TikTok Shop’s earning potential isn’t news to anyone paying attention. Affiliates can attach a buy-now button directly to their videos, turning content into a sale without ever sending traffic elsewhere. That alone makes it one of the fastest ways to make money from content today. What’s less obvious is how well email and TikTok marketing can work together, even though many still consider email outdated.
Liss Graham Ellis, CEO and President of Graham List Management, has built a career proving that combination works. Her path there was unconventional. Trained as a microbiologist with a minor in chemistry, she had no marketing background when a chance connection, made through a podcast interview after winning a fitness transformation contest, led to a customer service role with a multi-million-dollar ClickBank offer. When the company’s email manager quit, she took over and outperformed the previous manager’s results 17 times over. That result turned into a full email agency, now monetising lists for vendors across ClickBank, Digistore, BuyGoods, and beyond, spanning verticals from nutra and telehealth to dating offers.
More recently, Graham Ellis has been growing her own TikTok account from scratch. She’s reaching close to 5,000 followers organically in seven months. Her content leans into lifestyle and shopping, which has already attracted brand PR and gifting despite the small size of her following. She’s been feeding that TikTok content into her email newsletters to drive followers back to the platform, and she says it’s already paying off.
Graham Ellis also points to a yoga instructor client as proof of what a fully connected funnel can do. The client’s email list feeds content across her Facebook page, Instagram, and TikTok, and that cross-promotion runs in both directions. Her Facebook following alone has grown to three million, a result Graham Ellis attributes partly to paid ads and significantly to how consistently the client’s email list keeps her audience engaged across every platform she owns.
For newcomers building through e-commerce and TikTok specifically, Graham Ellis’s advice is to grow organically before spending anything, and to learn both sides of the creator-brand relationship rather than only one. She built her own following that way, and it helped her establish brand relationships faster than she expected.
Her broader advice for affiliate marketers goes beyond any single platform. “Communicating with people is the most important thing,” she said, and she credits in-person industry events specifically with growing her business fivefold the year she started attending them. Her advice for introverts: bring an extroverted friend or partner, and let them do the talking.
Graham Ellis will join AGS’s email marketing panel to break down how email and platforms like TikTok can work as one connected system rather than separate channels. Delegates looking to build the same kind of cross-platform funnel will get the chance to hear her framework directly, and ask how it applies to their own list.
Get your ticket today and hear more from Liss Graham Ellis and other industry leaders at the newly launched Affiliate Grand Slam, bringing 50+ expert speakers to Rome, 02–05 November 2026.
