Aside from building a solid relationship with your audience, email is an excellent tool for tracking and gathering data about them. You can learn about your audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviors through metrics like open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.

The data can inform future marketing campaigns and create more relevant and personalized content for your subscribers. You must know what your subscribers want from you, so tailor your campaign to them.

While the term “email marketing” often conjures up images of a mass email blast sent out to a large audience (which is unethical), best practices for email marketing now require email campaigns to be more targeted and conversational. Email messages that are too general or overly salesy will be deleted from the inbox immediately, as well as emails that use insufficient visuals, contain broken website links or misspellings, or are simply confusing to the reader.

Instead, consider using emails to greet and introduce yourself, invite people to your business’s website, social media channels, in-person events, or schedule an appointment. Remember, we are all strangers to each other until we greet, meet (build relationships), and, in time, show appreciation (offer a gift). The same approach applies to email marketing.

In addition to revealing special promotions and in-store deals, email marketing can help maintain awareness about new product lines, upcoming events or seminars, or other business news. This approach can be a great way to build trust and loyalty with existing customers and encourage customers to come back, or it can serve as a way to invite potential customers to try out new products or services.

For customer engagement, it’s essential to set clear goals for each email message and incentivize people to take action. This approach can include downloading an eBook, filling out a survey, or clicking on your emails’ call to action.

Keeping in mind that your audience is likely to receive hundreds of emails per week, it’s essential to make the goal of each email as straightforward and easy to understand as possible. Doing so will increase your chances of success and ensure your emails are read and responded to.

You should apply incentive-based email marketing to maximize your email campaign, providing value at no cost. If you do this, you will see a massive increase in your subscriber’s activity. And what’s beautiful about the entire process is it all started with a simple “hello.”