in newsletter land (finance is, by a mile), but it is the stickiest. People do not cancel dinner. That is a structural advantage worth building around.

How many email subscribers does a food blog need? A worked example

Let's run the numbers for an imaginary recipe site with 10,000 subscribers sending once a week. Everything below is my own arithmetic, offered purely as illustration, using only the benchmark figures cited above. Your real numbers will differ, and you should swap them in.

Step one: clicks per send. Using GetResponse's Restaurants & Food click-through rate of 2.44% (GetResponse, 2023 data), 10,000 subscribers produce about 244 clicks per email. Using Kit's creator average of 3.7% (Kit, 2023 data), it is 370. Using beehiiv's 4.59% (beehiiv, 2024 data), it is 459. Let's take the middle figure, 370, and call it a round 350 to stay conservative.

Step two: clicks per year. At one send a week, 350 clicks times 52 sends is about 18,200 email-driven pageviews a year. If you send twice a week, which Molen argues food creators can do without meaningful unsubscribe damage (Food Blogger Pro, 2025), that roughly doubles to 36,400.

Step three: ad revenue. No approved source publishes a food-blog RPM I can cite here, so use your own dashboard figure. To make the arithmetic visible, plug in a placeholder of $30 per thousand pageviews (a stand-in, not a benchmark). 36,400 pageviews at $30 RPM is about $1,090 a year, or closer to $1,530 with the 40% uplift Molen attributes to Raptive. On a 10,000-person list, ads alone are pocket money. That surprises people, and it is the most important thing in this post: a recipe site's email list does not earn its keep through ads. It earns through what you sell.

Step four: product sales. Say two sends a year carry a real offer, a $29 seasonal meal-plan bundle, and each drives those 350 clicks to a sales page converting at Kit's 2% creator average (Kit, n.d.). That is 7 sales per send, about $406 a year. Weak. Now change two things within your control: run the offer as a five-email sequence rather than one broadcast (beehiiv's automated emails clicked at 13.48% (beehiiv, 2024 data)), and get your sales page into Kit's top quartile at 5.31%. Ten thousand times 13.48% is 1,348 clicks; at 5.31% that is about 72 sales, roughly $2,080 per launch, or around $8,300 across four launches a year. Same list. Different plumbing.

Step five: a paid tier. At beehiiv's median free-to-paid conversion of 0.62% and $10 a month (beehiiv, 2026), 10,000 free subscribers yield about 62 paying members, or $620 a month, about $7,440 a year, with a churn rate that suggests the average member sticks around for a year and a half.

Adding it up. Under these illustrative assumptions, a 10,000-subscriber recipe list sending twice a week, running four launches and a paid tier, earns in the range of $17,000 a year, roughly $1.70 per subscriber. The timid version (weekly sends, one-off broadcasts, no paid tier) is more like $1,500, or 15 cents per subscriber. A tenfold gap produced entirely by behavior, not list size.

Now reverse it. If your goal is $50,000 a year from email at about $1.70 per subscriber, you need roughly 30,000 subscribers. On the ads-and-occasional-broadcast version, you would need something like 300,000, which is why "just grow the list" is such bad advice on its own. Fix per-subscriber value first, then grow.

The whole model in one line:

Annual email revenue = (subscribers x sends per year x click rate x RPM / 1,000) + (launches x sequence clicks x sales-page conversion x price) + (subscribers x free-to-paid rate x monthly price x 12)

How do you grow a recipe blog email list faster?

Start with the traffic you already have, because for a recipe site with search and Pinterest visitors, the cheapest subscriber in the world is someone already standing in your kitchen. Molen's line in the Food Blogger Pro episode is worth taping to your monitor: "Your existing traffic is your best source of list growth" (Food Blogger Pro, 2025).

The number that governs this is your opt-in rate. Kit reports an average opt-in rate of 4% across its creators for 2023 (Kit, 2023 data). As illustration only: if 4% of the people who see a form sign up, reaching the 30,000-subscriber target above takes roughly 750,000 form views (before churn). A site doing 100,000 pageviews a month with a form on every post gets there in under a year. A site doing 20,000 needs more traffic or a better opt-in rate, and the second is usually faster to fix. Here is what moves it on recipe sites.

