What I Learned From Starting a Newsletter With a List of 100 Email Addresses
What I Learned From Starting a Newsletter With a List of 100 Email Addresses
Starting a newsletter for a client who gave me a list of about 100 email addresses taught me a lot more than I expected.
Starting a newsletter had been on my to-do list for years.
For this client, it was only supposed to be a couple of quick emails letting their customers know that they were launching their own website.
A third-party website that had become the go-to website for this client's niche customer base had decided to shut down. The client was only able to get about 100 email addresses before the site went offline.
This business had been in operation since 2009. It was doing well.
But they didn't own their own domain.
In 2024, I was approached to build what was supposed to be a simple website.
But as I looked at other businesses in this niche, I knew this couldn't be as simple as the client wanted it to be.
And everything started moving very quickly.
Within days, I had purchased the domain, set up a basic landing page, and created a way for people to submit their email addresses so we could communicate with them directly.
Then the client had their first event for their customers.
So we were no longer just building a website.
We were building the website while simultaneously figuring out how to communicate with customers who were already expecting information.
The newsletter became a temporary crutch.
That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was what we needed at the time.
I was still learning the business, learning the niche, and figuring out what customers actually needed to know.
As the client got new customers and new email subscribers, I was learning from those interactions in real time.
What questions were people asking?
What information did they need?
What were they confused about?
What did we keep having to explain over and over?
I was making changes day by day based on what we were learning.
And I wasn't doing this with unlimited time or budget.
Everything was happening quickly, and we had to make decisions based on what we could realistically get done.
That meant some things were temporary from the beginning.
One of those things was the client's business email.
They were initially using a Gmail address that included the business name. It worked, but I knew we eventually needed a proper business email address using the domain.
Within the first 30 to 60 days, I set that up.
My preference is Google Workspace, but Microsoft, Zoho, and several other providers can accomplish the same basic thing. Even Apple now offers custom domain email as part of iCloud+.
The point wasn't necessarily which provider we used.
The point was getting the business off a temporary setup and onto infrastructure that actually belonged to the business.
That became a recurring theme throughout the entire project.
Learning the Niche While Building the Website
I also didn't pretend that I already knew everything about this niche.
I researched it.
I subscribed to another newsletter in the same niche.
I looked at their website.
I paid attention to what they were sending to their customers and how they structured their information.
I copied and pasted some of the things they were doing—not to simply duplicate their business, but to understand what worked and what didn't.
I looked at features that customers in this niche would already recognize from visiting similar businesses in other states.
Then I simplified those ideas and adapted them to fit this particular client's customers.
That was important.
I wasn't trying to build the biggest or most complicated website in the niche.
I was trying to build something that made sense for this particular business and its customers.
That meant looking at what was already working elsewhere, understanding why it worked, and then deciding what was actually necessary here.
Some ideas made sense.
Others didn't.
Some features were worth adding.
Others would have just added complexity.
And because we were operating under time and budget constraints, I couldn't spend months researching every possible option before making a decision.
I had to build, watch, learn, and adjust.
The Website and Newsletter Became One Project
I wasn't just building the website and then starting a newsletter afterward.
I was building the website while also running the newsletter.
As I sent out a few emails, the email list began to grow.
So I couldn't just stop.
I had to learn what worked and what didn't work for this particular niche.
I did everything manually for months.
Then we quickly outgrew the website builder we were using. So we moved to another provider that gave us more features.
This is when the emails really took off and the email list began to grow and grow.
At the same time, the website was evolving.
The more I learned from the emails and the questions coming from customers, the more I realized what needed to actually live on the website.
That became one of the biggest lessons from the entire process.
Don't Make the Newsletter Your Website
The biggest thing I learned from this niche—and something that likely applies to others—is this:
Don't use your emails for information that should be on your website.
Early on, the newsletter had to do more because the website was still being built and I was still figuring out what information belonged there.
But that wasn't sustainable.
I had to create dedicated pages and blog posts for things that needed to be constantly referenced.
I paid attention to the questions we received via email.
Those questions became pages or blog posts that I could link to in an email.
So, over time, the emails got shorter and shorter.
That wasn't because we had less to say.
It was because we had learned where the information belonged.
Instead of explaining everything in an email, I could give someone a short explanation and send them to the website for the full information.
