The most beneficial way to be successful in email marketing is to build a list of existing and potential customers who trust you enough to read your emails. They trust you and want to read your messages and they want to act on the information you provide.

When you ask existing and potential customers to agree to receive messages from you (through your opt-in form and your “ethical bribe”), you are asking them to trust you. You need to do everything you can to earn and keep their trust by setting expectations and communicating clearly with them. Do it professionally and do not abuse this trust. If you treat them like this, you will build a loyal following. Loyalty is the best way to success in business – especially in your online business!

Email marketing is the number one method of success for almost every online marketing campaign. This is how you build your business, keep your business, sell your products, and most of all, increase the value and trust in your customer’s minds.

Getting people to come to your website is one thing. Getting them to remember your website out of the dozens they visited today or the hundreds they’ll visit this week, well, that is a whole other matter.

This is why email marketing is so essential to your online marketing success. Email marketing is so easy and cost-effective to implement, it’s hard to believe some people actually mess it up! Let’s say that someone visits your website and wants to hear more from you. You have an opt-in form that allows them to subscribe to your list (usually as the result of a free gift you provide for them – the “ethical bribe” if you will). When that person subscribes, they do so tentatively. They really do not trust you at that point (unless they have been a loyal subscriber for some time).

You job is to keep these people interested and engaged with you. You want there to be an interaction between you and them so you can send them information on your products and they will trust you enough to purchase them.

The best way to do this is to simply ask them what they want to know! It allows you to correspond directly to your clients (increasing your credibility). If there is enough interest in the same question, you can use that as an indicator that there is a need in that area of your niche. This will allow you to develop a product specifically for your clients – which should trigger acceptance (which translates into sales). But I will talk more about that in a minute.

Now, when you initially load your autoresponder, you should only load perhaps two to three weeks of emails. This will allow you to continue to write daily emails so your content always seems “fresh” in the eyes of your subscribers. It also allows you to answer questions in a timely fashion and then share them with your group.

Not only will this help build your credibility, but it will get your business name in front of your list more often. You need to focus on at least one email every other day (but no more than one per day). For every email you send with an affiliate link or product offer, you need to send at least four that are content related only. This will ensure you are providing information in the eyes of your subscribers, with only a few sales oriented emails in between, instead of sales emails with only a little bit of information mixed in. Remember, we want to build credibility and trust in the eyes of our subscribers at all times!

This type of email marketing can be done in a few different ways.

As I briefly mentioned above, You can ASK THEM! What a novel idea! Actually asking the subscriber what issues they are facing and what areas they need help in. You can use a Face Book post and ask your followers there. When you answer the question, you can post a link on FB back to your website and generate traffic from FB.

You can post in a forum. There are a variety of ways to ask the question, “What areas are you having problems in that I may be able to help?” Take the responses and create blog posts, emails for your autoresponder and even training programs to provide answers to the questions. The important thing is to ASK! Then, provide the information to your current subscribers through email – free of charge! You can do this while preparing a training program, which you can then load into the autoresponder for new subscribers.



Simple Updates – When you receive a question from a subscriber or potential subscriber, provide the answer to the group. You may want to avoid using names, but you can say something like, “I received this question the other day and I think it is important enough to discuss this with everyone.” When you update your subscriber email list on things you have talked about and questions you have received, you automatically become empathetic to their views (and this builds your credibility and trust factor).

Just establish a plan to provide content emails with a few product or affiliate recommendations scattered inside (instead of the other way around) and your credibility and trust factor will increase in the eyes of your list. But you need to remember, your number one priority is to help those on your list – not to sell them!