84: The 5 Excuses Keeping You From an Email List That Actually Sells

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🌵 You Don't Have an Email Problem. You Have a Pile of Buts.

You've been meaning to start the newsletter for months. Or maybe you started one, sent three, and quietly let it slip. Every time the thought comes back around, something rises up to meet it first. A but. A reason. A very sensible-sounding excuse for why now isn't the time, why this isn't for you, why it probably wouldn't work anyway.

I get it, because I've said every single one of them out loud myself.

So this isn't a lecture, and there's zero finger-pointing here. I know exactly where you're standing, because I've stood there too. But I've also sent a newsletter every week for more than 285 weeks straight, and I can tell you the thing keeping you from your email list is almost never what you think it is.

It's not time. It's not your platform. It's not your business model.

It's the pile of buts sitting between you and the one channel that actually reaches the people who already love you.

So let's pick them up one at a time and hold them up to the light. Most of them fall apart the second you look at them straight.

💡 The Pilates Studio That Taught Me Everything About Email

A while back, I joined a Pilates studio down the road from my house, and I fell hard for it.

It got me out of the house. It helped my perpetually trashed lower back. And as a solopreneur who works from home, it gave me something I didn't know I was starving for: a reason to be around other women that had nothing to do with my kids' sports schedule.

If you work from home, you know exactly the kind of lifeline I'm talking about.

I started going once a week. Then twice, because I loved it that much.

And then life started life-ing. I got busy. My membership ran out. The signup wasn't set to auto-renew, so every single month I had to open an app, remember where to go, and make a whole decision about it. In a loud season, that tiny bit of friction was enough. I just... stopped going.

Here's the part I need you to sit with.

She never emailed me.

I don't mean a personal, handwritten note. She's a one-woman show running the whole studio, and I would never expect that. I just mean she had my email address from the day I signed up, and she wasn't using it. She runs these fun seasonal specials, and the only way I ever heard about them was by physically being in class when she announced them.

I would have signed right back up on the spot. Every time.

But I was out of sight, out of mind. I'm never on Facebook. I'm barely on Instagram. The algorithm was not handing me her posts, so in my busy, perimenopausal, mom-of-two brain, the whole studio just quietly ceased to exist.

I became the customer who drifted away and never got reminded to come back.

That story sounds like it's about me. It's really about your people. And it flips the scariest email fear completely upside down.

🎯 Excuse #1: "But What If No One Reads It?"

This is the one that stops people cold, so I want to start here.

When you imagine sending a newsletter and picture the silence on the other end, you're asking the wrong question. The fear assumes your people don't care. But go back to my Pilates studio. I cared. I loved that place. I would have handed over my money again in a heartbeat. I didn't leave because I stopped caring. I left because she never showed up in a spot I'd actually see her.

That's not a "no one will read it" problem. That's the opposite.

You have people right now who have bought from you, who felt about your work the way I felt about that studio, and they are quietly drifting away. Not because they don't love you. Because you're only reaching them in a feed that isn't even showing you to them.

So flip the question. It was never "will anyone read this?" It's "how many people who already love me are slipping away because I never showed up where they'd actually see me?"

Your email list is the one channel that lands in front of them with no algorithm deciding whether they're allowed to hear from you. The people who'd read it are already here. You're just not using the door that opens straight to them.

📧 Excuse #2: "But I Don't Use Flodesk"

I'm a proud Flodesk girl. I'm a Flodesk partner, I love that company, and I'll happily talk your ear off about it. So I understand why people assume that if they're on Mailchimp or Kit or anything else, they're out of luck.

You're not. Not even a little.

What keeps you consistent has nothing to do with which platform you log into. It's the framework. The writing. The story bank. The format you're not rebuilding from scratch every week. The system that makes it doable when life is loud.

Your platform is just the delivery truck. What I care about is what goes in the truck, and how to make it something people actually want to open. That works on Flodesk, on Mailchimp, on Kit, on whatever you switch to two years from now.

So no, you don't need to switch to my platform. You don't need any specific tool. You need a system that goes with you no matter what logo is on the login screen.

🤝 Excuse #3: "But I'm Product-Based" (or "But I'm Service-Based")

This one comes at me from both directions. Coaches worry it's a shop-owner thing. Shop owners worry it's a coach thing. You're both wrong, in the exact same way.

Strip an email list down to what it really is, and it's identical for every business on earth: a group of people who raised their hand and said, I want to hear from you.

