There’s a voice in the online business world that tells you every email you send needs to have an offer. Every email must sell something. Every open is a transaction waiting to happen. And for a long time, I believed it.
Then I became a beekeeper.
The first time I opened a hive by myself, I expected honey. I’d read bits and pieces about beekeeping for years before I ever touched a frame, and the picture in my head was always the same: golden comb, dripping sweetness, the reward for the work. But that’s not what happened that first visit. What happened was that I stood in front of a box full of fifty thousand insects and had absolutely no idea what I was looking at.
My fellow beekeeper and I did our best to figure things out. I remember standing next to a hive cheering because we had located the queen. “See her? She’s the queen.” We would watch as they were building comb and marveled at how calm they are or grumpy depending on the day. In the first year that I helped my friend tend her hives, we didn’t intend to take a single drop of honey. We were rewarded by some comb honey in the end, but for the most part, we just looked, learned, and left.
Beekeeping has taught me something that has shaped the way I think about email marketing.
You don’t harvest honey from a hive you haven’t tended.
If you show up to a beehive demanding honey every time you visit, you will be doing a disservice to the colony. If you show up consistently — sometimes to feed, sometimes to check, sometimes just to be present — the hive thrives. And the honey comes, in its own time (around the 2nd year), and in great quantities.
Your email list is the same.
The myth of the “money email”
Every guru with a course has told you that the purpose of your list is to make money. They’re not wrong. That’s part of it, but it’s not all of it, and treating every email like a transaction is the fastest way I know to burn a list out.
I’ve watched it happen to other business owners. They launch. They send three sales emails in a row. Their audience stops opening. Their unsubscribes climb. They panic, send more offers, and wonder why their list of ten thousand feels colder than the cold list of two hundred they started with.
The problem isn’t that they’re selling too much. The problem is that they’re never showing up as a person.
Facts tell. Stories sell. That phrase has been bouncing around marketing circles for years (if not decades), and it’s true, but it’s only half the truth. The other half is that stories also keep. Stories keep people subscribed. They keep people opening the emails. They keep people rooting for you long after they’ve forgotten your offer.
What I send when I’m not selling
When I sat down and looked at my own emails, I realized something. The emails that actually drove sales weren’t the ones with the offer in them. They were the emails that came two weeks earlier, or three months earlier. They were the emails where I told a story about my kids, or showed a picture from the bee yard, or wrote about what I learned at scouts that week.
Those emails had no call to action, no button, and no link to anything. But they did something far more important, they let me be a person, and they let others get to know me.
And people buy from people.
That’s not a cute saying. It’s a measurable truth. When someone reads three of your personal stories and feels like they know you, like they’ve sat across the kitchen table from you. They will buy from you before they ever need what you’re selling. Not because you tricked them, but because they trust you.
I think about this often in the context of my own buying. I buy from people I feel like I know. I’ll pay more for something from someone whose emails I’ve been reading for six months, even if a stranger is offering the same thing for less. That’s not weakness.That’s how human beings are wired. We do business with people. Not brands. Not funnels. Not logos. People.
The three emails every list actually needs
If you’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, but what do I actually send?” Here’s the framework I use. It’s simple, and contains three kinds of emails. That’s it.
1. The Story Email. This type of email is all about connection with no offer or pitch. It’s an email that’s just you, telling a story about something that happened to you this week, or something you learned a long time ago, or a moment that changed how you see your business. The point is to be a person, not a brand. Send these often.
2. The Teaching Email. Give away your best stuff. Not your okay stuff; your best stuff. The thing you’d normally charge for. Give away the framework, the checklist, the five steps. The paradox of email marketing is that the more you give, the more you eventually sell. Teaching builds trust faster than anything else I know.
3. The Offer Email. This is the only one with a button. Send it sparingly and only after the other two have done their work. If your last ten emails have all been offers, your audience has been conditioned to scroll past you. If your last ten emails have alternated between stories and teaching, your offer will land like a gift from a friend, not a pitch from a stranger.
Most business owners I’ve coached have this ratio completely backward. They send ten offer emails for every one story. The result is a list that opens out of habit for a while, and then stops opening altogether.
I send maybe one offer email for every four or five story and teaching emails.
The long game nobody wants to talk about
Here’s the part that doesn’t fit on an Instagram carousel.
Building an email list that actually buys from you takes longer than the gurus say it will. It takes longer than you’d like. It takes showing up on Tuesdays when nobody’s opening, and writing about your daughter’s soccer game on a Thursday, and sending a quiet little note about a book you read on a Sunday morning when you’re sure no one’s paying attention.
Someone is always paying attention.
The people who eventually become your biggest fans (your superfans), the ones who buy every launch and tell their friends about you. Those people didn’t show up on launch day. They showed up six months earlier, when you were sending emails with no offer and no strategy beyond “I want them to know me.” They were watching and they were waiting. And when you finally had something to sell, they were the first ones there.
That’s the hive. You tend it, you feed it, and you sit with it in the cold months when nothing looks like it’s growing. And then one summer day, you open the box and there’s more honey than you ever thought possible.
What I’d tell you if we were sitting across from each other
If you’re a mom building a business and you feel guilty every time you send an email that doesn’t have an offer in it — stop. That guilt is misplaced. That email you almost didn’t send because “it wasn’t selling anything”? That’s the email that’s actually building your business.
Send the story about the bees. Send the lesson you learned at scouts. Send the thing your kid said at breakfast that made you laugh. Send the rambling Sunday email that doesn’t go anywhere in particular.
People don’t remember your offers; they remember you. And the more they remember you, the more they’ll trust you, and the more they’ll trust you, the more they’ll buy when the time is right, without you ever having to chase them.
Facts tell. Stories sell. But the part nobody says out loud is that the stories keep selling for years after you forget you told them.
So go tend your hive. The honey will come.