Three Reasons Why You Need an Email Newsletter

Note from Sarah: This article was originally sent via my newsletter. Newsletter subscribers receive essay style pieces like this before anyone else. Click here to subscribe!

Remember how I got super meta last month and devoted three weeks of newsletters to the subject of email newsletters?

(Update Nov 2021: We've rewritten that an it's now part of a massive guide to email marketing.)

I'm not done! I have many hills I'll die on and the importance of building a strong, intentional email list is one of them.

I know not all of you are convinced. You're doing social, you're blogging (because you're sick of me hassling you about it), your working in your business or organization every day, and an email newsletter seems like just on more thing...

I'm here to tell you that email marketing is absolutely transformational—here's why.

1. You are able to hone your message in "real time" with a friendly audience. This is huge! Most of us don't conjure great ideas out of thin air, we have to work through them and an audience who's opted in to hearing from you is invaluable.

2. You can literally ask people what they think of an idea. As in, you can say, "If I offered X, would you be interested? Hit reply and let's chat." There's no other marketing that allows you to have this sort of immediate interaction and feedback. Sure, you can ask people to DM you on Instagram or hit the comments on your blog, but that's a different process than just replying in your inbox.

3. You will more easily learn more about your audience, so you're not making up customer profiles. If you use a solid enough email marketing tool (if you don't have that series of emails anymore, let me know and I'll send you the links), you can get all kinds of info about your subscribers' interests using tagging and other organization and therefore send messages to people heavily engaged in a specific topic. Cool, right?

For me, these characteristics have literally changed the way I think about business and growing an audience. 

I'll always be obsessed with blogging, due to the SEO benefits and usefulness of it in building a resource library, but a regular email newsletter has allowed me to build on the work I've done on my blog. It's like magic!

Need an email marketing tool? I use and recommend ConvertKit for serious email marketers. Click here to support my free content when you sign up!