He suggests an entirely different approach focused on training our customers to ‘interact’ and engage with us and celebrate that rather than the ’stats’.

Hillstrom acknowledges that his ideas may be ‘garbage’ and not work, but as he concludes, with only “one in seven hundred customers buying what we have to sell today, what do we have to lose?”

Imagine, you’ve been invited to visit a friend on a regular basis to chat. How would you go about building that friendship? What questions would you ask him on the first visit, what about the second? What questions would he ask you?

Envisage how your conversations would blossom over a period of twelve to twenty four meetings. At what point would you expect to start asking him questions about his problem, at what stage would you expect him to put his cards on the table about a certain problem he’s trying to solve?

What level of education does your friend have? If you blinded him with science would he understand or would he ask you to leave his house? You’d be amazed how many sites use Ph.D. level language on their sites and in their newsletters. Unless it’s a site that is targeted towards doctors, of course, the language should always be at fifth grade level.

What tone of voice would you use throughout? Professional and cold or friendly, warm but professional? Thinking this through beforehand is vital, as it could dictate whether the friendship lasts a long time or a very short time indeed.

Do you prefer to write to a woman or a man? Deciding this beforehand could dictate how you phrase your messages. You may not realise it but it could.

Once you have the outline written and answered all the questions you think he or she would ask, start to write a sequence of emails that reflect that private conversation; just between you and him or her.

If you stick with this simple principle you should never have any problems producing future email campaigns or extending the present one.

Below is an example of what one guy figured out about his newsletter. He’d discovered that by simply placing links at the top of his newsletter, increased clickthroughs by 50%.

Here’s how Andrew Seltz of www.BibleResourceCenter.org discovered it:

“We have been delivering a monthly newsletter to our subscribers for the past five years.

The basic template for the HTML newsletter hasn’t changed much over this time, but I realized some alterations were in order. The most dramatic change was the addition of a list of text links added to the top of the newsletter that provided summary access to all of the article links mentioned in the body of the newsletter.

We immediately saw that more than 50% of the clicks on any given content item were through the summary links at the top of the page. There was also better clickthrough for items that were lower on the page which used to get lost.

Next up, a total newsletter overhaul!”

It’s amazing how one simple change can bring such a great result.