You’ve got mail!
While we may not hear those iconic words after the scratchy dial-up tones of accessing the internet, email is still one of the best and cheapest ways to reach your customers as a small business in 2025.
Anyone with an email is familiar with email marketing. If you’ve given your email address to any big business or nonprofit (including Rising Tide), you have received an email from them. Businesses use email marketing for one reason: it works.
To get started, you need a few things: a marketing email platform, a list of emails and content.
Platforms:
There are many email marketing platforms available. From Constant Contact (a Rising Tide favorite) to MailChimp and HubSpot. Some website platforms, such as Wix and Squarespace, have an email marketing platform included or available for use for an additional charge.
Whatever you use, ensure you are comfortable using the program, managing email lists, and creating emails. You can find many tutorials on YouTube that will take you step-by-step to create an email.
Getting Email Addresses:
Building an email list is not as hard as you think. There are many ways to collect email addresses from clients and customers. The most important thing is to remember you need consent from the customer to send to their email.
You should also provide an opt-out, in case some people don’t want to receive a promotional email from you. Add a comment box to the opt-out so you can track why people are opting out of receiving your emails.
You can collect email addresses when people book an appointment, upon checkout (either online or in-person), on your website through a pop-up, and by a simple sign-up sheet at your register or at an event. Keeping track of where you get the most email addresses could help you decide which method to focus on for the future.
Content:
When you have your platform and email addresses, it’s time to turn to content. Your marketing email should be an extension of your current marketing efforts. If your shop has different themes for each month or season, you can use that to create the content for your marketing email.
Ideas such as product features, special events and sales, holidays or employee or customer spotlights can be ideas for content.
You can send as many or as few emails as you’d like. A good place to start is sending an email at least once a month. If you’re promoting products or a special add-on to services for September, you want to send the email at the end of August, especially if people must make an appointment.
Effectiveness
According to a survey conducted by Litmus, a marketing company in Boston, email marketing saw a $10-$36 return on investment (ROI) for every $1 spent.
How do you know if it’s working? Well, asking customers for their feedback, either in person or through email, is a good way. Tracking sales after emails go out is another way.
The other is to look at the analytics. A good practice is to research open rates and click-through rates for your specific industry to compare your emails. Just keep in mind, you will never see a 100 percent open rate (unless you have one person on your list and it’s you). But knowing what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are will help you understand how your email is doing.
Keep track of these numbers on a spreadsheet to see what got the most opens and clicks throughout the year, which will help you adjust your marketing for the following year. If something worked this year, you could try it again the following year, and the opposite is true, too.
From there, test how well people respond to your emails through A/B testing, which is a method used to compare two versions of an email to determine which one performs better based on a specific goal, like open rates, click-through rates or conversions.
Email marketing can help make your business more visible, and it can help keep you top of mind with your customers.
If you need help creating content or need to create a template for your emails, reach out to our marketing coordinator at Rising Tide by emailing RTCLF-Marketing@caclv.org.
