Your name will open doors among friends, family, and social or business connections
This article first appeard 9 Oct. 2025
You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs and small businesses find viable business models.
The most frequent question I get from colleagues is, “How can I get more clients/customers with digital marketing and social media?” For me, it’s all about building authentic relationships, trustworthy relationships. Social media isn’t always the answer.
Last week, I talked about the importance of having a Google Business Profile. This week, I’d like to talk about how to use a communication tool you might hate — email.
Why do you immediately delete most of the email you receive? Probably because you don’t know the sender, or they’re trying to sell you something, or they’re trying to lure you into clicking on something.
Trust is in short supply, and trustworthy relationships – be they family, social, religious, or business – are also in short supply.
Email newsletters and email marketing can work for you because your name, or your company name, opens doors. People will let you in.
Build a direct relationship
The value of your email newsletter or email message is that you have a relationship with the person who is receiving it in their inbox. (Unless, that is, you bought a list of email names who may be strangers, and then you’re possibly just an annoyance.)
Maybe you met them at a trade fair and they gave you their business card. They know you from your religious group or bowling group. They’re a client. They’re a former client.
When you have a person’s email address, you are going directly to them. You’re not going through social media or some other intermediary. Your message is going directly to their inbox.
Your name in the subject line
Make sure your name or your company name is in the subject line. Or make sure you name the person who recommended you to that person: “Carol Johnson suggested I contact you.”
My very first email newsletter capitalized on the fact that several hundred people knew me and trusted the information I was sharing: How I accidentally discovered the power of email newsletters 25 years ago
And if you don’t believe me, trust this guy, who has tens of thousands of email subscribers:
Ismael Nafría: “The newsletter is a format, a way of communicating that I am in love with. It seems to me to be a very effective, very natural, very authentic format, which facilitates something that is the opposite of other digital platforms today.”
You can read all his observations here.
More tools
Here’s a handout I use at public events while volunteering for SCORE.org, which gives free mentoring to small businesses and entrepreneurs: 5 Digital marketing tips to build your business.
This explains the power of trustworthy relationships in a crowded digital ecosystem: Trust people not bots: Your guide to thriving as Google search results plummet