Many of my email marketing consulting clients are what I call “accidental business owners”.
They’re smart, capable people who are super knowledgeable in their craft and decided to build a business based on that expertise. And if it were up to them, that’s all they would do.
Unfortunately, when it comes to running a successful business, you have to do some sort of marketing: relationship marketing, email marketing, search engine and AI optimization, social media marketing.
Obviously I’m biased, but a newsletter is one of the simplest, most reliable ways to stay visible and nurture relationships with the people who matter to your practice, including past clients, prospective clients, referral partners, and your professional network.
What exactly is an email newsletter?
Before we go further, let’s clarify what we’re talking about, especially the difference between newsletters vs. email marketing.
Email marketing – which encompasses newsletters – is educational and/or promotional email messages sent via an email service provider or newsletter platform to a group of people who have consented to receiving those emails (and can revoke that permission at any time).
It’s not BCCing a list of email addresses you’ve collected over the years. And it’s not scraping emails from LinkedIn, or buying lists of people who have never heard of you.
Why small business practices overlook newsletters
Here are the most common reasons I hear from credentialed professionals about why they’re not yet doing email marketing:
You hate email. It’s hard enough for you to keep up with your own inbox. Why would you want to be contributing to that?
But what if your newsletter was not only helpful, but something your audience actually looked forward to receiving?
You have legitimate resource and time constraints. If you’re a business of one, or you have a very small team, and you’re trying to actually do the work, then setting aside time to do email marketing, to set up your software, to make sure you understand it correctly, and to keep up with it regularly takes time and effort.
But if you were to take a look at your business development and marketing efforts, how might you find a way to use your time more effectively to include one of the highest-value marketing activities?
You might already have enough clients or customers. Maybe you have a full roster and can’t take on any more clients right now, so what’s the point?
But what happens when your practice ebbs? Or when a former client needs your services again but they’ve since forgotten about you?
It’s yet another platform to learn. When you’ve built a business out of your expertise, you inadvertently also find yourself having to learn a lot of other tools and softwares that you did not expect to need to learn, and this can just feel like yet another thing to add to your plate.
True. But it doesn’t have to be complicated, and you can always hand off the build to someone else.
You worry about coming across as annoying or spamming people, because you’ve been on the receiving end of this. You’re very mindful of the trust that goes into you work and the relationships that you’ve worked to establish. You don’t want to break that trust, because once you break it, it’s a lot harder to rebuild.
This is probably the biggest concern I hear, and it’s a valid one. But if you’re mindful about not wanting to spam people, then odds are you aren’t. In my opinion, as long as you’re setting clear expectations and only sending your newsletter to people who gave you permission, then it’s pretty unlikely that they will see you that way. And if people are annoyed by receiving your emails, then they can easily unsubscribe!
How newsletters and email marketing can support your practice
I can wax poetic about all things email marketing, but for the sake of your time, I’ll share just a few of the many benefits. A newsletter helps you:
Stay in touch with past and prospective clients, your network, and collaboration partners.
I like to think of a newsletter as a virtual gathering place, a way to keep people in your network up-to-date on what you’re working on, the latest trends in your industry, and your unique viewpoints on your work, but in a way that can be surprisingly sustainable because you don’t have to remember to email each person individually.
Many of my subscribers aren’t my clients, but they’re potential referral partners who’ve invited me to be on their podcast, teach in their communities, and be featured on their newsletter.
As for prospective clients, when someone books a sales call with me or downloads my services guide, I ask if they want to be added to my newsletter. If they say yes, they automatically get added. So even if someone books a call with me and it doesn’t end up working out, I still have a way to nurture that relationship – whether they end up hiring me later, or they go on to refer me.
Develop your unique viewpoint.
Regular writing helps you clarify your thinking and establish your unique perspective in your field. As Erica Holthausen, an Authority Development Strategist at Catchline Communications shares:
“When you think deeply about your area of expertise and look at it from every possible angle, you develop a clear, unique, and thoughtful point of view. That point of view and how you express yourself is the common thread through all of your visibility-building efforts.”
Be seen as an expert.
Showing up regularly, talking about the same topic time and time again, positions you as an expert of your field and worth paying attention to. This is true even when you’re curating links to others’ content, you’re demonstrating that you’re someone who’s in the know.
Better understand what resonates.
You’ll learn what topics your audience cares about based on what emails people open, click, and reply to. This in turn can help you hone in your messaging, how you talk about your offers, and how you position your expertise.
In my opinion, there are very few businesses that won’t benefit from this kind of direct access to their audience, especially given that the vast majority of people check their email every day. That being said, your approach to your newsletter will differ depending on your business model, your market, and your capacity.
