How to Build Trust with Your Email Subscribers

Email marketing is a highly-important tool for business owners these days, especially as we start relying heavily on technology and digital marketing techniques. It’s a powerful resource that builds trust, credibility and a rapport between yourself and your customers, no matter how loyal or new they might be. They need to know that you’re not going to spam their inbox, but that you’re not going to “ghost” them, either. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about how to build trust with your email subscribers.

Offer them some valuable content

Your email subscribers need to know that they’re receiving quality, valuable content that’s worthwhile opening once an email comes in from you. Whether you’re offering them the latest discounts and offers, the newest releases or providing them with a newsletter that’s full of the most up-to-date information, you need to make sure that your customers know that your emails are worthwhile opening and reading. Valuable content needs to be something that will:

• Solve their problems
• Answer their questions
• Teaches them something new

Be consistent & reliable 

Your customers need to have some reliability and consistency in your emails. You can’t contact them sporadically and expect them to engage with you. You need to make sure that you’re finding the correct balance between spamming your customers and hardly contacting them at all. It’s better to contact them on a weekly or a bi-weekly basis to keep things interesting, but without going overboard. 

Spam emails can be a nuisance and so you might end up with more customers who are unsubscribing than subscribing to your mailing list. In addition to making sure that your customers know when they’ll be contacted, it also shows your subscribers that you’re professional, respectful and trustworthy. It also shows that you value the time and attention of your customers, which is another huge benefit.

Personalise your emails

According to Campaign Monitor, emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than subject lines that aren’t personalised. The same source also states that the revenue a company receives is 5.7 times higher in emails that are personalised. Therefore, it’s in your best interests to make sure that the emails you’re sending to your customers are as personalised as they can be, without being too overboard. The places to incorporate customer names are:

• Subject line
• The address at the beginning
• Once or twice throughout the main body
• In the CTA

Be transparent at all times

Something that helps to build trust between yourself and your email subscribers is to make sure that you’re transparent and honest with them. Don’t have ulterior motives for emailing them and don’t give them offers or discounts that aren’t actually saving them any money. You might wonder how that’s possible, but some firms who are dishonest may inflate the RRP and then “discount” it back down to what it would have been, at full price, before the inflation. 

If your customers are loyal, then they’ll know exactly what you’re up to and so all trust will be broken. Be transparent with them, because one small thing could break that trust and, therefore, you’ll start to lose customers rather than gain and retain them. Not only does it show you’re being honest, but being transparent also means that you’re being: ethical, authentic and confident in what you’re offering.

Encourage customer feedback

One of the ways in which you can make your services better is to ask your customers for some feedback. Whether you encourage them to leave you a review or ask them to give you some constructive feedback by contacting you either over the phone or via email, what your customers think is something you need to be aware of, in order to better your services. 

It allows you to see what you’re doing well in and what needs improvement, for example. Do they have any suggestions to modernise or upgrade the service and/or goods you’re offering? Reviews are also a great way of bringing in new customers, and so that needs to be encouraged for advertising reasons. 

According to Luisa Zhou, 95% of customers will read product reviews before purchasing anything, with a further 9 in 10 consumers deciding to buy a product or undertake a service based on great reviews, states Exploding Topics. If you’d like to learn more about how you can generate positive reviews online, then take a look at our latest article here.

Get permission before sending emails

It’s imperative that you have permission to send people emails. One way is to ask them if they would like to sign up, but another is to entice them to tick the right boxes when it comes to receiving emails. Unfortunately, without the correct permissions, you won’t be able to make any contact with your customers via email. Unless they have agreed to receive regular content from you, you will have to look for other ways in which to get in touch with your customers, again, with their permission.

Avoid some of the most common mistakes

You might think that writing an email and sending it onto your customers is a simple and easy task, but there are actually a few things that could go wrong that you may not be aware of. Building trust with your email subscribers is an important part of running your business, especially online. 

Therefore, it’s imperative that you know about all of the mistakes that could happen along the way. If done wrong, then you could find that your email marketing campaign is fruitless. With that in mind, here are some mistakes to avoid when it comes to contacting your email subscribers:

• Using an irrelevant subject line
• Not segmenting your audience
• Using spam words in the email body
• Not optimising your email content for mobile devices
• A lack of personalisation
• Not using email automation
• Not placing enough importance on your call-to-action (CTA)
• Not following the best practices for email design and copy
• Sending emails at the wrong times
• Neglecting GDPR guidelines and compliance
• Flooding subscribers with emails

Kumo is a dedicated digital marketing agency with over two decades of experience behind us. We are on hand to offer SEO, PPC, content creation and website design services, to name just a few of the ways in which we can help your business to grow and develop. If you would like further information about how we can propel your company into the spotlight, then get in touch with a member of our friendly, knowledgeable team today – we’re always pleased to hear from you.