The Challenges of Email Marketing in Holistic Mental Health

Transitioning a business to a new brand and focus can be an exciting but challenging endeavor, especially when it comes to marketing efforts like email campaigns. Kaela Rae Vance LPCCS, LLC recently underwent a transformation into Teal Saguaro Wellness, Inc., shifting its focus to from strictly mental health, to a broader holistic wellness practice.

When transitioning to a holistic wellness practice, we expanded our content to include a holistic approach that considers the whole person - body, mind, spirit, and emotions - in the pursuit of health and wellness. This approach recognizes the interconnectedness of these aspects and emphasizes addressing each one for overall well-being. Holistic health understands that physical health is influenced by psychological, emotional, and spiritual factors, and vice versa. Therefore, it focuses on treating the whole person rather than just symptoms, often using a mix of conventional and alternative therapies, lifestyle changes, and self-care practices to promote health.

Holistic wellness is often dismissed as "pseudoscience," as it includes practices and beliefs not always endorsed by mainstream "healthcare". It promotes a natural approach to health, which can conflict with industries profiting from conventional healthcare. By emphasizing self-care, mindfulness, and alternative therapies, holistic wellness challenges established healthcare narratives and industries reliant on pharmaceuticals. Shadow banning holistic wellness content can be a strategy to control health discourse, protect profits, and maintain the current healthcare paradigm.

Despite skepticism, holistic wellness has ancient roots, drawing from traditional systems like traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and Indigenous healing. These practices prioritize holistic health, recognizing the interconnectedness of body, mind, and spirit, and emphasize lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, and mental well-being, demonstrating their effectiveness across generations.

Prior to our transition to Teal Saguaro Wellness at the new year, our business enjoyed a healthy, industry-average open rate for our email marketing campaigns. As seen in these email analytics screenshots here, in December, our email campaign, sent from www.kaelaraevance.com, was distributed to 7,014 subscribers, and opened by 1,643 subscribers; 23% open rate. One month earlier, our email was opened by 2,616 subscribers; 37% open rate. Our email analytics fluctuated throughout the year, from week to week, but in general, this was the range we observed for the year 2023. Fast forward to 2024, post transition to Teal Saguaro Wellness. As seen in the screenshot here, we're now lucky to see a 6% open rate for our emails.

There's many variables that go into what happens to an email after it is sent to a recipient - delivered to their inbox, delivered to spam, dropped, returned, etc. There's many reasons why an email might be flagged as spam. One might suggest that maybe our Teal Saguaro emails "look extra spammy". However, our email sender address is formatted similarly to what it was prior to our business changes, or email content is formatted similarly, our list of subscribers is the same, and so on. You be the judge, what's the difference between these emails sent last November, last December, and this February? This sudden drop in email deliverability, coinciding with our business transition this past January to a holistic wellness oriented business, accompanied with no other reasonable explanation, leads us to believe that our emails are being shadow banned by some email providers due to the holistic wellness related content that we began publishing.

There has been a longstanding attack on holistic wellness, largely because it poses a fundamental threat to the current healthcare structure, and Teal Saguaro Wellness is just one of the latest victims. We will, however, continue to promote all effective means for improving one's well-being. We invite you to join us, call today to chat, 614-647-HELP.