Newsletter Identity Profile: Three styles of email marketing
I think of email marketing for credentialed professionals who built their business out of their expertise as falling into three profiles: Founder Newsletter, Brand Newsletter, or Hybrid Newsletter.
Founder Newsletter
This type of newsletter is really about you, the person behind your business. It’s about your perspective, your ideas, your point of view in your field. You might even take people behind-the-scenes of your work, or share aspects of your personal life.
With a Founder Newsletter, you’re sharing how you think about your work, rather than directly promoting your services. That’s not to say that you’re not marketing your services, but that’s not the main focus.
(And I’ll note that while a Founder Newsletter might not feel like email marketing because you’re not launching or heavily promoting anything, you are in fact marketing your ideas!)
Brand Newsletter
This type of newsletter is less about your personal perspective and more focused on your offers. Think service updates, case studies, new offerings, announcements about availability. It’s what you might think of when you hear the phrase “email marketing.”
Most ecommerce businesses and SaaS companies run pure brand newsletters. You don’t really see the people behind them, except for perhaps a periodic “note from our founder” type of email.
If you’re running a business at scale and want the focus to be less on you and more on your products or services, you might lean in this direction. But for most credentialed professionals, it’s less likely that you’ll run a pure Brand Newsletter.
Hybrid Newsletter
As the name implies, a Hybrid Newsletter is somewhere in between a Founder and Brand Newsletter, and it’s what most of the credentialed professionals I work with have.
You’re sharing your perspective AND talking about your work and services, sometimes in the same email. The goal is staying connected with people, building trust over time, and attracting clients through a mix of thought leadership, case studies, helpful content, and straight up services.
My own newsletter, Automate with Heart, is a hybrid. I share what I think about email marketing AND I write about my client work and actively promote and sell my services.
You might also have more than one Newsletter Identity Profile depending on your business. For example, my client Chelsea has a monthly newsletter that leans more Founder – it goes out to her past colleagues and referral partners – and a weekly newsletter that leans Brand, where she actively promotes her coaching and supervision services.
Founder vs. Brand Newsletter Example
This concept can feel a bit abstract, so here’s an example that illustrates the difference well: Nathan Barry (the founder of Kit) and Kit both have newsletters, but they’re quite different. While this isn’t illustrative of a service-based business specifically, it gives you a clear sense of how these two approaches differ.
Nathan Barry‘s newsletter is a Founder Newsletter – he shares his thinking about how creators can build a sustainable living, and Kit shows up as context rather than as the point.
Kit’s newsletter is a Brand Newsletter- it’s focused on the software, featuring product updates, case studies, and helpful content for creators.
Why determining your newsletter profile is important
I see a lot of people get really hung up on this amorphous idea of a newsletter and understanding where it fits within their business. I believe it’s in part because they think, “I should have a newsletter,” but it feels like this BIG THING. So they jump to picking a platform without having a framework of what the actual purpose of their newslettter is.
Understanding where you are – or where you’re headed – will help you make more informed decisions about everything from what you write about, to how often to send, to which tool is the right fit for your newsletter.
For example, email marketing platforms like Kit, Mailchimp, Mailerlite, and Flodesk can be used for all three Newsletter Identity Profiles. However, newsletter platforms like Substack or beehiiv are really intended for thought leadership and not for promotional content. (They both explicitly say that their platforms are not intended primarily for email marketing.) So knowing that you want a Brand or Hybrid newsletter already narrows down that decision for you.
What is the right type of newsletter for your practice?
If you’re a therapist, financial advisor, healthcare provider, speech pathologist, or another credentialed professional, chances are you have a Hybrid Newsletter – one that might skew toward one end or the other depending on your goals. But that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.
To help you think through which Newsletter Identity Profile fits your practice, here are two questions to ask yourself:
Question 1: What is the point of your newsletter?
What role do you see your newsletter have in your overall sales and marketing strategy? Is it:
- Driving inquiry calls?
- Making sales of your products and services?
- Keeping in touch with past clients and/or colleagues?
- Building relationships with referral partners?
- Attracting prospective clients who find you through content?
- Being seen as a leader in your industry?
- Building an audience because you intend to write a book and/or speak on stages?
Question 2: Who is it for?
Who is the intended audience(s)? Is it:
- Current and past clients?
- Prospective clients and customers?
- Referral partners?
- Colleagues?
If you lean toward sharing ideas, being seen as a leader in your field, and staying connected with colleagues and referral partners, then your Newsletter Identity Profile is a Founder Newsletter.
If you lean toward promoting services and reaching prospective clients, then a Brand Newsletter is better for you.
But, most likely, you’ll find your newsletter somewhere in between.
If you want help figuring out where you land with your newsletter, and what might be the best software for yours, then this something we can figure out together during an Email Power Hour.