Match the offer to the recipe. Food blogger Tanya Harris grew her list from 3,000 to 10,000 in seven months, and the tactic Kit's case study leads with is content-specific opt-ins: a reader on an air-fryer recipe sees an air-fryer guide, not a generic "join my newsletter" box (Kit, Tanya Harris case study). Molen recommends the same layering: a site-wide seasonal lead magnet as the floor, category-specific forms targeted by URL slug on top, and custom offers on your handful of highest-traffic posts (Food Blogger Pro, 2025).

Let people save the recipe by email. Harris also used an "email me this recipe" feature, where the reader enters an address and gets the link with the recipe title as the subject line so they can find it later (Kit, Tanya Harris case study). It is the most natural opt-in in the niche because it solves a real problem (I will never find this tab again) rather than asking for a favor.

Keep lead magnets short. GetResponse's study of 790 marketers found video and written lead magnets converted best, at 24.2% and 22.8% respectively, and that 73% of respondents saw their highest conversion rates from short-form content (GetResponse, 2020). For a recipe site, that argues for a five-recipe weeknight plan over a 60-page ebook. The 2020 date is worth flagging; treat the percentages as directional.

Segment the pop-up, and mind the season. Harris ran pop-ups matched to page content and seasonal (even weather-based) pop-ups timed to avoid fatigue (Kit, Tanya Harris case study). A soup guide in January and a grilling guide in June will outperform one evergreen offer all year.

Borrow other creators' audiences. Harris received 6,892 subscribers through Kit's Recommendations feature while sending 2,628 to other creators (Kit, Tanya Harris case study), and across the whole Kit platform, Recommendations delivered just over 3 million new subscribers in 2023 (Kit, 2023 data). The equivalent on beehiiv is Boosts, which paid out $2.09 million across 3,112 newsletters in 2024 (beehiiv, 2024 data). Cross-recommendations with two or three non-competing food creators (you do baking, she does weeknight dinners) is the closest thing to free subscribers that exists.

Send more, not less. Harris moved to "a valuable email at least twice a week" (Kit, Tanya Harris case study), and beehiiv found weekly senders jumped from 37.9% of its users in 2023 to 65.62% in 2024 (beehiiv, 2024 data). Every send is a referral and sales opportunity. A quiet list does not grow.

Where should opt-in forms go on a recipe post?

Put a form where the reader has just received value and is about to leave: below the recipe card, in a slide-in on scroll, and in a page-matched pop-up with a sensible delay. Harris's segmented pop-ups and Molen's layering both start from the same assumption: the reader who has scrolled to the recipe card is the one worth asking.

A simple placement checklist for a recipe site:

1. Site-wide: one seasonal lead magnet in the header bar or footer, swapped four times a year.
2. Category level: a form matched by URL slug (everything under /air-fryer/ gets the air-fryer guide).
3. Post level: a custom offer on your top ten traffic posts, since that is where most of your form views actually happen.
4. In-content: an "email me this recipe" option near the recipe card.
5. Exit or scroll-triggered: one pop-up, page-matched, shown once per visitor per session.

Five placements, not fifteen. The goal is a form seen at the right moment, not everywhere.

Should you prune subscribers who never open?

Yes, and the math above explains why. Revenue per subscriber is a ratio, and dead addresses are pure denominator. The Real Food Dietitians cut their list from 125,000 to 58,000 and watched open rates rise from 10 to 12% to around 30% after migrating platforms; their process was to flag subscribers inactive for 90 or more days, send a re-engagement campaign, and remove those who stayed silent (Kit, Real Food Dietitians case study). A smaller, warmer list also lands in the inbox more reliably, which quietly lifts every other number in the model. That case study is worth reading for one more reason: they started emailing from their first 20 subscribers and never stopped. The list was the business from day one.

