The Business Side of Flower Farming: Email Lists & Social Media

I’m excited to start a new series about the business aspects of flower farming! Although I’ll focus on flower farming specifically, many of the strategies I’ll share are relevant across industries.

A bit about us: my husband, Steve, and I have been serial entrepreneurs since we first got married over 25 years ago. From the beginning, we shared a high-risk tolerance, jumping into new ventures and believing that self-employment offers unique security and freedom. And these days, there seems to be a higher risk in working for someone else – job security feels like a thing of the past. Our journey has shaped how we started and now run our flower farm.

Email Image Bus Post 1

EMAIL LISTS: The Most Valuable Asset You Own

Today, let’s talk about a key asset in any business: your email list. Many younger entrepreneurs (I’m looking at you, Millennials and Gen Z) view gathering customer emails as outdated – relegated to boomers. But trust me, email marketing is still incredibly powerful!

According to Forbes, there are 4.48 billion email users worldwide as of 2024, with numbers set to grow to 4.59 billion in 2025 and 4.73 billion in 2026. Let that sink in… billions of people! Forbes also reports that 81% of companies use email marketing as a core strategy, and for small businesses, 64% say it’s helped build sales and customer loyalty. Here’s a link to the article – I think you’ll find it fascinating.

From day one, we focused on collecting customer emails, which has become our strongest sales channel. While local ads and mailers are useful, they can be costly, especially on a small business budget. Email marketing, by contrast, is budget-friendly and one of the most effective tools we have.

SOCIAL MEDIA: A Helpful Tool, but Not the Only Tool

Social media is wildly popular, and many businesses rely on it as their primary marketing strategy. But here’s why it shouldn’t be your only strategy.

  1. Time & Effort: To make social media work, you need to post regularly, create engaging (often funny) videos, and constantly compete with similar content. Creating all of this myself is time-consuming, and hiring a marketer is beyond our budget. Importantly, it takes a long time to build your following.
  2. Algorithm Unpredictability: Algorithms are a mystery. Some posts do great, others… not so much. It’s exhausting to try to keep up, and you can’t guarantee that followers are even seeing your posts.
  3. Ownership: This is the big one. You don’t own your followers. If you’re hacked or locked out, you can lose your access to all of them. I’ve seen small businesses face this nightmare firsthand. One lost access to their Facebook account and waited weeks for Meta to respond. Another had their X account suspended due to a bot error. Without customer emails, how would they have connected with their audience?

Google the stats on email and social media marketing advantages and disadvantages, and you’ll see strong evidence for balancing both, but emphasizing emails. Ultimately, an email list is a business asset you control.

Coming Up Next…

In part two of this series, I’ll share some of the strategies we use to gather email addresses for our farm. Stay tuned!