A standing channel to your customers works even when it is plain. Regularity matters more than polish, and when the channel stops, the business goes quiet.
Most owners start from the other end. They want a designed newsletter, and they wait until they have time to build it properly. Meanwhile nothing goes out.
Anything beats nothing
The source puts it as a maxim that is easy to remember: any magazine is better than no magazine. Here a magazine means any update that leaves you on a regular basis and reaches your customers.
The source does not ignore quality. It says that any issue will do for a while, and that later it has to be decent enough to get you respected. Quality is a condition for continuing. Starting needs none of it, and someone who waits until they have something good enough to send ends up sending nothing.
That is a relief if you are waiting. The first update mainly has to go out, and the quality improves along the way once a rhythm exists.
Suppose a studio owner who sends a three-paragraph update every month, with no design at all. After a year it is her second-largest source of enquiries.
Against her, picture a business owner who planned a properly designed newsletter and is still in the middle of it two years later.
The channel is your presence
The deepest reason in the chapter is one line about the role of the channel. The source calls the magazine the talking piece of the organization and goes on: “Without it the org is dumb.” Dumb here means mute.
Elsewhere it explains what the channel buys you. Send out a good issue on schedule, and the result is that “you look stable and there.”
In a small business this is exact. A customer who has heard nothing from you for a year has stopped thinking about you. Silence has a result too: it slowly erases you from the memory of people who already bought from you.
Suppose a heating engineer whose long-standing customer bought from a competitor. Asked why, the customer said they did not know he still did that.
Or a consultant who sends one line each quarter. Three enquiries a year come directly from those messages.
What cutting back costs
In a weak month, promotion is usually the first thing to go, and a standing channel looks like a natural place to save. The source reacts sharply. It knows of no surer way for an organization to collapse than to curtail its magazine.
Then it gives a case. London cut its magazine from 4,500 copies to 700, because only 700 files counted as hot. It went $22,000 into the red at once.
Look at the order of events. The cut was made to save money, and its immediate result was a loss.
London's reasoning was perfectly sensible, and it was wrong. The list carries the presence of the business, which is a far wider job than this month's sales.
Suppose an owner who decided to write only to active customers in order to save money. Enquiries fell, and it turned out they had mostly been arriving from the inactive ones.
Next to him, a landscape gardener who writes to every name on his list, even those who have not ordered for three years. Two jobs a year come from exactly there.
The result arrives late
There is another reason people give up too early: a standing channel does not pay off at once. According to the source, after a good issue goes out the figures rise only some weeks later. The reverse holds as well. A drop in what you send out reaches your income only after a few weeks.
So someone who sent twice and stopped because nothing happened stopped before the measuring had even begun.
That lag is also what makes cutting dangerous. If you drop the update in a weak month, the damage is invisible at first, and it reaches your income some weeks later.
Suppose a business owner who kept sending for two months with nothing to show for it. Three enquiries came in during the fourth month, and all of them traced back to the first month's mailing.
Or a consultant who stopped after three weeks and never learned whether it would have worked.
Measuring takes patience. Someone who checks after a single week is measuring something that has not had time to happen.
The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to do and one to prepare, followed by a self-check. It also holds the minimum rhythm the source sets for an update, and how long to wait before you measure.
If you are waiting for the first update to be perfect, remember that in the meantime your customers hear nothing from you at all.