Your followers are on loan. Your email list is yours
By Emma Coochin — 2026-10-07
You've probably seen the post. Someone's Facebook has been hacked, and they're asking everyone to ignore any messages from them until it's sorted. For a person, it's a hassle. For a business, it can cut off its only line to customers.
It happens to businesses more than you'd think, and not always because of hackers. Late last year, Meta suspended the Instagram account of the Forbes Bakehouse, a family bakery in central west New South Wales with about 2,500 followers. A few weeks later, the owners lost access to their Facebook account too. The manager told the ABC the bakery had been "1000 per cent reliant" on social media. They got the accounts back within a day of the ABC asking Meta about it. The usual appeal can take up to 180 days. That same year, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman helped 482 small businesses in disputes with social media companies.
That's the part people miss. You don't own your followers. You're borrowing them from Meta, or whichever platform your business posts on. Any social media platform can shut down a business account, a hacker can take it over, and getting it back can take months if you're lucky. If not, you may never regain access. If you lose access to your social media accounts, you lose every one of your followers, with no other way to communicate with them.
Regular readers will know I've said this here before. I'm saying it again because plenty of businesses are still one locked account away from losing touch with every customer they've got. Build a mailing list from day one, so you always have a reliable way to reach your customers that nobody else can switch off.
So say you've done it. There's a signup sheet on the counter, a form on your website, or a few dozen names in a spreadsheet. Now what do you send them?
One email list, three kinds of people
First, the jargon. In marketing circles, these emails are called EDMs, short for electronic direct mail. (No, not the dance music.) It just means an email a business sends to a list of people who've agreed to hear from it.
Most people think email marketing means a newsletter. That's one kind. A newsletter is a broadcast: you pick the day, and everyone on the list gets the same email. The other kinds are sequences, a short run of emails that sends itself when a customer does something, like making an enquiry or paying a deposit. You write a sequence once, and it runs for every customer after that, each on their own timing.
That's where email earns its keep. Omnisend, one of the big email platforms, crunched last year's figures from more than 150,000 online stores and found automated emails made up just 2% of what was sent, but brought in 30% of the email revenue.
Every email list holds three kinds of people: the regulars, the maybes and the brand-new customers. Each needs a different email.
The regulars: a newsletter still works when it isn't opened
The regulars get the newsletter. I know what you're thinking, because your own inbox is already full of emails from businesses, and most of them get deleted without a second look.
Here's what years on the sending side have taught me: the unopened ones still work. Every time a business's name lands in your inbox, it makes a mark on your memory, even if you swipe it away. Then the day you need what they sell, theirs is the first name you think of, before you've even started searching for alternatives. Psychologists call it the mere exposure effect: the more often you see a name, the more you tend to like it.
The research on email points the same way. Across 70 experiments with a large online ticket-selling platform, researchers from Stanford and the University of Chicago found that emailed offers lifted average spending by 37% during the promotion, and concluded the emails worked as a form of advertising.
In Clermont, it looks like this. Four real estate agents are in town. If one of them sends you a short market update every month, covering what's selling, what's sitting and what rents are doing, whose name is top of mind the day you start looking for your next rental or your next house? And when a mate asks who you'd recommend, whose name do you give them?
A good newsletter doesn't need to be long: one useful thing, one local story, what's new or seasonal, and one thing you'd like readers to do. Monthly is plenty, as long as you send it every month.
The trick to keeping it going is to stop treating it as an extra job. Pick one topic a month and let it drive everything: the newsletter, your Facebook and Instagram posts, even what you chat about at the counter. Write the newsletter first, then cut it into three or four social posts, and you've got extra content for your other channels and the same message everywhere. That consistency is what people remember. Use those posts to point followers to your signup form, too, because every follower who joins your list is one you can still reach if the account ever disappears on you.
The maybes: follow up without hounding
The maybes are people who've put their hand up but haven't bought yet. They've asked for a quote, enquired about something big, or asked you to let them know when it comes in.
You've been on the other end of this. You enquire about solar panels or a new ute, and one of two things happens: you hear nothing, or you get a phone call every second day until you stop answering.
A sales sequence sits in between. It's three to five emails over a few weeks, each answering a question the buyer's too polite to ask. What's it really going to cost? What happens if something goes wrong? Has anyone around here actually used you? What happens after I say yes? Answer those honestly, one email at a time, with proof from real local customers and the price said plainly, and each email earns a little more trust than the last. Then stop. When they buy, or tell you it's a no, the sequence ends, and make sure it does. If you keep emailing someone who's chosen not to engage, you undo every bit of trust you just built.
Written once, a sales sequence follows up every enquiry for you, even in the weeks you're flat out and would never have got around to it.
This one's for considered buys: machinery, solar, renovations, websites, holidays. If you sell pies and coffee, skip it. Nobody needs three emails to decide on a sausage roll.
