Is Email Marketing Still Relevant?

Hello friends,

I know what you’re thinking: is email marketing still relevant?? With a daily bombardment of email advertisements from scores of brands, and about 10,000+ unread emails in your inbox, its easy to think that email marketing may be an approach that has gone the way of phone books and newspaper ads. But au contraire, email marketing remains on of the most effective marketing channels, even in 2025, with mature lists returning an average ROIs of 3600% (that’s $36 earned for every $1 invested in email marketing).  

Despite the overwhelm of that 10,000+ unread messages in the inbox, 88% of email users check their email daily. And despite the common fears around soliciting unsubscribes due to frequent email content, the average unsubscribe rate is only .1%. 

Email marketing was one of my original tasks at my former marketing agency, and I have to say, I was amazed at how successful email marketing can be for driving up sales. Not only is it a great tool to announce new offerings, run promotions, or share brand news, but it also is an amazing way to reinforce your branding, cultivating your vibe and sharing it with those who are seeking to soak of more of it. 

Email marketing may not seem like an obvious choice, but it works especially well for certain kinds of businesses, and in certain situations.

Below we’ll cover the top five senarios in which email marketing truely excels as a marketing channel for therapists and holistic health practitioners. 

1. Educate your clients about your craft, especially when you work in a niche modality

For my audience, this is probably the BIGGEST benefit to starting an email marketing strategy. Quite simply, it’s an easy way to periodically dispense educational information about your modality to your interested future clients. This is especially important if you’re on the frontlines of a new modality, practicing a cutting edge therapy, or doing ancient work that has been lost from popular consciousness over the past hundred years of “modernization”. Examples of “cutting edge” practices can include somatic therapy, postpartum doula, death doula, sacred song circles, past-life-regression hypnosis, you name it! If when you share your title you commonly get the response “what’s that?”, then this educational-style of email marketing can benefit your audience. 

Why does dispensing bite-sized bits of information via email work? Because you’ve trained for years in your current craft, but your ideal client may know relatively little about your modality. Which can make initiating services a tough sell. When people are faced with unknowns, they want to resolve ambiguity by seeking more information. Your goal is to be there with that information, sharing it in digestible, bite-sized pieces, at a frequency that serves as a gentle nudge to encourage them to jump on over to your website to learn a little more, and then take a further step by encouraging them to make actual contact with you.

2. Announce a frequently updated schedule of offerings, seasonal workshops, and one-off retreats or collaborations

For the practitioner who is always offering something new, email marketing is one of the BEST ways to announce and gather signups for your offerings. Of course, social is likely to play a vital role in promotion of these events and workshops as well, but an email announcement may get to a client when they have more time and attention to click over to your site to learn more about your upcoming workshop. If they have more time to intake the info (because they’re not just on IG while in line at the grocery store), then they’re more likely to check their calendar, do a quick cost-benefit-analysis, and pull out their wallet to reserve a spot. And wow, how convenient that your email is two clicks away from your booking page! Emails with intentional CTA's to directly link to your event page or booking platform is EXACTLY what I help clients with in The Craft Design Portal's email packages.

In marketing, intentional timing of intentional communication for a specific purpose is incredibly important. For instance, if you want people to share a funny post on a social channel, that’s great content for social media, because people’s primary goal is staying on the platform (and that’s what the algorithm optimized for). If the goal is getting someone to visit your website and make a booking, then that form of communication should come in at a time when your audience has a bit more mental space to make a financial decision. Email may be the best gateway channel for this kind of content. 

3. Communicate with clients outside of social media

I feel like half of people are thinking “well, duh” and the other half are thinking “who is that client that's not on social??”. Here’s my take on this point: not all your clients will be active on the social media channels you’ve invested in. This is true, no matter what age demographic your target audience is. As a practitioner, your offering ultimately lives outside of social media spaces.

This means eventually someone has to move past social media engagement to participate in your services. Which means that social media is just one path to center, and it’s highly unlikely that ALL your clients will be walking that same path to get to you, especially as there are multitude of different social platforms in existence. Obviously, you know your audience better than I do, and some of you will have an audience more grounded in one channel over another. Conversely, some of you will attract clients across a range of ages, interests, and other demographic categories, inclusive of a variety of social channels they may or may not participate in. But no matter how many of your clients may or may not be on Instagram, I bet 99% of them have an email that they check at least once a month. 

