Most of my clients, who are solo and small business owners, have a deep appreciation for what works.

They don’t have time or spare creative energy for anything else.

They’re busy people, usually with partners and families and homes and pets and other big life interests they’re pursuing. Their  business is not everything to them, but it is a huge part of how they’re showing up in the world, one of the primary ways they’re contributing and making a difference. And — huge bonus for ME as their creative provider — they enjoy their work a whole lot.

When they come to The Voice Bureau for copywriting or content creation support, they’re not looking for short-term tactics or to get in on a hot marketing trend. They’re looking not only for a clear and discernible result but also a deep conviction that this is the best way to direct their business’s energy in this season. They’re looking to position their business in a certain way. And they’re looking for a path and an outcome that feels right through and through.

So when I encounter a new client who doesn’t have an e-newsletter, or who has one but doesn’t ever use it, the first thing I ask (gently and encouragingly) is why not???

I’d never give up my e-letter for anything.

Of all the things the different marketing activities I’ve done in my time as a solo business owners, writing and sending a consistently high quality e-newsletter is by far the one with the highest ROI (return on investment). Let me tell you why.

As a solo business owner, you deserve to know that —

1) Your Right People want to hear from you.

They really do. Nobody really wants more email, so consider this: if someone has willingly given their email address to you, it’s because they really, really WANT to stay connected. Somewhere in their mind, they have the intention to become your customer one day. They’re curious and intrigued by how you do what you do. They like watching you work. They’re attracted to your voice, and to the value you promise to share. Give the people what they want.

2) Good solid content trumps gorgeous design.

I know and preach the value of great design all day long, but when it comes to a business e-newsletter, simple old line of type can be just as effective as a chic, sleek HTML template. The nice thing is, email service providers like Aweber and MailChimp make it SO easy to get a great-looking e-letter these days. Yet four years in, my own e-letter is still nothing fancier than a logo header, Helvetica paragraph text (with short, web-friendly paragraphs), and font colors that reflect my brand’s color palette. Visual branding goes hand in hand with great content, but without great content, visual branding goes poof. So develop your sense of what great content is for YOUR people, and come out with that.

3) You don’t owe anyone total transparency about your decision-making process or your business strategy.

I often see solo business owners treating their e-newsletter like a page out of their business owner diary. And for some Voice Values — especially Transparency and Intimacy — this isn’t necessarily a bad choice.  But not every small business e-newsletter needs to be a reckoning of the creator’s personal travails, experiments, and innermost feelings about being an entrepreneur. If you want to be intensely personal in your e-newsletter and can see a way to tie this to your Right People’s needs and desires, then so be it. But know that there’s NO pressure on you to self-disclose anything you don’t see a use for just because people have given you their email address. Not every business e-letter needs to go behind the scenes of the business. I’ll repeat. Not every business e-letter needs to go behind the scenes of the business. Consider that based on what your business offers, your Right People may be even more interested in what they are hoping to GET from your brand than they are in your personal story. As human beings, we do care about others’ stories, but not more than we care about what’s in it for us.

To quote Marketing Profs’ Ann Handley, there’s a marked difference between personal and personable, and either approach is A-OK.

4) A small but engaged list is better than a bigger but zoned-out list.

Yes, there are mathematical realities about how many people you can “convert” from an offer made to a list of X number or Y number of people. If you want to sell more stuff, you do need to grow your list over time. But in the here and now, are you selling what you could be to the people you actually have? Aren’t some sales better than no sales? Some sales can teach you a lot about your subscribers’ desire, about effective (and less effective) copywriting, and about an effective rhythm for connection. No sales can teach you a lot, too.  But you can’t learn whether people will buy or not if you’re not making the offer.

Segue: The E-Letter Atelier is the seventh course I’ve launched under The Voice Bureau in the past couple of years. But in the first week of enrollment, sales were sluggish. I asked myself why and saw a number of possible factors: the price was significantly higher than the price of many of my previous courses; I (like usual, to be honest) did little to no lead-up before the launch [the advice to do a pre-launch, warm-up campaign is wonderful and I’m sure effective, but I very rarely do it]; and it seems like an unusually heavy “launch season” out there in the values-based B2B online realm. I knew that the problem was not my list size, but rather, with the sales page itself, since I wasn’t “converting” at my usual rate.

So I sought feedback from a source I trust implicitly (The Voice Bureau’s very own Project Curator Katie Mehas) and radically reworked the sales page, including a swap-out of all photos on the page to evoke a different feel. And voilà!, sales picked up and have been steadier since. I’m so excited about the group of solo and small business owners coming together for this first-ever experience and I look forward to getting started in June.

5) You don’t NEED a free opt-in gift, but if you have one, make it worth their while.

Just like nobody really wants more email to process, nobody really wants another digital file sitting around on their hard drive. So if you go the route of creating a “free gift” for your e-newsletter subscribers, make sure it’s worth their while. Your e-letter opt-in gift should (1) loop your Right People into your brand conversation via a tiny slice of the whole thing, (2) help them solve a pressing problem or address a critical concern, and (3) be consumbable in about 10 minutes.

My own subscriber gift is my Discover Your Voice Values brand voice self-assessment. It meets the criteria for a viable opt-in gift because it (1) immediately loops my Right People in to my conversation about brand voice for small, values-based businesses, (2) offers them a way to gain quick self-understanding of a topic that can seem rather complicated, and (3) takes most people about 10 minutes to do.

Not a subscriber yet? Sign up below to discover your Top 3-5 Voice Values.

6) Top quality over laser consistency, every time.

This one turns the usual advice on its head. You know how “be consistent” is the battle cry of branding specialists and marketers everywhere? While I wholeheartedly believe there’s GREAT value (and rewards) to be found in showing up consistently, I also believe that some of the best marketing content we see out there today is a pattern interrupt. It snaps our brain out of its usual open-mouthed stare into the digital netherlands. It tell us, “Hey! Wake up! You don’t get an email from [insert your business name here] every day but today you ARE. And you enjoy getting his/her emails. So this must be significant .”

There’s all kinds of research out there about the best times to send email. For months (years), I held myself to an every-Tuesday-morning-at-3-AM-EST sending schedule, aiming to land in people’s inboxes first thing on the first day of the week that wasn’t Monday. But the more consistently I kept up this rhythm, the more my open rate declined, and then settled in at a consistent 50% lower than when I used to send sporadically! I’ve personally found that varying the days and times I send yields the best open rates. In short, my people are MORE apt to open my emails and click the links inside them when I’m less predictable. I’m still consistently, but now I’m sending consistently inconsistently. Open rates are up and more of my Right People are reading my e-letters more often.

In the comments, I’d love to hear:

Do you have an e-newsletter you consistently write and send? If so, what “best practices” have you discovered hold true for you? If you don’t yet have an e-newsletter, what holds you back?