Build Great Business Relationships Using an Email Marketing Strategy

We have all heard that you need to build relationships with your prospects if we want them to buy from you. Studies have shown that qualified prospects require 3-7 contacts from a company before they will respond with a purchase. The main driver of this need is that the prospects want to feel a level of trust in their relationship with the company. Having an effective email marketing strategy allows you to develop a personal presence with your subscribers.

So the question then becomes, what is the best process to do this? We know when you use an email service provider (ESP) that you can send messages via an auto-responder or broadcast. A lot of people choose to use an auto-responder because they are looking for a “hands off” approach with their subscribers. But, the way that I see it, if you want to build a truly quality relationship with your customers and/or prospects, then don’t use the auto-responder as a relationship builder. The auto-responder sequence puts out “fake” emails to your subscribers and they know it. How are you going to build a great relationship if you are not putting in the effort to do it?

So what should you do, broadcast everything? You mean you want me to do work to build my relationships? YES!!! Why would you think anything else? Now an auto-responder has its place in communicating with your subscribers, but it should be used sparingly and probably only to give your subscribers the free thing that they signed up for. Other than that, don’t use it.

So if you buy into this, how should you use your email marketing strategy to broadcast your emails? If you look into the mind of why someone is checking their email, it's not because they're making sure that they got part 2 of their 7 day eCourse on cat juggling, right. They want to know what's happening over at their brother’s house, what sort of funny jokes have been forwarded to them, what's going on with the gossip you were talking about earlier or whatever right. It's all about relationships. So rather than trying to fake it with a robot, you want to build real relationships. So as a current event comes up or something that's happening in your niche just send out a broadcast to everyone and talk to them about it.

Take your email marketing strategy and make sure that you focus on building “real” relationships. Put in some work. It’s not that hard. When something hits your fancy, send it out to your list. People want information as it happens, not some generic info about something that happened last month or last year (which would be part of an auto-responder sequence). Work on your list and put a little effort in to maintaining the relationships. Simple as that. Keep it real and the relationships that you build will be stronger than ever and correspondingly you will see you sales increase too.