Let’s face it – we live in a world full of information. Just take a look in email publishing industry. There are several hundred thousand email newsletters and we are all aware of rising spam problems. People are reluctant to give their email address to email publishers. Moreover, you have to offer top quality email newsletter to retain your email subscribers. However, quality email newsletter is not always enough. It is usually only one thing in building strong email relationship and making your subscribers loyal.

Building long-lasting email relationship is essential for your online business. If you have loyal subscribers who eagerly await your new message in most cases they will be your loyal customers, as well. That’s why smart marketers know that it is much more important to focus on keeping your current subscribers than to focus in finding new subscribers. Moreover, it is much more expensive to look for new subscribers than to focus on present ones.

In order to have loyal subscribers you have to treat them like kings! You already know that customer is always right and in most cases your subscribers are (or they will be) your customers.

We have already said that people reluctantly give their email addresses to subscribe to email newsletters. They are afraid that this way they will have even more spam in their inboxes. That’s why you have to assure them how you will use their email address. You need a good privacy policy. There you will explain all important items related to privacy of your subscribers. Also you can make your privacy policy reviewed and approved by TRUSTe. It gives more credibility to your privacy policy. TRUSTe, the online privacy leader, is an independent nonprofit which certifies thousands of web sites to strict privacy standards.

If you send an email newsletter, one item in your privacy policy should be about the use of the emails of your subscribers. Here is an example:

“We only collect and hold your email address in order to send you the newsletters you have requested. You can unsubscribe at any time for any reason. We never rent or sell our email lists! If you ever have a problem with your subscription, feel free to contact us at privacy@yourdomain.com.”

Also, here you can see an example of Infacta’s privacy and security policy for GroupMail: http://www.group-mail.com/asp/common/privacy.asp

It is useful that you offer your subscribers an easy way to subscribe and unsubscribe from your email newsletter. The best thing is that you offer a so called “one click” unsubscription using unique address. This will assure them that they can unsubscribe at any time if from any reason they don’t want to receive your email newsletter anymore.

The second very important thing is that your subscription boxes should never be pre-checked. CAN-SPAM Act requires that people (and not publishers) should check boxes depending on email newsletters they want to receive.

If you want to build strong email relationship with your subscribers, you have to know what they are interested in. It is one thing and the second thing is to fulfil their expectations. Just because they subscribed to your email newsletter doesn’t mean that they are absolutely happy with the service you provide. At least you can always do better. That’s why you have to ASK them what THEY want. You can make periodical surveys where you will ask what they like like/dislike about your email newsletter. You can offer them some useful value-added content like white papers or discount on your products in order to more people participate in your survey.

Some savvy marketers offer to their subscribers and customers opportunity to have their Profile or Preference page. This way they will be able to even more personalize communication with their customers and their customers will be happy and grateful because they will see how much they are important for their email publisher.

It is obvious that you should always provide quality and targeted content in order to make them stay. However, beside quality content your visitors have to be sure in several more things in order to be your loyal customers.

They have to know the frequency of your email newsletter and the exact date when they can expect your email newsletter in their inbox. If they subscribed to a monthly newsletter they want to receive it once a month and not once a week or “when I have time I will send it” schedule. Also, like with print magazines you have to decide a date in the month when you will send your email newsletter. It doesn’t mean if it is the 1st, 15th or 30th in the month – just stick to that date. If you prefer days more, you can say something like this: “You will get our Messaging Times Newsletter on every first Wednesday in the month”.

You can see that making a strong email relationship is not so hard if you abide to several rules. Time invested in loyalty management is always rewarding, because the best customer is – loyal customer.

Some people say RSS is better than email, some people think that RSS will never replace email. I’m from one of those that thinks that RSS and email are a perfect match and smart marketers should use both chanels in promoting their services.

Dr. Mark Brownlow, publisher of well-known Email Marketing Reports, has compiled interesting articles about RSS vs. email marketing. Those articles can give you an answer how web feeds can be used in order to complement with email marketing and if you really want, to replace it.