Her Hungry Girl e-mail newsletter (Tips and Tricks for Hungry Chicks) has spawned a $25 million empire that expands to books (her ninth, The Hungry Girl Diet, is out March 25,) TV shows on the Food Network, and her image on multiple cereal boxes.
"E-mail is still the driving force," she says. "People are used to reading the daily e-mails. They wake up, they drink their coffee and read their e-mails."
That's a challenge for her, since the No. 1 Web mail provider, Google's Gmail, in late 2013 re-organized the e-mail inbox into "primary," "social" and "promotion," tabs, which could make it harder for her 1.2 million readers to find her daily messages. But she says she's yet to see an impact. "People still open my e-mails every day," she says.
When Lillien began in 2004, e-mail marketing was easy. Spam filters hadn't gotten sophisticated. Google's Gmail had yet to be invented. Now, it's the most popular Web mail program — with 40% market share, compared with 23% for Outlook.com and 21% for Yahoo Mail, according to Litmus.com.
"This will have a huge impact eventually," says Jason Falls, co-author of The Rebels Guide to E-mail Marketing: Grow Your List, Break the Rules and Win. "Everyone I know is nervous and watching it closely."
The trick for Lillien and other e-mail marketers is to be very vocal with readers about Google's changes, and to urge them to "whitelist," the newsletter to make sure it shows up in the primary inbox instead of being marked as spam. "They need to be educated to know where to find it," she says.
She's pushing readers of her website to other places to find her, including Facebook (nearly 1 million fans), Twitter (160,000 followers) and Pinterest (nearly 100,000 followers.) What she hasn't been willing to do is bypass Google with a daily text, even though texting is so hot that WhatsApp, the company that provides unl! imited texts for 99 cents yearly, got snapped up by Facebook in a $19 billion deal.
She shakes her head violently. "No," she says. "People are annoyed by texts. People say they want them, but every time I see (a sponsored text), I want to throw my phone out the window."
Lillien's "Hungryland" home base here is a testament to the power of e-mail. It's like a box of Froot Loops come to life, with rich, vibrant colors. Illustrated cartoon images of Lillien as Hungry Girl adorn the walls. Cereal giant General Mills, a sponsor of the newsletter, showed their appreciation of the relationship, by creating a framed portrait of her — with colored Cheerios.
Lillien is a former TV producer (she's married to Dan Schneider, a former Head of the Class actor who's behind many of Nickelodeon's biggest hits, including iCarly and Sam & Cat.) She fell into the e-mail newsletter business after questioning whether a local bakery's pastry was really 150 calories, as it claimed, and had it tested.
She sent her findings to a bunch of friends, and the verdict came back — she should do a newsletter.
"I'm a little nutty," she says. "I'm the person who will take this to a lab. I'm not a dietician, I'm not a nutritionist, I'm just hungry. If I present that in a fun, relatable way, it could be successful."
She thought about building a website, but that was too much work. "The idea of e-mail appealed. It was short and sweet and marketable. People could share with friends. There was no marketing involved."
She doesn't write the newsletter anymore, but says she edits it. Instead of trying out recipes at home, she has a huge test kitchen, and employs chefs to try out new recipes and review products. Each newsletter is sponsored, but she says she only features sponsors for products she loves. "Ads are clearly marked as ads."
Lisa Lillien, a.k.a. "Hungry Girl," in her colorful L.A. office.(Photo: Jefferson Graham)
Meanwhile, how does the woman who sends out 1.2 million missives every day handle her own inbox on her Apple MacBook Air laptop?
"My inbox is a mess," she admits. "I'm organized, but I haven't mastered my inbox. I get 2,000 e-mails a day. My favorite thing to do is delete. I don't like work to pile up, so I instantly respond. People know if you don't hear from me right away, I missed it."
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