Let me tell you something that nobody in the “post every day and grow your audience” crowd wants you to think about.
That following you’ve spent months building on Instagram or Facebook?
It’s not yours!
Not a single follower. Not one contact. Nothing.
You’re renting space on someone else’s platform. And like any landlord, they can change the rules whenever they want.
They can decide your posts reach fewer people. They can tweak the algorithm. They can shut your account down with no warning and no appeal process that actually works.
It’s happened to businesses just like yours. Accounts with thousands of followers, gone overnight. A post that got flagged. A terms of service update they didn’t even know about. And with it, every connection they’d built. Every potential customer. Every bit of trust they’d worked to earn.
That’s not me trying to scare you. That’s just the reality of building your marketing on ground you don’t own.
Compare that to an email list.
Every address on that list is yours. You collected it. You have permission to use it. If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, your email list would still be there. If Facebook changed its algorithm again and decided to show your posts to 3% of your followers instead of 10%, your email list wouldn’t care.
It’s the difference between building on solid ground and building on sand.
And I know what you might be thinking. “Nobody reads emails anymore.”
They do. The data is pretty clear on this. Email consistently outperforms social media for reaching people who’ve already shown interest in what you do.
Not every email, not every time - but as a channel, it’s more reliable, more direct, and more personal than any social post.
When someone gives you their email address, they’re saying: “Yes. I want to hear from you.” That’s a different relationship entirely to someone who scrolled past your post and hit follow.
Here’s where this fits in the Perfect Customer Journey framework.
Stage 2 - Connect is all about this. It’s the bit where you go from “someone saw you” to “someone gave you their contact details.” Social media lives mostly in Stage 1 - Get Noticed. It’s brilliant for visibility. It’s genuinely useful for that.
But if someone sees your post, likes it, and moves on - you’ve got nothing. You can’t follow up. You can’t stay in touch. You’re relying on them seeing your next post too, and the one after that. And with the way these platforms work, that’s never guaranteed.
An email list bridges that gap. It moves someone from “vaguely aware of you” to “I can actually contact this person directly.”
That’s a much more valuable place to be.
So what do you actually do with it?
You don’t need a complicated system. You don’t need fancy software or a professional email designer.
You need three things:
First, something worth signing up for. A useful guide. A checklist. A short email course. Something that solves a small problem your ideal customer actually has. It doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be genuinely useful.
Second, a way to collect emails. Most email platforms have a basic sign-up form. Put it on your website. Mention it in your social content. Keep it simple.
Third, send emails regularly. Not every day necessarily - but consistently. A weekly email that’s actually useful will do more for your business than posting on Instagram seven days a week hoping the algorithm is in a good mood.
The email doesn’t need to be long. It doesn’t need to be perfectly written. It needs to be helpful, personal, and written like you actually give a damn about the person reading it.
The bigger picture.
I’ve spoken to loads of service business owners who’ve put all their marketing eggs in the social media basket. They’re not wrong to be on social. Social media is useful. It’s part of Stage 1 - Get Noticed and it has a role to play.
But when I ask them what they’d do if their account disappeared tomorrow, most of them go quiet.
That’s the problem.
Your email list is the one bit of your marketing that’s actually yours. Build it like you mean it.
Start small if you need to. Even 50 people who genuinely want to hear from you is worth more than 5,000 followers who’ve already forgotten they clicked follow.
Own your audience. Don’t just rent it.
Why not check out my daily email, The Marketing Memo where I give you quick, actionable, jargon free advice.
.png)
.png)