Email marketing serves as a unifying channel, which is partly why it is easy to overlook entirely. We tend to write-off email just as we’d write off a billboard or a flyer on a bulletin board, but in actuality, those often-overlooked communication channels do work for driving sales and inquiries. Why? Because they present themselves to a wide range of people, casting a broad net to capture interested leads. 

The beauty of email marketing is that it is a billboard in a digital format, that you can click on to learn more or take action. Instead of your client driving past a billboard three times a week, you are driving your content into their inbox at a chosen cadence. And when it’s easy to view content, have your curiosity sparked, AND simply click to learn more? The low barrier to entry will drive up your booking rates.

To sum up on this point, not all customers use your chosen social channels, but they likely all have email. Not all followers (or non-followers) will see your posts, but they will get your email to their inbox. Not everyone checks their inbox daily, or opens all received messages, but if you hone-in your timing and increase the relevance and value of your emails, they will get opened by the people who are ready to learn more about your craft and your offerings. 

4. Reinforce your branding

Email lends itself well to being a visual channel, giving you a regular opportunity to reinforce your branding. From my personal experencince creating email marketing campaigns, I’ve seen that shorter, purpose-driven emails tend to work best. Why?

When content is broken up across multiple emails, there are more opportunities for a client to see your message. These are also opportunities for them to absorb your intentional branding choices. You’re communicating information in your email, but you’re also subliminally communicating your brand’s vibe in the process. This is all the more reason why intentional design choices in email template creation are super important, and why it can be beneficial to have a designer get you set up with branded templates that you LOVE to use. You’re sharing your vibe with your people, and sometimes that alone is enough to motivate them to choose you out of others practicing in a similar space.

5. Nurture your existing customers

Ending on a biggie here: email is great for capturing leads and converting them into actual clients, but it also excels at driving up customer lifetime value by nurturing your existing clients. Customer lifetime value is defined as the amount of money your average "customer" generates over their “lifetime” of being your client. For instance, if you’re a therapist at $100 / session and your average client meets once a week for 6 months, you’re looking at an average lifetime value of $2400 for each client gained. If your email is the final push to convert them from interested observer to active client, then you’re on-track to getting that $2400 in the bank.

There’s a saying in marketing: it's cheaper to keep a client than to buy a new one. Why?

Because you have to invest a lot in getting someone’s attention, providing the right gateway into your marketing funnel, and then using the right approach to convince them that they should take additional steps to engage with your services. Once you’ve done the work to earn your client, the task becomes to keep them. If they LOVE your services, this shouldn’t be too hard, especially with the help of appropriately-timed email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing is a great way to gather further sales from your existing client base, because they already know you and love your work. They just need the gentle reminders when new services or classes or workshops are offered. Its a lot easier to say “Hey, I’m doing another tea circle, this one to celebrate the Summer Solstice” than to say “Hey I’m so-and-so, a practicing neopagan with ideologies of X, Y, Z, and offerings A, B, C, and a personal history with XYZ. Oh and I’m doing a summer solstice celebration this June!”

You catch my drift. You already have the attention of your satisfied clients. As you continue to promote offerings that resonate, they’ll continue to support you. And you can even support them by offering special promos to your email list, like extended booking windows, early-bird discounts, and exclusive events to your most-faithful fans.

Lastly, email marketing is a brilliant way to win back former clients. You know - the ones that were your regulars before they spent a summer in Bali and then had a baby, and you know how life just happens…

Our interests change, our attention shifts. That’s all part of our individual growth process. Sometimes a gentle nudge can be really supportive in reminding us about the availability of practices that we used to really love. Maybe they haven’t been to ANY yoga class in over a year. But maybe something has shifted recently, and they’re craving a return to a regular practice, and your email announcing your new aerial yoga class is just the ticket to get them back in the studio.

Email list segmentation can be a great help for tailoring announcements to certain groups of your clients. For instance, you may want to offer the early-bird discount to your regulars, but perhaps there’s a special class pack promo that you created for the former customers you’re winning back.

In Conclusion...

There are endless possibilities for how you can structure your email marketing strategy, and how you can nurture your existing clients while growing your audience. Email marketing serves as an often-overlooked channel that continues to drive up ROIs by unifying announcements across a diverse target audience, and serving as a gentle nudge to get your people to learn more about you and your offerings. Email marketing reinforces your branding, educates your prospective clients, and makes it super easy for your people to take the next step in signing up for your services.

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I’m happy to talk through all things email marketing with you in an email marketing strategy call, which is included in all my Email Marketing Configuration packages.

If you’re curious to see what's included in my email marketing packages, pop on over to my Services page to learn more. 

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