The short version: A newsletter matters because it is the one marketing channel you own, so when a platform changes its algorithm, gets bought, or throttles your reach, your list still gets your email. Every other channel is rented from someone else who can change the rules overnight. I learned this the hard way after building a following of over 300,000 people on platforms I didn’t control, and the newsletter with 9,000 subscribers now outperforms all of it combined.
The platform you don’t own can disappear on you
Here’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud: your Instagram followers, your LinkedIn connections, your TikTok audience, none of it is yours. You’re a tenant. The platform can change the algorithm, change ownership, change the rules on what gets shown to who, and there’s nothing in your control except deciding whether to keep paying rent with your time.
I found this out between 2019 and 2022. I’d spent over a decade building a social following that Forbes and others wrote about, hundreds of thousands of people across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Then the algorithms shifted, one platform changed hands entirely, and organic reach on posts I used to get seen by tens of thousands on dropped to a few hundred within eighteen months. Same content, same effort, a fraction of the reach. Nothing I’d done wrong. The rules had just changed underneath me.
My email list didn’t move an inch. Same 38 percent open rate it always had, because email doesn’t have an algorithm deciding whether your message is worth showing someone. It just arrives. That single difference is why I told this to the host on the Expert In Demand podcast when we talked about why I’ve gone cold on chasing social reach as a growth strategy.
The number that made me take it seriously
Here’s a comparison worth sitting with. Mailchimp’s own benchmark data puts average email open rates across industries at around 21 to 22 percent, with click-through rates typically under 3 percent. My weekly newsletter, sent every Sunday to just under 9,000 people, sits around 38 percent open rate and regularly clears 6 to 8 percent click-through on the weeks I include a clear single call to action.
Compare that to a LinkedIn post reaching, say, 5,000 of my roughly 200,000 connections on a good day, which is a reach rate of about 2.5 percent, and you can see the maths. A list ten times smaller than my social following is out-earning it. That’s not a marketing platitude, that’s a spreadsheet.
A newsletter forces you to have something to say
This is the uncomfortable part most people skip past. A newsletter fails for the same reason most New Year’s resolutions fail: it’s easy to start and it’s built on motivation, not a system. I’ve watched dozens of business owners launch one during a slow month when they suddenly need leads, send three issues, and quietly stop. The list doesn’t grow because it was never treated as infrastructure, it was treated as a panic button.
The businesses that get real growth from a newsletter are the ones who send it whether or not they’re busy that week. Not because discipline is a personality trait, but because a newsletter compounds. Someone who joins your list in month one and reads twelve issues before they ever buy from you is a completely different kind of buyer than someone who saw one ad. They’ve had twelve small proofs that you know what you’re talking about.
This is also exactly where you should be refining what you say to people, not just how often you say it. If your messaging is muddy, a weekly newsletter just broadcasts that muddiness to more people, faster. I wrote about how to fix that in 5 Ways To Refine Your Company’s Value Proposition, and it’s worth doing before you scale up sending frequency, not after.
What a newsletter does for growth, specifically
- It shortens the sales cycle. Prospects who’ve read six or more of my newsletters before booking a call already know my rates, my views on AI adoption, and roughly how I work. The call becomes a scheduling conversation, not a pitch.
- It survives your worst weeks. When I had health setbacks during the rebuild of my business over the past five years, social posting stopped for stretches. The newsletter kept going because it takes less energy to write one honest email than to perform for an algorithm.
- It’s the only channel with real ownership of the relationship. No platform can suspend your account and take your list with it. You can export it, move providers, and it’s still yours.
- It gives you first-party data. Open rates, click patterns, reply rates. You learn what your audience cares about instead of guessing from vanity metrics.
- It sells things without selling. A weekly show-up builds the kind of trust that a sales page can’t manufacture in a single visit.
The step-by-step version, no fluff
If you don’t have one running yet, here’s exactly how I’d start it this week:
- Step 1: Pick one platform and commit for twelve months. Kit, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, whatever suits your budget. The platform matters far less than people think. Switching every three months because a new tool looks shinier is a bigger drag on growth than any feature gap.
- Step 2: Choose one fixed sending day and time. Mine is Sunday, 7am UK time. Consistency trains your reader’s habit and trains your own.
- Step 3: Write like you talk, not like a press release. Short sentences. One idea per issue. My best-performing issues are under 600 words.
- Step 4: Include exactly one call to action. Not five links. One. Multiple options create decision fatigue and click-through rates drop.
- Step 5: Track two numbers monthly. Open rate and click rate. If open rate falls below 25 percent for three issues running, your subject lines or your list hygiene need attention, not your content.
- Step 6: Automate the repeatable parts, not the judgment parts. I use AI tools to help pull together my weekly research and draft a first pass, which I detailed in I Built an AI Agent to Run My Newsletter Without Me. What it can’t do is decide what’s worth saying that week. That’s still me, every single time.
Why growing companies specifically need this, not just growing personal brands
If you’re a service business, a newsletter is where trust gets built before anyone fills out a contact form. If you’re B2B, it’s where you stay top of mind for the eleven months of the year a prospect isn’t actively buying, so when the budget opens up, you’re the name they already trust. If you sell products, it’s where repeat purchase happens because you’re not paying ad costs to reacquire the same customer twice.
Steven Bartlett has built an enormous business partly on this exact principle, treating his own media and audience as the asset, not a side project to the “real” business. I wrote about what that approach teaches founders in Business Lessons from Steven Bartlett, and the throughline is simple: own the audience, and the business built on top of it becomes far more resilient than one built on rented reach.
The wider shift in how marketing and sales work together also matters here. I talked through this in more depth on the UNmiss Podcast, where the point that stuck with the host was that most companies still treat email as an afterthought behind social and paid ads, when it’s often the highest-converting, lowest-cost channel they have, they just haven’t measured it fairly against the others.
The mistake I see most often
Business owners write a newsletter like a company update. Here’s what we launched, here’s our new hire, here’s our award. Nobody subscribed to read your internal memo. They subscribed hoping you’d tell them something useful, something they can’t get from a five-second scroll. If your open rates are sitting under 20 percent, this is very often the reason, not your subject lines.
The fix isn’t complicated but it is uncomfortable for a lot of founders: stop writing about your company and start writing about your reader’s problem. Every issue should answer a question they have. If you can’t think of twelve of those questions off the top of your head, that’s worth sitting with before you send issue one.
Frequently asked questions
How often should a business newsletter go out?
Weekly works best for most growing companies because it’s frequent enough to build a habit and stay top of mind without becoming a chore to write. Monthly is better than nothing, but the gap is long enough that readers forget who you are between issues, which shows up as lower open rates over time.
What’s a good open rate for a company newsletter?
Anything above 25 to 30 percent is solid, and above 35 percent is strong, given that Mailchimp’s general benchmarks put average open rates around 21 to 22 percent across industries. If yours sits well below that, the problem is usually subject lines, list hygiene, or sending to people who never wanted to be on the list in the first place.
Do I need thousands of subscribers before it’s worth doing?
No. A list of 300 engaged subscribers who open and click regularly will outperform a list of 30,000 who never open your emails. Start with whoever you have, whether that’s past clients, event attendees, or website visitors, and grow it steadily rather than buying a list, which almost always damages your sender reputation.
Should my newsletter just repurpose my blog posts?
Not entirely. A short original note at the top, written specifically for the email, with a link to the longer piece if someone wants more, performs far better than dropping a full blog post into an email template. Readers want to feel like they’re getting something written for them, not a copy-paste job.
