We’ve mentioned personalising your email marketing campaigns before on these pages, but there is a further step you can take that can provide a number of benefits. It requires careful planning.

To be personal means opening the details of your business, or even private, life to a limited extent. It is a big step and not one that should be taken lightly. 

You might have found a way of using a product in an effective, but unusual way. You could coldly state the new method on a blog or in an email marketing campaign. Such new ideas are read. However, there is another way of using the experience. 

If you tell the story, perhaps of how an accident meant that you were unable to follow the old method and so had to come up with something revolutionary. By mentioning your problems your readers will relate to you and sympathise. This is a big step beyond merely putting your name under a photograph on the website. 

You could relate your experiences when setting up your first course. The errors you made, the difficulties you had to overcome and finally the flowering of your vision of making learning an exciting experience.  

There are some things to avoid, the first being not to make up any detail. It is all too easy to say something at a later date which will reveal you as a liar to those with long memories. The second is not to show yourself as someone who is a bit of an idiot, after all you want customers to trust your assessments of your products. 

Conversely don’t come over as a know-it-all. This is the way to put off your readers. As important is not using the pages as a confessional.

If you run a newsletter then you can gradually build up the relationship, and the same goes for a blog. You can, via sectioning your email marketing list, keep it personal on your campaigns without having to go into detail as they will know what your are referring to.

Whilst it is more difficult to reveal yourself on marketing emails, the drip, drip, drip method works.

Keep it honest, keep it relevant and keep it interesting.