You’re Sleeping on Newsletters. It’s Time to Wake Up.

I wish I’d started mine sooner.

When was the last time you were sent a newsletter in the post?

You know the kind I mean.

A double-sided A4 page in glorious inkjet colour, designed using a clunky template on Microsoft Word, packed to the gills with juicy updates about your sister’s latest family holiday to Tenerife and the big award Great Uncle Joe received from the bowling club.

There’s even a grainy photo on the back page of someone’s cat celebrating his eleventh birthday — good for him!

That might be what springs to mind when you think of a newsletter. If it is, I apologise for making that happen.

That’s not how newsletters are supposed to be.

These days, the best newsletters are incredible gateways to value and information. They’re carefully-curated for their intended audience. No fluff, no cat photos.

The right newsletters are slabs of protein-enriched meat with all the fat trimmed away.

They exist to grow their audience’s knowledge and understanding, and to keep them in the know about what they should know.

If you aren’t regularly sending out a newsletter to a list of people interested in your brand or business, you’re asleep at the wheel.

Newsletters are the past, the present and the future.

Social media is a massively powerful promotion tool, but it comes with one major downside: a lack of retention.

A tiny percentage of your audience sees each of your posts (something like 10–15%) — it’s like tossing a sign up in the air and hoping someone sees it before it falls back to earth.

When you send out a newsletter, all of your subscriber list receives it. 100% of your audience. They won’t all open it, of course, but it’ll land in their inbox regardless.

And the percentage of those who view your content will be a heck of a lot higher than 10–15%.

The primary purpose of social media in 2023 (and beyond) should be to encourage profile visitors to become email subscribers. Read that again.

Why wait? You can start right now.

Setting up a newsletter’s never been easier, either. There are a ton of great providers out there and they all start for free. Just type ‘free newsletter platforms’ into Google and skip past the ads.

My personal recommendations are ConvertKit and MailerLite (and yes, those are affiliate links, because I happily endorse both of those brands).

Here’s an example of how I use the newsletter approach in my business: I send out a free newsletter to 1,200+ email subscribers every week. The businesses I partner with can add their offers and availability to those newsletters and ensure they get seen by the perfect audience every time. That’s a nice boost on top of the daily social media promotion we also offer them.

My advice? Don’t sleep on newsletters anymore.

They’re an amazingly-underrated brand marketing tool and can have a huge impact on your business when implemented properly.

One of the biggest regrets I have is not starting one three years ago.

Get yours off the ground today.

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