As you know, many businesses treat email marketing as a purely one-way marketing medium. Instead, they focus on getting as many sales as they can before recipients scramble to the unsubscribe link.

While that model might work for a few businesses, it's certainly not for everyone (nor is it in line with most of the email marketing tips you'll find on this and other blogs.

Of course, it's all well and good to talk about the theoretical value of building relationships via email... but is anyone doing it? And if so, how?

Recently, I talked with AWeber customer Chris Guillebeau, who uses email to connect with subscribers, build relationships - and, oh yeah, grow his business while traveling the world.

Watch These Videos From Our Interview

Chris and I talked for a while about:

• How he "does" email.
• What he's learned about email marketing.
• What mistakes he's made (and how he recovered from them).
• How much (if at all) other businesses "get" relationship building.
• How he sells products without making subscribers feel he's being "pushy."

... and a number of other topics.

We talked for about an hour, but that would be one loooong video... so we broke our discussion up into a handful of shorter videos. You can watch them here:

What About You?

How do you build relationships via email? What have you learned along the way?

Share your thoughts on the blog!

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As our US-based users get ready for Thanksgiving, it's easy to find yourself jumping to thoughts of the holiday while working on your campaigns.

So let's have a little fun in the spirit of the season.

I was thinking recently about what I was thankful for, and when my mind turned to work, a question occurred to me:

What Should Email Marketers Be Thankful For?

A few things I came up with:

Affordability

Not everyone has the cash to spend on radio, TV and print ads. (This is doubly true if you're just starting a business, or taking a struggling one and rebuilding it.)

Email gives us a powerful, yet relatively inexpensive, means of marketing our products and services.

Tracking

No other marketing channel lets us track our results as extensively and quickly as email does.

From open rates (which are still useful, even if they're not perfect), to clickthroughs, to conversions, we can use email statistics to see what works, what doesn't, and what we should do to increase the response to our campaigns.

Reputation and Relevancy Rule

Used to be, content filtering was a really big deal. And a lot of people were lured into the trap of obfuscating words like "F.R.EE" to try and get around those filters. (PS - if you're still doing this, stop. Please. Learn why here.)

Nowadays, effective email marketing involves building a reputation for sending timely, relevant, useful information to subscribers. (Permission still matters, too, but it won't save you if you're sending junk.)

The moral here? Send subscribers what they want, when they want, and you don't need to micro-manage your content to get your email delivered. That's a lot to be thankful for.

You Don't Have to Be an Artist to Create Good-Looking Campaigns

Still like hand-coding your messages? Go for it. I don't envy you.

For the less design-inclined, HTML email templates make it easy to spice up your newsletters with a splash of color and imagery, helping to build your brand as subscribers associate your emails with your website.

That's not to say hiring an email designer to create a custom design for you isn't ever a good idea; it absolutely can be. But it's not critical for every business, and it's not always in the budget.

There's No Shortage of Useful Advice

And not just on our site, either (though in our humble opinion you'll get a lot out of subscribing to this blog and sitting in on one of our webinars )

Organizations like MarketingSherpa and MEC Labs feed us a steady diet of case studies and benchmarks to show us what works and what doesn't.

And blogs like no man is an iland and BeRelevant give us plenty to think about as we evaluate our own email marketing campaigns.

Point is, if there's something you want to know about email marketing, you can rest assured that there are people out here willing and ready to help. All you have to do is ask.

So What Are You Thankful For?

How has email marketing helped you this year? Share your experiences on the blog!