The website became the source of truth.
The newsletter became the way of reminding people that the information was there.
In the beginning, we were trying to do too much.
But we were also learning.
And we had to adjust quickly.
You Can't Learn Until It's in Motion
A lot of this couldn't have been figured out before we started.
I had to actually put something in motion and see what happened.
I was learning this niche while building the website.
I was learning this niche while communicating with customers.
I was learning this niche while growing the email list.
I was even learning from competitors and businesses in other states by seeing what they were doing, what their customers were accustomed to, and what could be simplified for this particular business.
And I was changing things day by day based on what we were seeing.
That meant some things we did early on eventually became unnecessary.
Other things became permanent parts of the website.
Some emails worked.
Some didn't.
Some information belonged in an email.
Other information clearly needed its own page.
You don't always know the difference until you start doing it.
You Have to Own Something
You also can't rely on social media or other third-party websites to stay around forever.
This entire project started because a third-party website shut down.
That was the wake-up call.
The business had been around since 2009, but it didn't own its own domain or have a direct way to communicate with many of its customers.
The third-party website disappeared, and suddenly a business that had been operating for years had to scramble to preserve whatever customer contact information it could.
Social media and other third-party websites are useful.
They should be used for discovery and distribution.
But whenever possible, you should funnel people back to something you control.
Your own website.
Your own domain.
Your own email list.
Even if it's just a simple one-page website.
I was able to grow this email list from roughly 100 addresses to well over 1,000 subscribers.
We typically see more than a 50 percent open rate among active subscribers.
And that's another thing I've learned.
Even if you have thousands of subscribers, you have to pay attention to the people who actually interact with your emails.
You can't simply look at the total number of subscribers and assume they're all equally valuable.
You need to understand who is actually engaged with what you're sending.
Don't Go Link-Crazy
Sometimes you need to be wordy.
Other times, you don't.
One of the mistakes we made early on was trying to put too much into the emails.
If you have a website, your newsletter should be a reminder or announcement of what's on the website.
It shouldn't contain everything.
If something is important enough to keep referencing, it needs to live somewhere on your website.
Create a page.
Write a blog post.
Build a resource.
Then use the newsletter to point people there.
If it's just a newsletter without a website, still tread lightly.
Don't go link-crazy and send people everywhere.
Give them a short explanation and a link to the full write-up.
And whenever possible, that full write-up should live somewhere you control.
Automate What You Can
As you learn what your audience needs, automate your emails over time.
If someone does this, they get this email.
If they sign up for that, they get that email.
If they haven't done something after a certain amount of time, they get a reminder.
You don't have to manually remember every interaction.
You can also pre-write and schedule emails in advance.
That's where the system starts to become much more manageable.
At the time of this writing, I've automated most everything to the point where if this happens, they get this email, or if that happens, they get that email.
I've also segmented the email list.
I've had to learn which times of day give me the highest open and click rates.
None of that happened overnight.
It came from doing things manually first, learning what worked, and then figuring out what could be automated.
Simplify Over Time
Once you learn what your niche needs, simplify your emails.
Don't feel like you have to be overly creative with your words every single time.
Change what needs changing and send it.
Once you have an email template that works, use it.
Depending on the niche, you will eventually run out of ways to basically say the same thing every week.
And that's okay.
Your customers aren't sitting around waiting for you to come up with a clever new way to announce the same information.
They want the information.
Give it to them.
The goal isn't to make every email feel completely different.
The goal is to make sure the right people get the right information at the right time.
That's something I couldn't have learned by simply reading about newsletters.
I had to actually do it.
I started with roughly 100 email addresses because a third-party website was going away.
Within days, I had a domain, a landing page, and a way to start communicating directly with customers.
What started as a couple of quick emails turned into a system with more than 1,000 subscribers, segmentation, automation, dedicated website content, scheduled emails, a proper business email address, and a much better understanding of what this particular audience actually needs.
And it all happened while I was building the website.
The website informed the newsletter.
The newsletter informed the website.
Customer questions informed both.
Competitors gave me ideas.
Time and budget constraints forced me to prioritize.
And the more we learned, the simpler the system became.
That's probably the biggest lesson of all:
You can't learn until it's in motion.
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