Email marketing means communication with your subscribers. How effectively do you communicate is the most important question to ask. The next thing to ask is how would you communicate with your friends and family? The answer should be obvious. You communication is effective when you are not trying to 'fake' it.

Analyze the emails written to a client compared to the emails written to your friends and family. Notice the casual way of talking when you're writing to friends and family; while the emails written to your client would be formal and somewhat tensed. You see you are trying to sell to the client and you'd never be talking in a casual way.

Try this test. Write an email to a group of friends asking them to check out the cool camcorder you have seen on amazon. Put your affiliate link in the URL and send it to your friends. You will find that most of your friends will open the email from you. They will checkout the product you are recommending and they will definitely make up their mind to buy it if they want one.

The conversion rate will be high because the way you recommended the product in a casual way will grab their attention. So the point is never sell a product to your subscribers; recommend it in a way that would make them open their wallets and buy the product.

The fact is that subscribers no matter who they are don't want to be sold to. They'll simply whine and unsubscribe instantly if you try to hard sell because they don't know you in person, hence, they don't trust you.

So the first and the foremost rule is to build trust like you'd build a friendship with a group of people. To build trust, you need to follow a series of step by step actions that'd be stepping stones on a way to build trust.

Never sound like a salesman - Never, ever sound like you're selling them stuff. You might have experienced this yourself in the real world. What do you do if a person knocks at your door and try to sell you a product right on your doorstep. You'd shun him and close the door immediately. But when you get a call from your friend about a cool product he purchased today, you'd definitely want to check it out.

Always build trust first - Building trust is a tricky thing. You might wax a lot of people in the process. But don't give up. If some people unsubscribe from your list, that's fine. Don't worry about them. They won't buy from you no matter what you do. So it's good to 'clean' your list in the process.

One way to build trust is to send product review emails of the famous products in your niche. Don't become their affiliate in that process. Just give you honest opinion about the products. Give them things of great value. For example, you might have some old report lying waste on your hard drive. Brush it up and edit it accordingly. Remember, it should have good value. Good information.

Communicate in a casual way - Be casual. Communicate as if they are friends with you. Use casual words like "hey check this out" as a subject of the email. Don't try to increase your conversions by selling hard. Don't pound them with offers; inform them. Tell them about your stuff. Make them look at your sales page and the sales page will do the conversions. Don't try to make your email a sales pitch.