That is gold whether you're booking discovery calls or shipping candles. A raised hand is a raised hand. If someone wants a direct line to you, you want a direct line back to them, no matter what's on the other end of the sale.

So if you've been telling yourself this is probably more for "those" kinds of businesses, whichever kind you've decided you're not, stop counting yourself out.

There's no one-size-fits-all newsletter here anyway. The whole point is working out the version that fits your business, your season, and the people you serve, so it's doable for you and genuinely worth opening for them.

🌀 Excuse #4: "But I Don't Have Time"

I want to push back gently, because I think the math is upside down.

You're picturing a newsletter as one more job stacked on top of everything else. Another content channel, another plate spinning in the air. If that's what email was, I'd tell you to skip it too. I'm not here to hand you a second full-time content machine.

But think about what you're doing right now instead. You sit down. You panic at the blank page. You decide everything from scratch. You second-guess it, close the laptop, and then carry the guilt around all week. And then you do the whole miserable dance again seven days later.

That is an enormous amount of time and energy, and it's invisible because it's spread out and mostly made of dread.

A system replaces all of it with: sit down, follow the structure, send.

I email more than 10,000 people every week while running everything else I run, and it's not because I have spare hours you don't. It's because I made the thing small and repeatable, so it fits the time I already have. At this point a newsletter takes me about 30 minutes on a weekend morning.

This isn't addition. It's subtraction. You're not adding a job. You're deleting the weekly agony and dropping something quick in its place.

🚪 Excuse #5: "But I Don't Even Know How to Grow My List"

This is the big one, and part of the confusion might be my fault, so let me clear it up.

I never said I'm quitting Instagram. I'm still there three to four times a week, and I still love making posts. What I said is that I refuse to let Instagram be my only doorway. For years I let one fragile little entrance become the entire way anyone found me, and that's the genuinely risky part. Instagram was never supposed to be the destination. It's one road that leads to the destination, and the destination has always been my list, the thing I own.

Growing your list is a skill, not a dead end. And I'll be honest in a way most people won't: there is no single magic tactic that works for everyone, and I don't trust anyone who swears there is.

The right mix looks a little different for you than it does for me. Mine right now is this podcast, plus getting in front of other women who serve people like mine, through collaborations and guesting instead of hoping the algorithm blesses a post. Roads that don't depend on Instagram at all.

You don't have to have your whole growth plan figured out. You just have to stop betting your entire business on one fragile doorway.

📌 Before You Talk Yourself Out of It Again

If you read all five of those and felt at least one of them lose its grip, that's the whole point.

The Newsletter System opens on September 14th, and the waitlist is open right now. Getting on it means you're first through the doors when they open (two of the three tiers have limited spots), and it's the simplest way to make sure this doesn't quietly become one more thing you meant to do.

Join the Newsletter System waitlist - hop on for first access when the doors open September 14th

🛠️ Resources & Links

• The Newsletter System waitlist — hop on for first access when the doors open September 14th

• Episode 81, my pivot episode — the full story of why I went all in on email after six years of teaching Instagram and Canva

• Flodesk — the email platform I use and recommend (my code THECREATIVEBODEGA gets you 25% off your first year)

💪 None of Your Reasons Are the Real Reason

Let's put the pile of buts back on the shelf.

"No one will read it?" The opposite is true. Your people are right there, drifting a little further every week you stay quiet.

"I don't use Flodesk?" Doesn't matter. This works anywhere.

"I'm product-based, I'm service-based?" A raised hand is a raised hand.

'I don't have time?" It's subtraction, not addition.

"I don't know how to grow my list?" That's a skill, and you don't have to figure it out alone.

None of these are the real reason you haven't started. The real reason is that you've never had a system that made the whole thing feel doable, maybe even a little fun. That's the thing I built, and it's the thing I'll walk you through step by step.

Here's what I most want you to hear: you are allowed to be the business that finally shows up in your people's inbox. Not perfectly. Not with some huge, polished plan. Just consistently, in the one place you actually own. Being the studio owner who emails, instead of the one hoping you happen to walk back through the door.

If you want in the second the doors open, get on the waitlist so you're first through: JOIN THE WAITLIST HERE!

Now tell me in the comments: which of these five excuses has been your one, the one that's been holding you back the longest? Drop it below, and if this gave a friend the nudge she needs, send it her way!