You Need an Email List — But Not Necessarily a Newsletter
Is a newsletter a requirement for a business (or a nonprofit)?
As sure as the rising sun, you’ll find posts on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and other social networks used for business saying so. Here’s one from X:
You NEED to start a newsletter..
— Tara (@itstaramclellan) June 4, 2023
You HAVE to start before it’s too late..
Im sure you’ve heard it all but no one explains the real question
why..?
Does a newsletter actually have benefits?
Benefits of a newsletter
I’ll answer Tara’s question that ends her post. A newsletter can benefit an organization in a number of ways. These include:
If you’re a creator or other solopreneur, you can monetize it with a large enough or niche subscriber base. For example, as of January 2023, per the Noah Kagan Presents podcast, course creator Justin Welsh was generating around 7% of his business’ $1.7M annual revenue from his Saturday Solopreneur newsletter; it currently has 165,000 subscribers.
If your organization has a number of divisions or a moderate to high number of offerings, a newsletter is a great way to showcase new products or services, success stories, and other highlights to your average subscriber in a way they might not be able to digest as quickly or easily by visiting your website.
If you put your newsletters on your website, it’s a great one-two punch when it comes to warming both email service providers (ESPs) and search engines to your content. ESPs reward your recipients’ email opens when you send them other emails outside of your newsletters (those other emails are less likely to end up in Junk or Spam folders); and search engines push up your content in search results over time as you tell them, from your regular publishing schedule, that you are consistently providing quality content that aligns with their visitors’ searches.
A newsletter ‘bubble’?
As we’ve established, newsletters can be great for both the author and the audience. However, at least three factors — the number of newsletters the average contact already subscribes to, the increasing number of newsletter opt-in pings from ever smaller operations, and the coming avalanche of fully AI-generated spam newsletters — seem to be creating a newsletter “bubble.”
I think what Zero to Marketing’s Andrea Bosoni said about this on X this weekend is on point. He makes the case, with which I agree, that a newsletter needs to be uber high quality to justify its existence:
I think we're in a newsletter bubble.
— Andrea Bosoni (@theandreboso) September 2, 2023
I don't know who has the time to read them all. I definitely don’t.
I end up reading only the ones that are really, really good. The ones that always deliver value.
All the rest just sit in my inbox unopened.
Maybe I’m wrong but I think…
Start with an email list and create a newsletter later based on your following and your organization’s needs
You definitely want to create and highlight an email subscriber opt-in, if you haven’t already done so. While you build your list and determine if you want to launch a dedicated newsletter, you can send your growing audience items that you might eventually put in a newsletter, such as customer or client testimonials, new products or services, special offers, employee news, and more.
If you have a website and/or social network profiles, and you don’t yet have an email list opt-in, you really should jump on creating an email marketing channel. Fellow marketing consultant Kristi Mitchell explained why succinctly a few weeks ago on LinkedIn.
