AGS MAGAZINE: Why one touchpoint isn’t enough

What started as a part-time job became her full-time career. Now, Liss Graham Ellis runs her own email marketing agency. The CEO of LissT Management discusses the shift in email marketing, building customer lifetime value, and why networking matters in affiliate marketing.

The career she never planned

Ellis didn’t start in email marketing. Her background was microbiology, then science teaching. Alongside teaching, she took a part-time job answering questions in a forum as a customer support rep. From there, her boss pulled her into project management, where she proofread web pages and PDFs. Then the email list manager quit, and she took over; when she did, “It was wildly successful. I did 17 times what the previous manager had done.”

Friends and colleagues told her to do it full-time because they saw she had a ‘gift’. But what really pushed her out of teaching was her family’s move to the Texas coast. Their mortgage doubled for a house the same size as their old one, and she realised email work would cover what teaching wouldn’t have. In that moment, she saw the leap twofold: someone else believing in you, and the confidence to live the life you want. 

“You just need one person to believe, and the rest will be history,” she says.

Building a brand world

Ellis has watched trends come and go, and strategies work and go stale. In this era of multi-channel marketing, she says the way forward is to move from single to multiple touchpoints: affiliates should optimise not only the initial conversion but also the multi-touchpoint post-conversion funnels and backend retention loops.

One client of two years shows what that looks like. When a buyer or lead comes in, they choose the channel they opt into: email, SMS, or webinars. What makes it work, according to Ellis, is that “We’re just creating this brand world where we can meet these folks where they are.”

If someone won’t take SMS but prefers email or webinars, you don’t lose them. The webinars especially have a huge fan base, giving direct access to the face of the brand and real-time answers to questions. That’s how the team built a Facebook community.

Asked what caused the shift, Ellis puts it down to the new generation’s consumer savviness. They like to be sold to differently:

“The younger demographic is more savvy of a customer; they just want facts and information.”

The list that kept paying

Multiple touchpoints build lifetime value (LTV), the total revenue or net profit a business expects to earn from a single customer across the whole relationship. For affiliates, it’s one of the biggest challenges: without a good LTV strategy, taking a day off means you won’t make money.

So instead of capturing a buyer one time, she advises, “Think of ways how you can sell to them multiple times with a channel that keeps working for you, even if you’re not working.”

She’s seen it play out. One of her clients grew a very large, highly profitable email list, and then the company had to shut down. They let the list run, and a year later it was still raking in cash. The only reason they stopped was that they really needed to close the company. So Ellis advises affiliates to build a list day to day; it’s an asset that generates predictable money with minimal supervision.

The other big lift in LTV, one she sees a lot of people skipping even though it makes the most money, is Short Message Service (SMS). It goes hand in hand with email, since platforms can usually run both. It’s low-effort and low-frequency in sending, but it generates a lot of sales. She does warn you to follow the SMS rules, especially in the United States, because the fines are stiff.

Shaking hands still works

For years in the business, Ellis didn’t realise how important it was to go out and network. There’s no substitute for attending events and shaking hands in person, she believes, because no problem is unique. Someone out there has already gone through your struggle and can coach you through it. The opportunity and growth she’s seen from attending events have been huge, and she’s grateful for the people she’s met.

“My life is richer because of the people I’ve met and the relationships I have,” she says.

These days, when she’s not attending events, you’ll find her on her TikTok channel, which she organically grew to 5,000 followers in seven months.

This article was originally published in AGS Magazine. Explore the latest issue for more in-depth interviews, straightforward analysis and informed perspectives from across the affiliate and performance marketing industry.