Why email still works for small businesses, and why we built OpenPromote

You have news to share: a new collection, a sale, an event, new opening hours. So you post it on your page and wait for people to come.

Most of them never see it.

The post most of your followers miss

Social media decides who sees your posts, and for business pages the answer is: not many. Socialinsider studied more than 870,000 brand posts and found that a Facebook page post reaches, on average, about 1 in every 100 followers. Small pages do a little better, at around 4 in 100 (Socialinsider).

So if 2,000 people follow your page, your post may reach somewhere between 25 and 90 of them. Everyone else chose to follow you, and still won't hear about your sale.

Email goes straight to the inbox

Email works differently. When someone gives you their email address, your message goes to their inbox. No feed picks a few people for you. And the list is yours: if a platform changes its rules tomorrow, you still have a way to reach your customers.

Almost everyone has an email address. About 4.5 billion people used email in 2024, and that is expected to reach close to 5 billion by 2028 (The Radicati Group). You need one to set up a phone, to shop online and to sign up for almost anything.

People also say email is how they want to hear from shops. In a 2025 survey of 3,180 shoppers in ten countries by the messaging company Sinch, email was the channel most people wanted brands to use, ahead of websites and social media ads (Sinch).

Personal beats "Dear Customer"

People also expect to be treated as people, not as a list. McKinsey found that 71% of people expect companies to talk to them personally, and 76% get frustrated when they don't (McKinsey).

An email that starts "Hi Ayesha" and mentions the shawl she bought last winter feels like it came from someone who knows her. "Dear Customer" feels like it came from a machine.

So why don't more small businesses use email?

If email works this well, why do so many shops, schools, clinics and organisers only post on social media? It usually comes down to three things:

• Writing takes time. A good email needs a clear subject, the right details and a friendly tone. When you run a business, that is an evening you don't have.
• Personal emails take even longer. Writing a separate email for each of your 50 best customers is a whole day's work.
• Mistakes are scary. A wrong price, a wrong date or a misspelled name goes to everyone at once, and you can't take it back.

Many email tools are also made for big marketing teams, with monthly fees and dozens of settings, when all you wanted was to tell your customers about Saturday's sale.

Why we built OpenPromote

OpenPromote started with one question: how can a small business reach the people who already want to hear from it, without hours of writing or a big marketing tool?

Our first answer is EmailCurator, an AI email writer. You tell it your news in a sentence or two, and it writes the email for you, in whichever of three ways fits:

1. The same email to everyone. One clear email for your whole list: news, a sale, an event.
2. An email with personal fields. Each person's name and details, filled in from your list.
3. A personal email for each person. A separate email for everyone, written from your notes about them.

Before you see a draft, EmailCurator checks it against strict rules. Prices, dates and numbers have to come from what you told it, and anything new is fixed or flagged for you. No "[Name]" left behind, no guessed names, and nothing in capitals or rows of exclamation marks that looks like spam. If it's not quite right, just ask for a change.

When it's ready, you send it from your own email account: Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail or your business address. Your customers see your name, not ours. We send at a careful pace, about 12 emails a minute and never more than 500 from one account in a day, to keep your account in good standing.

There is no subscription. You pay once for credits, and they never expire.

Since we opened, our customers have made more than 200 sends from their own accounts, and EmailCurator now writes in all three ways.

What you'll find on this blog

This is where we'll share what we learn about reaching people by email, in plain words:

• How-to guides: writing a sale email, inviting people to an event, building a list of people who want to hear from you, and staying out of the spam folder.
• Ideas and examples you can use for your own emails.
• What's new at OpenPromote, including our next product, social media posts, coming to the same account.

We'll keep it useful, short and honest.

One small step today

You don't need a big list to start. Ten customers who asked to hear from you can be worth more than a thousand followers who never see your posts.

• Take a look at EmailCurator and its three ways of writing.
• Follow the step-by-step guide to send your first email.
• Or subscribe below, and we'll send you the next post by email. It's only fair.