Building a relationship with your list is a vital process of email marketing. It builds trust between you and the customer which results in customers buying the products you recommend to them.

There are many different opinions out there regarding how often to email your list and how often to send them either free content, or to send a sales pitch letter. I think its important to have a balance. If your going to email someone every single day, you don't want to be sending a sales pitch every day. A possibility could be to send benefits and features of a product that you recommend from Monday to Thursday, then on Friday you can send the sales pitch for that particular product. At least then the customer has had a chance to read your emails and see what your product has to offer, without feeling like they are being pushed into buying.

You need to condition your list. If you have a list that you send free content to all the time in the hope to get your list to really like you, then all of a sudden you send a sales pitch letter, people will get mad. Why? Because they are used to receiving free content all the time and have not been conditioned to receive a sales pitch letter. Many marketers choose a 50% ratio between free content and sales pitch letters. It's important that you let your list know when they sign up you will be sending them marketing content. Not necessarily in such plain terms, however by doing this they are basically making a promise to you that when they do receive a sales pitch email, or a marketing email, they won't respond angrily.

Sending the wrong content to your list can be damaging. Having a list that is interested in internet marketing and sending them content about gardening is not what you want to do. Sure, chances are that 3% of your list might be into gardening, however people have joined your list purely for internet marketing and that is what content they expect to get from you. It's not worth spamming your list with a product from a different niche for that 3% that you may or may not get. More then likely people will not respond well to this, and you may even lose a few of the people who beforehand had every intention of reading your internet marketing emails.

Really get to know your list. No one knows your list better then you. The best way to learn your list is to get feedback. Comments on a blog post that you write are one way to receive feedback. Another way is to ask your list directly. Send an email to your list asking what they want. You really want to connect with your list. Tell your list something about yourself. Be open and personable. You might be really into your music, and you play guitar. Expose yourself and share this with your list. One angle you might use is to tell your list how internet marketing has provided you with the money and resources to spend more time doing what you love. Or has allowed you to form that band you always wanted to play in, or buy that guitar you always wanted to own. This allows your list to relate to you on a more personalized level, and this builds more trust with your list.

These are not difficult things to practice on your list. It almost seems to easy and yet many marketers aren't building a proper relationship with their list. There are many tools you can use to setup auto-responders to send out your relationship building content. I hope this article has provided you with some insight on how to build a relationship with your list.

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Happy marketing!

Chris Hebrard is author of Net-Marketing-Guide.com