My email advice for 2024

👉 it's short and hopefully sweet

The festivities are in full swing at ours, so I thought I’d take the time to reflect a bit and share some simple “big picture” advice.

This is especially relevant if you struggle to write your newsletter consistently. And double true if you’ve not managed to get started yet.

It’s to simplify.

Newsletters have become big news in the last couple of years, with some growing huge readerships and earning small fortunes in sponsorships, advertising and subscription fees.

That’s been great to get more people interested in newsletters and has accelerated a lot of technology development like referral software and platforms like Substack and Beehiviv.

But the problem with the success of these big newsletters is that they’re not great models for the type of newsletter that works best for most of us.

Most of us aren’t going to be working full time on our newsletter, employing writers and researchers and treating it as a business in its own right.

For the vast majority of us, our newsletter is a way of building relationships at scale. Of proving to potential buyers we can help them by sharing valuable advice ie actually helping them.

We don’t make money from advertising in our newsletters or from subscription payments. We make money when our newsletter leads to people hiring us or buying our products.

And that’s a very different model.

Paid subscription newsletters are almost all long-form and in-depth. It can take days or more to prepare each issue.

Advertiser-fuelled newsletters need big subscriber bases and frequent publishing to get the ads in front of enough eyeballs to charge a decent fee. That means they usually end up being news aggregators.

So if you look at these “big name” subscription or ad-led newsletters it’s easy to fall into thinking that a successful newsletter needs to either be a huge analytical piece or a daily news roundup.

And that can lead to tremendous feelings of overwhelm.

For most of us, if we tried to write a multi-thousand-word newsletter every week, or an up-to-date news summary every day we’d simply not be able to cope.

It’s a tremendous amount of work.

Kudos to the folks that do it - but we don’t need to. They’re operating under a different model to us.

A newsletter that wins clients or gets product sales doesn’t need to be huge. It can deliver a single useful insight or piece of advice each time and it’ll work.

It’ll gently build credibility and move your readers just that bit closer to being ready to buy from you. It’ll keep you top of mind so you’re the person they think of when they’re ready to buy.

Throw in a cheeky link to a relevant product (like my Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters Course for example, ahem) or to join a webinar or arrange a chat with you and you can accelerate the sale even more.

Ignore the big name newsletters. Simple works for people like us.

And simple means we don’t get stuck for hours trying to write. Or go round in circles because we don’t think our ideas are good enough. Or give up because our email isn’t as impressive as some of the big ones we’ve seen.

Simple gets done.

Simple lets you get on with business and life.

Simple means you’ll be consistent. And consistency leads to success.

In 2024, keep your newsletter simple. Keep it valuable. Keep it fun (for your readers and you).

And I’ll see you after Christmas on the 27th.

- Ian