~by Haley Lynn Gray~
People say the money is in the list. What they rarely explain is why, and the real reason isn’t about money at all.
You own an email list. You don’t own anything else.
Your social following exists at the pleasure of a platform that can change its algorithm, throttle your reach, restrict your account, or simply decline in relevance. All of those have happened to businesses that built everything on one channel, and none of them came with warning.
An email list is the only audience you can take with you. If a platform disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have the addresses.
That’s the argument. Everything else is detail.
Almost nobody does it
I talk to realtors, insurance agents, HVAC companies, people in direct sales — and most of them either don’t collect email addresses or collect them and never send anything.
That’s money left on the table, and it’s the cheapest money available, because these are people who already know you.
I’m not suggesting the goal is a massive list. It’s collecting the addresses of people you actually network and do business with — with their permission — and then staying in touch.
What to send, and why most newsletters fail
Most business newsletters are about the business. New premises, an award, a team photo, a service being promoted.
Nobody opens those twice.
The ones that work are useful to the reader on the day they arrive. Your clients genuinely want reminding to have the oil changed, to get the HVAC system serviced before summer, to check their cover before renewal. They want to be educated a little and reassured they haven’t missed something.
Fill that role and you become a useful presence rather than a marketing email. The businesses I’ve watched do this well have turned it into a reliable engine for growth. The ones that don’t use their list at all keep wondering why things aren’t growing.
Practical formats that consistently earn their place:
- Seasonal reminders. The thing they should do this month, tied to weather, tax dates, school terms, whatever governs your industry.
- One genuinely useful answer. A question clients actually ask, answered properly.
- What you’ve learned. Something from your own work that they’d find interesting.
- And occasionally, an offer. Occasionally. If every email sells, the useful ones stop being read.
The volume is smaller than you think
Here’s the reframe that gets people started: a monthly newsletter is twelve pieces of writing a year.
Twelve. Each month can have a theme, or tie to a season or a holiday. Fifteen or twenty minutes with a notepad will produce a year’s worth of topics in one sitting, and then you’re never staring at a blank page again.
Monthly is entirely sufficient. Weekly is better if you can sustain it — I’ve sent one every Thursday for years — but an unreliable weekly is worse than a dependable monthly. Pick the cadence you’ll actually hold.
Permission, properly
Only add people who’ve agreed, and be able to show when and how they agreed.
That means no adding everyone whose card you collected at an event, no importing your contacts wholesale, and a working unsubscribe link in every email. Rules differ by jurisdiction and the penalties for getting it wrong are real, so check what applies where your recipients are — not just where you are.
Beyond the legal position, there’s a practical one: people who didn’t ask to hear from you mark you as spam, and enough of that damages your ability to reach the people who did.
The minimum version
If you’re starting from nothing:
- Start collecting addresses now, with permission, from everyone you do business with or meet properly.
- Pick a simple email platform. Almost any of them will do at small volumes, and several are free to start.
- Write twelve topics in one sitting.
- Send the first one this month, imperfectly.
The list you start today is small and worth very little. The same list in three years is the most valuable marketing asset most small businesses ever build — and the only one nobody can take away from you.
If writing them is the part that stops you, that’s a solvable problem and it’s genuinely what we do at In2itive — but don’t let it be the reason you have no list at all. An awkward newsletter you wrote yourself beats a perfect one that never went.
More on staying in touch with people who’ve already bought and where else to be visible.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