Do this today

Run the one-line model on your own numbers. Pull your last 90 days of broadcasts and write down three figures: subscribers, average click rate, and sends per month. Then note your RPM from your ad dashboard. Multiply subscribers by click rate by sends per year by RPM over 1,000, and you have your current annual ad income from email. Next to it, write the number email would need to earn to matter to your business. The gap is your plan: a factor of two or three means more sends and a better offer; a factor of ten or more means per-subscriber value first (a product, a sequence, a paid tier) and list growth second. Fifteen minutes, one spreadsheet row, and you will never say "I should grow my list" vaguely again.

FAQ

How many email subscribers do I need before my food blog list makes real money? There is no magic threshold, because revenue per subscriber ranges from pennies to a few dollars a year depending on what you do with the list. In the illustrative model above, a 10,000-subscriber list earned around $1,500 a year on ads alone and closer to $17,000 with a product sequence and a paid tier. Set your per-subscriber value first, then size the list to your goal.

What is a good open rate for a food blog newsletter in 2026? Recent platform data clusters in the high 30s to low 40s: GetResponse reports 38.52% for Restaurants & Food on 2023 data, Kit reports 44% across creators, and beehiiv reports 37.67% for 2024 and "41%+" for 2025. Older 2021 figures (Campaign Monitor's 18.5% for the category) predate Apple's privacy changes and are not comparable. Track your own trend and treat clicks as the number that matters.

Is a paid newsletter realistic for a recipe site? It can be. beehiiv's 2026 report shows a median free-to-paid conversion of 0.62% at a typical $10 a month, and Food & Drink has the lowest monthly churn of any vertical at 5.06%, roughly 19 months of average membership. You will convert fewer readers than a finance newsletter, but you will keep them far longer.

What lead magnet works best for a food blog? Something short, specific, and tied to the recipe the reader is already looking at: a five-recipe air-fryer starter guide on an air-fryer post, a one-page holiday baking timeline in December. GetResponse's study found short-form written and video magnets converted best, and Kit's Tanya Harris case study credits page-matched opt-ins for a 3,000 to 10,000 subscriber jump in seven months.

Should I email more than once a week? Probably. Molen argues food creators can send two to three times a week without meaningful unsubscribe damage, and every send is another chance at clicks, referrals and sales. Watch your unsubscribe rate against the platform averages (0.5% on Kit, 0.17% for Restaurants & Food on GetResponse) and pull back only if it climbs.

Sources

Every number in this post links to the page it came from. The full list is below so you can check the data yourself.

• Campaign Monitor, "What are good open rates, CTRs, & CTORs for email campaigns?" (2021 data)
• GetResponse, "Email Marketing Benchmarks & Statistics" (2023 data)
• Mailchimp, "Email Marketing Benchmarks & Industry Statistics" (updated December 2023)
• HubSpot, "Email marketing benchmarks by industry (+ email open rate data)" (2025)
• Kit, "2024 email marketing stats report for the creator economy" (2023 data)
• Kit, "How to Increase Email Open Rates: 10 easy tips (+ avg. open rate)" (2024)
• Kit, "High-Converting landing page examples & tips (+ conversion rates)" (n.d.)
• Kit, "7,000 subscribers in 7 months: How this food blogger grows her email list with Kit" (Tanya Harris case study)
• Kit, "How these food bloggers build an engaged email list with Kit" (Real Food Dietitians case study)
• beehiiv, "2025 State of Email Newsletters by beehiiv" (2024 data)
• beehiiv, "The State of Newsletters 2026" (2025 data)
• beehiiv, "The State of Paid Newsletters 2026" (2025 to 2026 data)
• beehiiv, "Email Click-Through Rate Benchmarks: Real Data" (2026)
• GetResponse, "Best Lead Magnets for Lead Generation [Study Report]" (2020)
• Food Blogger Pro, "Diversifying Income Series: Monetizing Your Email List with Matt Molen" (2025)
• Raptive, "How traffic sources and data availability impact RPM" (updated March 2025)

Recommended

• Most Food Bloggers Have an Email List. Few Make Money From It. Here's How to Fix That.
• The Email Monetization Mistake Most Food Bloggers Make (and the Welcome Email Sequence That Fixes It)
• Why Your Follower Count Doesn't Matter (Unless You Own the Relationship)

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