Your best marketing list is probably sitting in your invoicing software right now. It holds a few hundred people who hired you, liked the work, and said they’d call next time. Some of them did that two years ago.
Email marketing for local businesses is mostly about those people. You write to them now and then, so when the furnace dies or the deck needs rebuilding, your name is the one they remember. It won’t bring strangers to your door. It keeps the customers you’ve already earned from drifting to whoever shows up first in a search.
Start with the list, and get permission
The list should be real customers and inquiries who agreed to hear from you. Buying one is tempting when yours looks small. Those people have never heard of you, and the email platforms don’t allow it. Mailchimp’s guidance on compliant lists says purchased lists violate its terms of use.
Where do addresses come from? Your invoicing or booking system, a sign-up box on the website, a line on the estimate form, a question at the counter. A small gift, like a seasonal checklist, helps the sign-ups along. Our guide on how to start a small business newsletter covers the first steps.
Commercial email also comes with legal rules about consent and unsubscribing. What you can prepare is a record of where each address came from and a working unsubscribe link. Your attorney should confirm what applies to your business before the first send.
Then sort the list into a few groups, using whatever your software already records, like the type of job or the year of the last one. A customer of ten years and someone who asked for a quote last week are in different places. A paving contractor, for example, might send a spring reminder to homeowners and a separate note about maintenance to property managers. Keep the groups few. Three that you actually use beat ten you don’t.
Is email still worth the effort?
Probably, for a business with a list worth writing to. In Constant Contact’s 2025 State of Small Business Marketing report, a survey of 2,500 small business decision-makers in four countries, 44 percent said email is their most effective marketing channel. Constant Contact sells email software, so weigh that with the source in mind. It’s still a large group of owners describing their own results.
The return figures are looser. In Litmus’s 2025 State of Email survey of nearly 500 marketing professionals, 35% of marketing leaders said they got back $10 to $36 for every $1 spent on email. Those are marketers worldwide reporting their own numbers, not local businesses, and 21% said they don’t measure it at all. We wouldn’t treat any of it as a forecast for a plumber in Lansdale.
What the numbers do suggest is that email is cheap next to what it can bring back. The platform doesn’t decide who sees your message, the way social media does. You choose when it goes out, and it lands with people who already know you.
What to send
If every email is a promotion, people stop opening them. A better mix is mostly useful information, with an offer now and then. Start with what customers ask you in person. What did three of them ask you this month? Each answer is a short email, and you already know it. A heating contractor who explains when to change a filter isn’t selling anything in that note, and the customer remembers who told them.
Think about three kinds of email:
- A seasonal reminder for the regulars, such as an annual tune-up or early booking.
- A short how-to that answers the question your office hears most.
- A follow-up to people who asked for an estimate and weren’t ready.
Then add what you know that a national brand doesn’t. You know when the township’s leaf collection starts, which weekend the street fair closes the main road, and what the last storm did to basements nearby. A pool company in Richboro that writes in April about opening day, and again in September about closing, reads like a neighbor. That’s because it is one.
Keep it readable on a phone. Plenty of your customers will open it between jobs, so use a short subject line, give the message one clear next step, and make the button or phone number easy to tap. Send yourself a test first and click every link. Our email marketing tips for small businesses go further on what to write.
How often, and what counts as working
Pick a schedule you can keep: monthly, once a season, or timed to your busy periods. A steady, modest rhythm beats three emails in one week followed by a year of silence. One email people want is worth more than four they delete, and a note that only says “we’re still here” doesn’t qualify as a newsletter.
Email platforms report how many people opened a message and how many clicked. We explain those numbers in our article on running email marketing for a small business. They are signals, and that’s all. What matters is whether anyone booked, called or came back, and often you’re the only one who knows, because the reply came by phone. So ask people how they found you, and write down the answers. Did the spring reminder fill a slow week? Only your own calendar can say.
What email can’t do
Email works with the people you already have. If too few new people are finding the business, that needs different work, like local search or ads, and no subject line will fix it.
It also takes time. A small list grows slowly, one email rarely changes a month, and nobody can promise how many customers a particular message will bring back.
If we handled your email marketing, we’d still need your part. That means access to the customer list, news about what’s happening in the business, photos of recent work, and word on which emails led to calls. We can write, design and send the agreed emails. We can’t know you added a service unless you tell us.
Count your list this week
Export the customer list from your invoicing software. Delete duplicates and anyone who asked not to be contacted, then count what’s left. That takes about half an hour and costs nothing. It tells you whether you have a list worth writing to or a sign-up problem to solve first.
Send us the number, whatever you’ve sent before, and what you’d like those customers to do next. We’ll tell you what we’d send first and why. Your first consultation is free, and you can get in touch with us whenever you’re ready to talk.