Using emails as part of your marketing efforts is effective. Finding the right balance between using email to promote your business or its products and services and sharing useful and relevant information with your audience is the key to effectiveness. While your audience is interested in your company, if you only send emails trying to sell them something all the time, then it may have the opposite effect. Even when you are sending out information-sharing emails, you are indirectly promoting your business because you are getting in front of your audience from an expert angle.

So what is the right balance?

The Right Balance

The right balance is 80/20. Eighty percent of the time you should be sharing relevant and useful information with your audience. Sharing useful information comes in several different forms. You can:

• Share a blog post—that you wrote or someone else did
• Share an article—that you wrote or someone else did
• Provide a resource (book, website other blog)
• Provide a book or product review
• Refer a product or service that complements your business
• Audio file
• Videos

The other 20 percent of the time, it is perfectly acceptable to directly promote your business or its product or service offering.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that eight of 10 emails that you send should not be a direct sell tactic. Eight out of 10 emails should share information and paint you as a resource, an expert and a go-to source for any information related to your industry.

Once you build this expertise and trust, making the direct sale with those other two emails gets a lot easier.