What My Old Cosmetics Business Taught Me About Mailing Lists
Welcome back to another piece where I use myself as the case study. More than ten years ago I had a small cosmetics business for handmade products, hair and skin. That business is not here with us anymore. It is gone. Yet we talk about it anyway, because there is a lesson buried in that time frame. The honest question I sit with now is simple. What would have been different if I had used the resources that we have at hand today?
The answer changes everything about how I would build a brand a second time around.
Small Businesses Underestimate the Mailing List
Small businesses underestimate the power of having a mailing list. Say hallelujah, because this point matters. A mailing list is part of sales. It is not only digital marketing. It belongs to the sales strategy itself, sitting right alongside your social media management and your content creation.
Having a mailing list is a strong way for businesses at any magnitude to build a relationship with their customers. Listen carefully to what I am about to say. These are people who chose to be in your inbox. They told you, in their own way, that they want you to share what you have to offer. That permission carries weight. It is the closest thing to a direct line a founder can own.
Many founders, content creators, influencers, artists, and art galleries treat that inbox as an afterthought. The result is a missed relationship with the very audience that raised a hand and asked to hear from them.
Why Social Media Alone Will Not Reach Everyone
We forget that the messages we send through social media never reach all of the people. I keep going back to this hill, and I will keep standing on it. The reach of any single platform is limited by an algorithm you do not control.
Everything you talk about in your social media management, your content creation, and your videos is strong material that serves people inside a newsletter. The work already exists. The audio exists. The video exists. The blog posts exist. The task is moving that value into a channel where the people who asked to hear from you read it in full.
A social media management tool keeps the front of the house running, while the mailing list protects the relationship behind it. One feeds the other.
Use Workflow Automation to Turn Content Into Newsletters
Here is where I would have done things differently. Workflow automation builds a system that takes your audio and your video and turns it into newsletters. The same system turns that material into blog posts, and the blog posts feed back into the newsletter. You make a mini website out of your newsletter, where each issue lives on and keeps working for you.
I cannot stress enough how much this helps. Had I known to set up workflow automation for that cosmetics brand, it would have saved an enormous amount of time. Tools such as Claude Cowork and chatGPT now sit at the center of that process, restructuring a single video into a week of written communication without losing the voice behind it. A creative agency leans on this same approach when outsourcing social media for clients who produce constantly and have no hours left to repurpose any of it.
This is the work that content creators, influencers, and founders give away every day. The raw material is already paid for in your time. Workflow automation collects the return.
Newsletters Are for the Good Stuff
A newsletter is an opportunity for deep insight. People are there for the good stuff, so bring the good stuff. Nobody wants a bland repetition of what already sits on your website. Nobody wants to open an inbox and find the same offers and discounts wrapped in a new subject line.
You are far more than your offer. You are not the discount. Build the relationship first, and let it carry through into the newsletter, into the distribution channels, into every piece of communication you send. That relationship is what turns a reader into a customer and a customer into someone who stays.
For artists and art galleries, this is the difference between a one-time sale and a collector who follows the whole body of work. For founders and content creators, it is the foundation that social media creation rests on. The platforms move fast and change their rules. The inbox stays yours.
That cosmetics business never had this. Yours can.
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Footnotes
1. Chaffey, Dave. Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks. Smart Insights, January 2024. https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/ This report shows that email consistently returns higher engagement and conversion than organic social reach, which supports the point that a mailing list reaches your audience more reliably than social media alone.
2. Patel, Sujan. Email Marketing Rules. 2019. https://emailmarketingrules.com This work argues that permission-based email earns attention because subscribers opt in, which backs the idea that people in your inbox chose to hear from you and expect real value rather than repeated offers.
3. McKinsey and Company. The State of AI in Early 2024. McKinsey, May 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai This research documents how automation and generative tools cut repetitive content work, supporting the case for using workflow automation to convert video and audio into newsletters and blog posts.
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