At its core, email marketing is about making money. Yes, it’s great to build an audience. It’s great to build relationships. But at some point, you have to turn that audience into money. That’s done through promotional emails. When should you mail promotions? And what should you mail? Let’s take a look.

==> Two Kinds of Promotional Emails

There are two primary ways to mail a promotion.

One is to have an email that’s primarily content. For example, you might have a two-page email teaching someone how to do something. Then at the bottom, you have a promotion for a paid product.

Another way to do promotional emails is to send out an entire email that’s promotional. The best way to do this is to position the email as if it were something valuable.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a product that teaches real estate agents how to do short sales. You might write an email that outlines the five most common reasons why agents fail at short sales. Then present your product as the solution.

==> How Often Should You Mail Promotions?

As a rule of thumb, 80% to 90% of your content should be content based. You want people to get in the habit of opening your emails and reading what you have to say, because you actually help them solve their problems.

That way, in the 10% to 20% of the time that you’re selling, people will actually read your promotions. As long as you have a good promotion, chances are you’ll get a lot of clicks and sales.

==> What Kinds of Promotions Work?

Promotions that have a “reason why” tend to work better than any other kind of promotion. In other words, you want to give people a deal of some sort – for a specific reason. For example:

* A 10% off holiday special
* “My tax bill just came and I need cash to pay the bill.”
* It’s my birthday, I’m feeling generous. For 48 hours, there’s an XX% sale.

So on and so forth. Avoid discounting your products for no reason at all, as you’ll devalue your products in your readers’ eyes.

==> The Relationship Comes First

If you ever feel like you’re weighing your relationship with your customer against sending a promotion, put your relationship first. If they’re going to buy, they’ll buy eventually. Never jeopardize your customer relationship for the sake of sales today.

This should give you a good sense of what kinds of promotional emails to mail and when to mail them. Finally, use your gut instinct. Stay in touch with your audience through Twitter, Facebook and in-person relationships. Use those relationships to gauge whether you should promote more or less often.