The new ones: the first week decides whether they come back
This is the email almost nobody sends, and it's the one I'd build first.
Think about the last time you paid for something big. The money left your account, and then nothing. No note about what happens next, no name to call. That quiet stretch is where buyer's remorse moves in, and where a new customer decides whether they'll ever come back. It's the moment most businesses overlook, and it's where you win or lose a regular.
A first-week sequence fills that silence. It's three or four emails, and the first one lands the day they say yes.
When a business signs on with Clermont Digital, it goes like this. The day they say yes, they get access to their client portal. The agreement follows, with time to read it properly and ask questions, and no pressure to sign on the spot. Next comes a quick-start guide showing where everything lives, and the name of their project manager, who's copied on every email so there's always a person to call. Then a shared folder for their logo and photos, the project plan, and their first workshop in the diary, with a few questions to think about beforehand.
You don't need a client portal to do the same. Strip it back, and it's four moves: confirm the yes straight away, spell out the terms so there are no surprises, tell them who their contact person is, and give them their first job with a date in the diary. For a tradie, that's an email the day the quote's accepted, a clear line on what's included and when payment's due, who's coming and their mobile number, and what to have ready on the day, with a reminder the night before.
A word of warning, though. Keep these emails about the customer, not your next sale. In March, the clothing company Lululemon paid a $702,900 penalty after sending more than 370,000 emails, including order and delivery confirmations, that carried marketing but no way to unsubscribe. The regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), takes a simple view: if an email promotes anything at all, it's a marketing email, and the rules apply. Its advice is to keep service emails and sales content separate.
The Spam Act rules: permission, your name, and an easy way out
Which brings me to the rules. Steve, our Technical Director, did the homework on this part, and they're worth reading twice.
Marketing emails in Australia are covered by the Spam Act 2003, and ACMA enforces it. Three basics apply to every email you send.
1. Get permission. Only email people who've said yes, ideally by ticking a box or signing up themselves. Buying a list, or adding everyone whose business card you collected at a field day, is a quick way into trouble.
2. Say who you are. Every email has to show your business name and contact details.
3. Give them a way out. Every email needs a working unsubscribe link. You have five business days to act on an unsubscribe, and the unsubscribe link (the one the law says every marketing email must carry, usually at the bottom) has to keep working for at least 30 days after you send an email.
It stings when someone unsubscribes, but it shouldn't. A smaller list of people who want to hear from you beats a big list of people who don't. And if unsubscribing is difficult, people hit the spam button instead. Enough of those, and Gmail and Outlook start sending your emails to junk for everyone, including the people who want to hear from you.
Two more habits keep you out of the junk folder. Send from your own business address, not yourbusiness@gmail.com. Google and Yahoo tightened their rules for bulk senders in February 2024, and MailerLite will quietly swap a Gmail sender address for one of its own. Steve made the case for a proper business email address in this column last year, and this is one more reason.
And once a year, clear out the addresses that haven't opened anything in twelve months, or send one last 'still want these?' email and see who responds. That might sound like it contradicts what I said about unopened emails, but it doesn't. A name in the inbox only works if the email reaches the inbox, and a list full of dead addresses tells Gmail nobody wants what you're sending.
Your homework: one sentence, then one email
Before I write any email, I finish one sentence that keeps the whole email honest: 'get (who) to (do what), so that (what happens).' For the newsletter, that's get past customers to remember you're there, so that they come back and bring a mate. For a sales sequence, get the maybes to take the next step, so that they buy from you when they're ready. For the first-week emails, help new customers feel sure they chose right, so they stay and tell a friend.
This month, write that sentence for each of the three people on your list, then build the email you're missing. If you're not sure which, start with the first week.
Don't send any of it from your normal inbox. Gmail and Outlook aren't built for bulk sending, and trying may get your account flagged and blacklisted by the internet overlords. MailerLite's free plan covers your first 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month, handles the unsubscribes for you, and runs up to three automated sequences, which is enough for everything in this column.
If your social media accounts disappeared tomorrow, how many of your customers could you still reach? Make that number bigger this month.
Sources
1. ABC News, "Nearly 500 small businesses seek assistance in dispute with digital platforms", 19 December 2025.
2. Australian Communications and Media Authority, "Lululemon penalised $702K for spam breaches", 11 March 2026.
3. Spam Act 2003 (Cth), and ACMA's guidance for businesses on the spam rules.
4. Navdeep Sahni, Dan Zou and Pradeep Chintagunta, "Do targeted discount offers serve as advertising? Evidence from 70 field experiments", Management Science, vol. 63, no. 8, 2017.
5. Robert Zajonc, "Attitudinal effects of mere exposure", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1968.
6. Omnisend, 2026 Ecommerce Marketing Report.
7. MailerLite, "Free plan update: what you need to know", updated 2 July 2026.
8. MailerLite, "Can I use a Gmail address to send campaigns with MailerLite?"