Imagine that you’re a single and one day you meet someone in a park on a sunny summer day. You start talking, and if you’re lucky, as the relationship develops, he or she asks you out. Gradually, you start to know each other better and when there is a match, the relationship might become a steady one. In email marketing it’s the same. Someone notices your email newsletter, gets interested and takes a first step in what could become a steady relationship but is merely a flirt now.
For an email marketer, a subscription form is like an invitation for a date. However, what do we still see very often? In the subscription form, we have to tell everything about ourselves: our name, the company we work for, our gender, phone number, address, the number of kids we have, our shoe size, what we eat for breakfast, etc.
Now, let’s go back to that park on a sunny summer day. You sit on a bench and this interesting looking man or woman comes and sits down on the same bench. You start talking a bit and all of a sudden she, or he wants to know everything about you. Quite pushy, no?
Relationships and profiles should be built progressively in email marketing
An email marketing relationship develops gradually too. You take it gently, you ask for a minimum of data. Start with a name and an email address. What it comes down to is this: you build email relationships with and profiles of prospective customers progressively. Email marketers should only ask a few general questions when prospects first register on their web sites and ask more data as the relationship develops further. It’s the best way towards steady and valuable email marketing relationships.
Don’t treat your subscribers as a list of email addresses, treat them like real people.