Expanding and creating trusted relationships is a cornerstone of any successful business. It allows you to quickly learn about your customers and connect with them at a very personal level. Primarily, email marketing is the best marketing solution for attracting and retaining prospects. In fact, it is an effective and efficient marketing strategy that helps you build strong and meaningful relationships with customers and promotes your business growth while increasing revenue.

With proper execution, email marketing is can be a huge asset in your digital marketing efforts. In fact, email is one of the few marketing channels that help you build authentic relationships with people that keep your business alive. However, there is a technique to building relationships through email that takes time, planning and most importantly authenticity.

1. Make your emails personal

Email personalization is the process of sending an email that contains the recipients personal information, making it look the email was sent to them only. This strategy is proven to increase open rates and drive revenue. Long gone are the days of one-size-fits-all messaging. Instead, modern marketers are striving to leverage personalization in emails that feel like they are custom-made for the individual.

A common personalization tactic includes adding your reader’s name in the subject line. However, there are many strategies that go far beyond this. Generally, personalizing emails increases the likelihood of the email being read, boosts trust and increases engagement.

2. Provide relevant information

In business, content is king. When someone subscribes to your emails, they are looking for something in particular: value. If you want your subscribers to actually read what you have to say, you need to make your emails worth their time. Rather than focusing your email content entirely around self-promotion, make sure your emails reflect the needs of your customers. From the subject line to the content and images, you need to make sure you are connecting the value of your brand to your reader.

3. Make your emails brief

In the digital marketing sphere, the most popular axiom is “you only have a few seconds to capture your customer’s attention once they reach the homepage of your website.” The same applies to your email. Lengthy marketing emails are often unnecessary. While some emails may be longer than others, try to maintain an appropriate length for your message.

The goal of marketing emails is to get the reader to take an action. Therefore, if your message is too long, it is most likely that your reader will give up reading, long before they reach the call to action (CTA). If you choose to share a lengthier marketing email, make sure to include your CTA in the first or second paragraph as well as the end of the email so that you don’t lose a conversion opportunity.

4. Be consistent

Consistency is the pattern of expression that affects what people think about your company. It isn’t just something that a brand strives for, but it is an essential element to business growth and longevity. Again, being consistent is when you communicate messages in a way which doesn’t detract or wander away from the core brand strategy, values and foundation.

Basically, this means that your messages are delivered in the same tone, the logo is always used in a similar way (if any), a single typeface is used for all communications and the typography and colours are always consistent. This is because a brand has its own style which enables the target audience to recognize it and differentiate it from the competition.

5. Use different medium

As mentioned earlier, in business, content is king. However, the content has to be appealing enough to attract an individual to read your email. It has to be exciting and visualized. The truth is, if you want to strengthen your relations with your subscribers, the easiest and best way to do it would be to make your content appealing and understandable.

There is nothing wrong with text, but sometimes diversity is necessary. You might consider sending emails of short videos, images or audios just to spice things up. Monotony might make people unsubscribe.

6. Interact with your subscribers

It is very important to interact with your subscribers. Personal replies lead to stronger relationship building. Also, you can provoke personal responses by asking questions like: Hey, did you see the advertisement? How can we help you with the process? Have you tried this out? Ultimately, you will be initiating and conversation and people might even respond. Thus, creating relations.

7. Optimize your emails for all devices

Optimization for all devices is the process of ensuring that your subscribers can access your emails on all devices including mobile phones, tablets and desktops, to mention but a few. Technology is an important part of the user experience equation. In addition to providing audiences with helpful and informative content, you will want to make sure that your emails can be accessed on any device. If your emails are not mobile optimized, it might a turn off to a subscriber.

8. Segment your subscribers

The segmentation is the part of email marketing. One of the best and affordable ways to segment your subscribers in email marketing is by content preference. You could probably start by segmenting your subscribers according to gender.

Segmentation is done because not every product or service appeals to everyone. However, it might appeal to certain group of people. It is not logical to send your female subscribers male oriented advertisements. It is obvious that if the content is not relevant to that person they will delete the mail and move on. If the content is attractive, visualized and is of value then one might settle in for a closer look.

9. Run automated emails

Marketing automation frees you as a marketer from repetitive tasks and helps you pump up profits automatically. A key benefit of marketing automation is that it helps you offer customers a better experience. Marketing automation technology allows you to send behavioural triggered emails. These highly tailored campaigns get sent to customers automatically when they do certain things. This could include signing up for your emails, browsing certain products or abandoning items in their basket.

Used hand in hand with email personalization, behavioural triggered emails allow you to create a highly personalized customer experience. Building better, more personalized marketing experiences for your customers helps you make more money. Smart marketing automation makes use of machine learning to improve product recommendations over time.

Every interaction your customers make gives you more data. Over time, you can use automation to predict and shape what your customers do next, encouraging them to spend more. Thus, you can use automations to generate demand, drive conversions and increase revenue.

10. Send emails on important dates

There are several ways for brands to connect with customers to drive sales during the year, but email marketing has consistently proven to be one of the most effective. Email marketing is a highly effective method to reach people during holiday seasons or on their birthdays. This plays an important role because human beings have a tendency of wanting to feel loved and appreciated. Therefore, you can create a personalized Christmas message that is attached to one of your promotions. That way, it is easy to appeal to an individual.

In conclusion, properly executed email marketing is a huge asset in your digital marketing efforts. Not only does email marketing retain customers from good relations, it also encourages referrals, boots trust and makes you the sole solution provider in your market niche.