Jodie Minto built her first email list before she even had a website. She was running weekend market stalls in Sydney, selling caftans and kimonos, and a coach had told her early on: if you build it, they will not necessarily just come. So Jodie put a glass fishbowl in the middle of her stall, a stack of paper slips next to it, and a little sign that said - would you like to go in the draw to win a caftan?
By the time her website launched, she had hundreds of subscribers waiting. On day one, she made sales.
That instinct - collect the contact, earn the relationship, follow up - became the foundation of everything she built. She scaled iland.co to $1 million a year in revenue over ten years, then sold it. She's spent the years since coaching hundreds of ecommerce founders across every product category imaginable. And the mistake she sees most often is the same one she was warned about at the very beginning: getting someone to sign up, and then never sending them anything.
The fortune is in the follow up. Most brands are skipping it entirely.
Start With the List Before You Need It
Jodie's fishbowl strategy wasn't just clever - it was strategic in a way that most brands don't think about until it's too late. She was building an audience before she had anywhere to send them. And when the website went live, there was already a community of people who'd met her, touched the product, and said yes to staying in touch.
The lesson carries forward even without the market stalls. Whether it's a pop-up, a lead gen ad, or a monthly giveaway, the point is the same: don't wait until you're ready to sell to start collecting contacts. The list is the asset. The website is just where it pays off.
One thing Jodie tested and would walk back: a giveaway for a travel voucher that had nothing to do with her product. Sign-ups poured in. The leads were worthless. Men who would never buy a caftan, people who just wanted a free trip, contacts that would never convert into customers. List quality matters more than list size, and the offer you use to build it determines who ends up on it.
Email and Ads Are Not Competing - They're Sequencing
One of the most useful frameworks Jodie shares with clients is how to think about the relationship between paid ads and email. She uses a simple analogy: the ad is asking someone out on the first date. Email is everything that comes after.
Meta ads operate on a seven-day attribution window. If someone clicks your ad on day one and buys on day ten, that sale doesn't show up in ads manager. For brands selling higher-consideration products - anything where a customer needs time to decide - this creates a dangerous illusion that ads aren't working when really the follow-up is just missing.
Email is the follow-up. The welcome flow, the nurture sequence, the weekly campaign that brings someone back for a second look. Without it, the ad spend that brought someone to the site just evaporates. With it, that first click becomes the beginning of a relationship that eventually converts.
Jodie also uses the Klaviyo and Meta integration to layer in paid retargeting for subscribers who haven't purchased yet - creating a custom audience from a segment of email subscribers and running ads specifically to that group. It's one of the more underused tools she sees across accounts, and one of the more effective ones.
The Most Common Mistake She Sees
When Jodie starts working with a new client, one of the first things she does is look at the email account. And more often than she'd like, she finds the same thing: a list of a thousand people who've never received a single email.
Someone set up the pop-up. People signed up. And then nothing happened.
It's not malicious. It's not even laziness. It's just the same thing Laryssa found when she subscribed to 362 ecommerce brands - 44% of them never sent a welcome email at all. People spend time and energy on getting someone to sign up, and then the follow-through falls apart completely. The subscriber is left waiting for the discount code that was promised, gets nothing, and forms an impression of the brand that's very hard to undo.
The fortune is in the follow up. Not the opt-in. Not the pop-up. The follow up.
SMS Looks Very Different Depending on Where You Are
One of the more surprising parts of the conversation was Jodie's take on SMS marketing in Australia. In the U.S., weekly texts to a subscriber list have become fairly standard practice among larger ecommerce brands - and subscribers on those lists tend to expect it. In Australia, Jodie says, that same frequency would send people running.
Australian consumers are receptive to SMS marketing, but the bar is higher. It better be something worth interrupting someone's day for - a major sale, a genuinely exciting offer — and it better not happen every week. The tolerance for marketing texts is lower, and the unsubscribe reflex is faster.
In parts of Latin America and the Middle East, the channel shifts entirely. SMS barely factors in at all. WhatsApp is where marketing conversations happen - a completely different platform with its own norms, its own audience expectations, and its own set of rules for what works. For brands selling globally, the lesson is that channel strategy isn't one-size-fits-all. What converts in one market might irritate an entirely different one.
What Product Pages Are Still Getting Wrong
Jodie works primarily with fashion and lifestyle brands, and the product page mistakes she sees are consistent across almost all of them. Missing fabric content. No size guide. Return policy buried in the footer. One grainy photo of a product on a mannequin.
For a customer considering a purchase - especially a considered one - every unanswered question is a reason to leave. Will this fit me? What's it made of? How do I return it if it doesn't work? What will shipping cost? If those four questions aren't answered on the product page itself, the brand is losing customers who were close to buying and just needed a little more confidence to follow through.
The fix isn't complicated. Accordion menus for FAQs, size guides built into the template, return policy visible without having to dig through the footer. A front view, a back view, a close-up of the fabric, and a short video if possible. The goal is to give someone every piece of information they need to feel confident - so the only thing left to do is click add to cart.
Letting Go
After ten years building iland.co, Jodie sold the business. It wasn't a triumphant exit - it was complicated, emotional, and slower than she expected. She'd started thinking about it around year seven, when she realized the business had become something she never intended: an office, staff, HR conversations, a job she'd accidentally created for herself.
The identity piece was hard too. For a decade, she'd introduced herself as the founder of a fashion brand. Separating herself from that took real work. The sale process took another year or two. And after it was done, the buyers eventually closed the brand down entirely.
It's one of those outcomes that's hard to make peace with - ten years of work handed over to someone who didn't carry it forward. But Jodie's perspective on it is steady: she did her part. It was an incredible chapter. And once it was out of her hands, it was out of her hands.
What she carried into coaching was everything she'd learned - the list-building strategies, the lead gen experiments, the email mistakes, the hard lessons about what actually drives revenue versus what just feels productive. And now she passes that on to the founders she works with, so they don't have to figure it all out the long way.
About Jodie Minto
Jodie Minto is an ecommerce business coach and strategist based in Sydney, Australia. After scaling her fashion brand iland.co to $1 million a year in revenue and selling it, she turned her focus to coaching ecommerce founders full-time. She's worked with hundreds of brands across all different product categories, helping them build sustainable sales and marketing systems - from lead generation and email strategy to paid ads and product page optimization.
🌐 Website: https://jodieminto.com
📸 Instagram: @jodieminto
