I've written before about how what you do is more important than what you say.

How – by doing good stuff for your potential clients like in a regular email newsletter – you can build relationships that turn into clients without needing to be a whiz at marketing.

Here's a mistake I made with that strategy though: focusing too much on great content.

Not that great content is a bad thing. But it's not enough.

Great content: material which educates and informs your readers, gives them useful information, helps them get results. All good stuff.

But very rational.

Dare I say it: boring.

We all say we want useful information. But after a while we stop paying attention. We can only take in so much. And it eventually feels like we're in a classroom. Zzzzzz.

What I've found over the years tends to work better is to build some emotion into your emails.

Yes, give great information. But wrap it in a story. A funny example. A rant. A dissenting point of view.

Stir some emotions.

Adrian Willmott is one of the star pupils from my Email Marketing Mastery Course. When Adrian emailed me a while back to tell me he'd just landed two big consulting projects purely through email marketing I knew I had to interview him for a podcast.

Adrian sells to finance directors in large corporates, so I wondered what he was doing to make his emails so effective. What part of the course had been the most useful for him?

You'll have to wait for the podcast for the full story, but here's one of the things I picked out. In Adrian's words:

“We put out a provocative point of view on something they should do, and then towards the end of the email we'd say ‘ask yourself, do your teams influence business decisions or are they just adding up the numbers? Are they at the table when the big decisions get made or are they stuck in their own office?' We've heard back that it's these questions that really get people's attention.”

Adrian's learnt that whether you're trying to build relationships with consumers, with small businesses or with very senior executives you shouldn't be afraid to challenge them. To say something provocative and different.

Across all walks of life, real decision makers don't just want “yes men” who repeat back to them the things they already know. They want to hear from people with different points of view who aren't afraid to state them.

You might lose some subscribers and contacts along the way. But you'll build a lot more fans and get a lot more attention.