Someone told you your business needs an email newsletter. Maybe a consultant, maybe a podcast, maybe your nephew who's good with computers.

Or you started one already. You sent 2, felt a bit silly, and it's been gathering dust ever since.

We get asked about this a lot, usually with a slightly guilty face. So here's the straight version.

A newsletter is genuinely useful for some businesses and a total waste of your evenings for others. Nobody ever sells you the second half of that sentence.

We will. By the end of this you'll know which one you are.

What your newsletter is actually good at

Newsletters do one narrow job well. They keep you in front of people who already know who you are.

That's your past customers, the enquiry that went quiet in March, the person who bought once and liked it. They haven't forgotten you. They've just got their own week to survive.

Your email lands in the middle of that week and reminds them you exist. That's the whole trick. It's not glamorous.

Is it going to bring you new customers? No. Almost nobody hands their email address to a business they've never heard of.

Expecting a newsletter to find you new customers is like expecting your fridge to do the weekly shop. Wrong appliance. Lovely fridge!

So judge it on the right things. Repeat work, referrals, the people who come back because you stayed in their heads.

If you want strangers, that's search, social and ads doing the heavy lifting for you. Not your Tuesday email.

When it isn't worth your time

Here's the part we'd rather say out loud. Plenty of businesses shouldn't bother, and you might be one of them.

If your customers live on WhatsApp, send a WhatsApp broadcast instead. We build WhatsApp-first software, so we're hardly talking ourselves out of work here. Plenty of South Africans will read a WhatsApp within a minute and never open an inbox at all.

If you sell one big thing rarely, skip it. Someone who reroofed their house isn't waiting on monthly updates from you, and 11 emails won't make the roof age faster!

If you've honestly got nothing to say each month, don't manufacture it. Your readers can smell filler from a mile off, and it costs you more goodwill than silence ever would.

And if you know in your bones you'll send 3 and stop, be honest with yourself now. A dead sign-up form and 3 old emails look worse than never starting.

What to put in yours

Right, you've decided it's worth it. Now the bit everyone overthinks.

You don't need "value-packed content". You need 3 or 4 honest things a customer would find mildly interesting.

• What you're busy with. The job you're on, the stock that landed, the thing you're opening in September.
• Something you learned. If it saved you a headache, it'll probably save your reader one too.
• The question customers keep asking. If 5 people asked it this month, the rest of your list is wondering as well.
• One clear thing to do next. Reply, book, pop in, call. Pick one and ask your reader for it.

Keep it short. Nobody has ever complained that your email was too easy to read!

Everyone will tell you the hard part is the writing. It isn't. The hard part is sending it in a month that's on fire, when it's the only job with no client shouting about it.

So make yours small enough to survive a bad month. One email, 300 words, written the same morning it goes out, beats a beautiful quarterly plan you'll abandon by autumn.

And get the permission bit right. Only email people who opted in, which is jargon for "said yes", and whoever invented that phrase owes us all an apology!

Do we do this?

Yes, sort of, and we'd rather be precise than impressive.

We write and send newsletters for clients as part of the marketing work we do for them. It isn't a package on our site. There's no price list and no bronze-silver-gold nonsense.

What we're useful for is plain enough. We'll help you work out whether to send one at all, write it so it sounds like you, and nag it out the door every month.

We're also weirdly good at stopping an email looking like a ransom note assembled in the dark. Low bar! We clear it.

What we're not is a certified platform specialist. We don't build enterprise automation, and we won't pretend we live and breathe deliverability.

We know that makes us sound less impressive than the agency down the road. We're fine being the ones who say it out loud.

So, where does that leave you?

If a newsletter suits you, start smaller than you're planning to. One email, to the people who already know you, this month.

Not a 12-month content calendar you'll resent by week 3.

If it doesn't suit you, let it go and don't feel a shred of guilt. There's no prize for owning a newsletter nobody reads!

If you're still not sure which one you are, come and have a chat, or WhatsApp us and tell us how your customers really reach you.

Then go and write your first one. 300 words. Today!