It’s not uncommon to stumble upon articles or hear discussions about the supposed death of email marketing. Many argue that with the advent of new technologies and ever-evolving social media platforms, email marketing has lost its relevance. At the same time, you might have encountered dialogues around the difficulty it poses with holding your audience’s attention. However, these arguments fail to capture the true essence and power of email marketing.

The idea that email marketing has lost its potency couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality paints a different picture, proving that the reach of email marketing is not just alive and well, but thriving. Compared to the fleeting nature of social media trends, email marketing allows for a more stable and predictable form of communication. It bypasses algorithms that stifle your content reach and provides a direct line to your audience, right into their inboxes. It is a platform that you own, and it gives you greater control over your message.

Email marketing, like any other platform, demands creativity and a sound understanding of your audience. But once you learn how to leverage it properly, it becomes less of a challenge and more of a powerful tool to help your business grow.

Businesses can utilize email marketing to foster deeper connections and build trust with their audience. Your emails provide more than just information; they convey your brand’s personality, value proposition, and can make your audience feel like a valued part of your community. This sense of personal touch goes beyond merely promoting products or services and extends to nurturing long-lasting relationships.

Another often overlooked advantage is the access and control email marketing provides. Unlike other platforms where you’d lose your follower base if the platform went under, with email, you have direct and perpetual access to your customers. These emails belong to you, providing an invaluable safety net for your business. Moreover, your communication remains uninterrupted, regardless of changes in social platform’s policies or algorithms. Hence, you’ll always be able to stay connected with your audience, delivering them relevant content right in their inboxes instead of hoping they stumble across it on a crowded social feed.

When you or your business use email marketing to build relationships and trust with your audience, there are 3 easy things you can implement to help grow consistently.

1. Be Yourself (or Your Brand)
2. Engage Your Readers
3. Provide Easy Ways to Say Yes

Be Yourself (or Your Brand)

Email is meant to be personable. It’s a primary factor in how you build relationships and trust. As you get into writing emails and developing your email marketing strategy and content plan, remember to use your voice or your brand’s voice. People join your email list and work with you because they want to hear your perspective and your ideas, not someone else’s or some bland business entity that doesn’t have personality or doesn’t offer a unique perspective.

One of the best ways to “be yourself” in your marketing and in emails especially, is to actually use your voice. Often, when we site down to write, we over formalize or over professionalize and stop using the words and phrases we use when we talk. If you find this is something that you struggle with, stop writing your first draft and speak it instead. Trying dictating your email content to a note-taking app like Otter.ai which will create an immediate transcript for you to start with and then clean up to turn into your final email.

Engage Your Readers

Establishing and nurturing relationships in the world of email marketing hinges heavily on understanding, appreciating, and reciprocating your readers’ interests and preferences. When you invite them to share their thoughts, express their opinions, and reveal their interests, you’re not just building a database of information, but a foundation of trust and rapport. Your audience yearns to be seen, heard, and acknowledged in meaningful ways. By giving them the platform to communicate with you, you’re fulfilling that fundamental human desire for validation and appreciation. This empathetic approach not only fosters a supportive environment for more open, two-way communication but also serves as a powerful strategy for engendering loyalty. Whether it’s through surveys, feedback forms, interactive content, or simply an invitation to reply to your emails, these opportunities for dialogue epitomize the essence of personalized marketing and show your readers that they are more than just a number in your database, they’re valued members of your community.

Three easy ways to start engaging your readers in your emails are:

1. Ask them questions
2. remind them to reply to you
3. send surveys or forms that create interest segments
   • This one is important because it does 2 things, it tells your readers that you want to know what they specifically are interested in or need help with and it creates interest segmenting for you to better create helpful content, resources, and products to serve your audience.

Provide Easy Ways to Say Yes

Not all emails should be sales specific emails. But not everyone will see your message every time you share it. I always say, you should be so sick of your message because you are sharing it all the time. If you aren’t sick of your own message, it means you aren’t sharing it enough. This is important because even though email has a much higher rate of deliverability and viewing than other marketing platforms (like social media), not everyone will open every email or a reader might see an offer but not be ready right away or forget about it in the midst of their day. So you always want to make sure that you have an easy way for someone to say yes to working with you.

The easiest way to always provide a way to work with you is by adding a standard post script to your email sign off – you can use this in your regular email and in your email marketing. My favorite way to put this together is to call it: Three ways to work with me when you’re ready. Then I provide 3 tiered resources or opportunities. Usually a free resource, like a blog post or an exercise to help give a quick win, then I include a mid-tier offer, like joining my membership, and the third offer is to book a discovery call for custom 1:1 work.

By providing these 3 opportunities at these levels, I’m meeting my audience where they are at, when they are ready. It’s also something I don’t have to write every time a craft an email and I can update to highlight a new offer or opportunity whenever it makes sense. Otherwise, it’s a standard offer.

As you move forward in adapting and advancing your email marketing strategy remember to be yourself, engage your readers, and give people easy ways to say yes when they are ready to work with you.

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