Is email marketing still worth doing?

That distinction matters more each year. Businesses that built audiences on platforms have repeatedly discovered that organic reach fell, that a policy change removed a format they depended on, or that an account was suspended by an automated system with no accessible appeal. None of those can happen to a list you exported and hold.

The performance case is also strong, though it is worth being careful with the widely quoted return figures, which come from surveys of businesses already invested in the channel and are not a prediction for anybody starting. What is more reliable is the comparison against social reach for equivalent effort, where email consistently reaches a far higher proportion of the people you intended to reach.

Where it genuinely works for a first year business is with people who already know you. Past customers, enquiries that did not convert, and anybody who asked to hear from you. That audience is small, warm, and reachable, and a monthly message with something useful in it is the cheapest retention and referral mechanism available. It works considerably less well as an acquisition channel, which is where businesses tend to point it and then conclude it failed.

The two things that determine whether it works are consistency and usefulness. A list emailed once a quarter has forgotten who you are by the time you write. A list emailed weekly with nothing to say produces unsubscribes. Monthly, with one genuinely useful thing in it, sustained for two years, outperforms both, and the sustaining matters more than the frequency you choose.

Start collecting addresses before you have anything to send, because the list takes time to build and cannot be assembled retrospectively. A signup on your site, an offer at the point of purchase, and the habit of asking will produce a few hundred subscribers over a year. Businesses that wait until the newsletter is ready begin from zero at the moment they are ready to send.

Permission is not optional and the rules are stricter than most people assume. Somebody must have taken an action to join, and a business card, a delegate list, or a purchased file is not that. Purchased lists are the most common cause of both compliance exposure and deliverability damage, and the second is usually worse because complaints from people who never asked will harm your sending reputation for months.

Measure it by replies and by revenue rather than by open rates, which have become unreliable since mail providers began pre loading images on behalf of users. What tells you whether the list is working is whether people respond, whether they buy, and whether anybody unsubscribes in numbers after a particular message. Those are all visible and none of them depend on a metric that now measures something other than attention.

Then export a copy monthly to storage you control. The list is one of the few assets in a small business that cannot be rebuilt, and holding it only inside a platform account means an account problem becomes a business problem.

Decide what the list is for before building it, because a list with no purpose produces messages with nothing in them. For most first year businesses the honest answer is staying present with people who already know you, so that when their need arises you are the name they remember. That is a modest objective and it is achievable, and it produces considerably better results than treating a small list as a sales channel and sending offers to people who were not ready to receive them.