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You’ve probably heard that email marketing can be good for your business but what is less commonly known and what I’d like to talk about today is actually how email marketing can help you to improve your love life.Let’s take a look at how email marketing looks if you view it through the lens of the dating process. The dating process all starts with flirting, just like email marketing does. You’ve got to start by getting someone’s attention, by getting them interested in you. Then, once you’ve got their attention, you need to get their details so that you can contact them later. It’s exactly the same with email marketing. Get people’s interest and then get them to give you their contact details so that you can follow up later. After all, no one’s going to agree to marry you the first time they’ve met you. It’s about building that relationship.

That’s why with email marketing you want to use things like data capture forms or capturing data from your other tools that you’ve got available, even SMS, mobile apps, every channel that you can think of to actually get people who are interested in what you have to say, to give you their details so that you can follow up and take them to the next stage.

Because, of course, what follow after flirting is the first date. This is all about selling first impressions with that person. They’ve shown they’re a little bit interested in you, now you want to develop that relationship a bit further. That’s really important that you do this effectively. After all, the first date you’ve got very little time to make your first proper impressions with people.

With email marketing this is all about what we call “the welcome email” – the first communication that you send to them after they give you their details. You want this to be fast, you want it to look good and, most importantly, you want it to be really interesting to them so they want to take things even further. It’s when we give you a whole heap of tools to help you do this and to always make that welcome email so that you can send it really quickly whilst they’re still interested in you.

Assuming your first date goes well, then it’s really important to have a good follow up. That next call – how long do you wait? Once you get in touch, are they still interested in you? With email marketing, you could automate a lot of this process. Using tools called marketing automation you can set up follow up messages to be sent automatically after your first date. No more needing to worry about exactly when to call or whether you left it slightly too long. You can set things up and leave them automated so that everything happens at exactly the right time.

Because assuming the follow-up goes well, then it’s all about the pursuit. Of course, no one’s going to agree to deepen the relationship just on the first date or even on the follow-up call. Next it’s about showing that you’re responsive to their needs, show them that you really want them, create interesting, well-designed email campaigns, schedule them for the appropriate time for your audience, and keep following up.

It generally takes at least eight touch points before someone’s ready to take things to the next level with you. So making sure that you don’t lose hope during the pursuit process is really important.

Of course it doesn’t always go to plan. Every now and again you are going to get dumped. In email marketing that’s what we call “the unsubscription”. They key here is just making that process as painless as possible. So, we automate it. You don’t even need to get involved. Every message that you send out will automatically have an unsubscription link in there so for those people where this relationship just isn’t going to work out they can opt out nice and smoothly. The important thing is: no one’s feelings get hurt, no one has to get upset. It’s a natural part of the dating game.

Of course, when things do go well, the next step is getting engaged. Knowing when it’s the right time to pop the question is really difficult. That’s why we have a whole set of tools, a special process that we call “our engagement algorithm” to help you understand when people are most interested in you and most ready for you to pop the question. You can see for each person that you’re contacting where they lie on the spectrum from “they’re just getting started with you” till “they’re ready for you to pop the question and take things to the next level”, which is of course getting married.

In email marketing what we mean by this really is they’re completing the transaction with you. They’re either making a purchase, they’re referring their friends to you, they’re doing the next action that you really want them to take, they’re making a proper commitment to you. This is usually the point where they’re actually spending money with you.

Of course once you get married, you can’t just neglect the relationship. It’s all about keeping that romance alive, developing that trusting relationship with people so that it gets better over time. That’s all about understanding your audience. Using tools like our Audience Intelligence features and our segmentation to really understand what’s most important to your partner so that you can send them the most relevant messages, you can show them that you really love them, deepen that relationship and keep them coming back to you for more.

Now the really great thing about email marketing, unlike just the normal dating process, is that you can legally do this multiple times over. You can get married as many times as you like. You can do this at exactly the same time and you can scale this to millions of relationships at once if you really want to. Our marketing tools are designed to make it easy to do this repeatedly, time and time again with lots of different people, something that you can’t do too often in real life.

Now if you want to see how this can apply for yourself, you can check out the 123-reg Email Marketing tool and you can try it free for 30 days, again something that you can not often do in relationships.