If I had to give up every marketing tool in my arsenal – apart from one – the one I would keep would be email marketing.

Without a doubt.

Ask any successful professional what the most important element of their marketing is and the answer will almost always be some variant of “follow up”.

“Keeping in touch”, “relationship building”, “being top of mind”.

People don't hire us to perform high value services for them after the first meeting. We've got to build trust and credibility. It's follow-up that does that.

And email marketing is the only form of follow-up marketing you can do “en masse”. Do it right and you can build credibility and trust with large numbers of people with just a little work and by pressing the send button.

Nothing else comes close. That's why, when the Direct Marketing Association evaluated the ROI of different marketing strategies, email marketing had almost double the ROI of it's nearest competitor.

Yet so many professionals either don't do email marketing, or get it so badly wrong they don't see any results from it.

Here are the three simple principles I've found to be the real foundation of effective email marketing.

1. Email marketing is about relationship building not (just) selling.

Whether you sell high value products like me, or in-personal coaching consulting, training or other services; you need to build high degrees of credibility and trust before someone will be ready to buy from you or hire you.

So my email marketing is geared to build that credibility and trust over time. Step by step.

2. Email marketing is about me and you.

Most email marketing – even when you get it from small businesses – seems like it's been written by faceless corporates.

It puzzles me why so much email marketing feels so impersonal. Perhaps there are marketing agencies out there coming up with this rubbish and convincing their clients they need to sound “professional” or have a newsletter filled with fancy graphics.

It just doesn't work.

What works best is if your marketing emails read just like your normal emails. You're writing from you as a person to them as a person.

That way they read them properly – and not with their “oh oh, I'm being sold to” shields up.

3. Email marketing is about delivering REAL value.

Your potential clients have a huge dilemma. They have big issues and opportunities in their business they need help with.

But before they hire you they need to know you have the true expertise that will deliver results for them. You need to prove it in advance.

How can you prove you can get results for them.

Well, you could claim you can. You could offer a huge guarantee. You could show them your qualifications or awards. Or you could show them testimonials from your satisfied clients (assuming they believe them).

Here's an alternative: deliver real value to them in your emails that allows them to get results before they ever hire you.

There's no better proof that you can get results by working with them than for your advice to have already delivered for them.

Makes sense, right?