One way of keeping subscribers to your email marketing lists happy is to build a relationship with them. Not as easy as it sounds of course, and it doesn’t sound easy. One way is to be personal.

You will be familiar with those companies which have a ‘face’ on their marketing emails and perhaps on their website. It will be accompanied by a name, something friendly, Sophie perhaps. It might seem a but naff, but it works. You can go further though.

The same basics apply to all levels of being personal. The photograph in the above example should not be from stock. If it is recognised then your subscribers will feel let down. In other words, there must be a Sophie. It need not be her real name, but it should be the one she uses whilst working.

To go further you will have to expose your personal life to an extent, the degree being up to you. You could, as some have done, invent an alter ego and tell stories of their life, but the tangled web danger is obvious. People who read marketing emails, the blogs and the newsletter will remember.

If you tell a story about yourself there is an immediate intimacy. It might be distant at first but it will build. You mention something humorous about your holiday, or the time the printer stopped working and no one thought of the fuse. 

Any story needs to be relevant to the product, perhaps highlighting a particular facet. The connection can be tenuous, but it must be there. Just because something funny happened to you that morning is not sufficient. 

There are many ways of directing the story. You might want to emphasise how a webinar solved a problem for you and now you advise others on the subject, or it might be where you made a mistake and the various solutions you tried. In the first instance the danger is you might be seen as evangelical. The latter will show you as vulnerable, which is a positive, but avoid appearing a bit silly. Planning, therefore, is an essential. You want people to have confidence in your judgement.

The depth of the intimacy you allow will be limited by the medium you are using. You can go into detail on a blog, and perhaps carry it on as a series for subsequent posts. If readers are not up to speed they can always read the previous one. 

Email marketing is a bit more constrained as you need to sell, but a segmented email marketing list can allow a bit of freedom. If they subscribe to your newsletter as well as email marketing list, less detail is required.

You are opening yourself up in order to build a light relationship so keep the subject matter as general as possible. If you’ve just had a relationship end then keep it to yourself, while the joy of a success can be shared. For instance, you might well have mentioned you were studying for an examination. When your results come back, then tell them about it, good or bad.

Make your customers feel they’d like to know you.