You mailing list is stuck. You feel that your readers are getting bored with your content. Well, if you ask me what’s the most important thing in email marketing, that’s working on your reputation to focus on relationship building within your readers.

I’m sure that when you receive an email from a relative, your partner or a friend, you just stop doing what you do to read it. That’s because you know that whatever the email is about, either you’re going to like or it’s something important. You know the sender of the email and probably what they have to tell you. That’s exactly what we have to aim at.

• Why focusing on your reputation is important?

Your mission here must be that every time that your readers get a notification with your name/the name of your brand, they stop what they’re doing to read it. And it goes without saying, that this must be worth it for them.

But they’re not going to do that from the very beginning. Why? Because…

• They don’t know you.
• They don’t trust you.
• They don’t really know what you’re going to do for them.
• They don’t know what you want them to do with your emails.

And we need to change this if you want to start building effective relationships with your readers.

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Relationship building isn’t hard if you do it right

Now you’ll be wondering what you can do to achieve this. Well, in a nutshell, you have to do want your audience want you to, what they like. Easier said than done, right?

I’d recommend doing a brainstorm at this point. What would you like to receive in your inbox? Why should my audience stop doing what they do to read your email? I don’t send a single email campaign without answering these questions first.

Tips to build effective relationships with your audience

A reader is like a boyfriend/girlfriend. If you don’t offer what he wants, he’s going to leave sooner or later. And we want them to stay as long as possible, right? Once you have done your brainstorm, you’ll be ready to implement these tips.

1. Give consistently, receive occasionally

I’m sure that you have come across with someone that promised the most exclusive and quality content, and then all you could find in your inbox were offers and “buy now” buttons.

Don’t ask your audience to buy your products or hire you from the very beginning. They don’t know you, why should they do that?

Instead, you should work on your reputation. Add value with every single piece of information that you send. After, let’s say, three very valuable emails, a reader will be able to identify your emails in his inbox as relevant.

Only once that you have worked on your reputation, you’ll be able to send them an offer to buy your products or services. They will know and trust you more, so they will think: “if he can give me all this valuable information for free, what will he offer if I buy his services?”

Again, the key is to seduce with your content.

2. Focus on quality, not quantity

I’m sure that you have also come across with someone that was showing off about how many people are subscribed to his mail list. These people are hilarious, aren’t they?

The objective of email marketing is to make all your subscribers do an action, not collect emails of random people that won’t care about you later on. That should be clear from the very beginning.

Now, we have to work on building a mail list, but also on improving the statistics of this list.

For example, imagine that A has 20,000 subscribers but during the last campaign he only got a click rate of 5%, whereas B has 5,000 subscribers but with a click rate of 50%. That’d mean that A made 1,000 subscriber do an action, whereas B made 3,500 people do an action with 75% less subscribers than A.

So, who’s doing better? B. Wrong answer. We don’t know.

Again, imagine that those A’s 1,000 subscribers spent £50 each (£50,000 in total), whereas B’s 3,500 subscriber spend £10 each (£35,000 in total).

Conclusion: define what quality is for you (number of sales, visits to your website, etc.) and analyse your results. And this leads us to…

3. Define your objectives as much as you can

Every single email campaign that you send must have an objective behind. If you don’t focus your campaign and keep adding different call-to-actions, your readers will get lost and leave without doing any action.

Define the main objective of your campaign and the results that you want to obtain. Did you achieve them? Great! Didn’t you achieve them? Step back and analyse what didn’t work.

4. Answer your audience’s questions

If you want people to open your emails, you have to send them the information that they really want to read. If you have a question in mind, and suddenly you got an email in your inbox answering this question, obviously, you’re going to open it.

Again, you should know you audience as well as you know your best friends to do so. And this includes the tone of your emails. Copywriting plays an essential role in email marketing.

Don’t forget to segment your lists to be as specific as possible with your emails. Don’t send the same campaign to everyone if half of them aren’t going to be interested in it.

5. Meet the expectations

Writing a good email to increase your list isn’t enough if there’s no follow-up. You need to feed your audience with quality content and you have to meet your audience’s expectations. If you risk the quality of your campaign, your readers will consider clicking the it-who-must-not-be-named button (aka “unsubscribe”).

If you promise quality content, make sure that you never disappoint. If you promise a monthly email, set a remainder just in case. Whatever your promise, make sure that you fulfil it at the end of every campaign.

6. Set a routine

If your readers know that when they receive your email, it’s because you’ve published a new blog post, they’ll go directly to the blog to read it. If they know that you want them to share your content, they’ll be more likely to do it.

However, if some times you ask them to share the content on twitter, and the following week you ask them to go to Instagram to check your pictures, you’ll end up confusing them.

Finally, be patience. People must know you to start trusting you and you’ll have to gain their trust over the time and being consistent. However, investing time in building relationships with your audience is essential in the long run for your business.

What about you? How do you build relationships with your audience? I’d love to hear from you!

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