For many businesses, email marketing campaigns are key marketing strategy components. This is where you cultivate potential leads, convert them into sales, and nurture them to repeat and refer your business. The recipients of these messages are all people who have shown interest of some sort by giving you their information, so these leads are good targets to convert into sales.

When building your email marketing campaigns, keep these tactics in mind in order to get better conversions from your email list.

Keep Them Casual

We’ve all been on an email list before, so we can all spot the form emails when we see them. They stand out like sore thumbs in our inbox. Subject lines that include phrases like “special offer” and “sale” are often some of the first emails people delete, particularly when they’re busy.

I’ve found that the best way to engage with your customers is to make your emails as informal as possible, particularly if they are automatic-response emails. You want them to seem as if they are personal responses, sent at a moment’s notice. Simple subject lines and plain, conversational language can go a long way toward increasing response rate on emails.

Have a Reply-To

So many auto-responder emails have no-reply from addresses, meaning your contacts can’t reply directly to the email. While this may make sense for some businesses which have enormous email lists where even a one percent response rate would result in thousands of emails to read, it makes no sense for most small businesses. If a prospect takes the time to read and respond, you absolutely want to re-engage them to nurture that lead.

You will want to make sure the reply-to email goes to a real person and an inbox that is checked regularly. This doesn’t have to be your main inbox, if you want to keep that clutter-free, but someone should check it.

Be Valuable

Your emails should be focused on providing value for your customers, rather than being self-serving. You want to give targets value for opening your email messages. When you include informative material and engaging content, the email message becomes something they look forward to.

Use your email marketing campaigns to educate your customers. Give them something they can’t find on your website. Sure, this can be an offer or a sale, but you can also give them much more.

This is where a regular newsletter comes in. Your newsletter should be something your customers anticipate and share. To do this, you must provide some value beyond just sharing your content or products.

Be Consistent

Finally, you must keep in mind that your email messages, like any other piece of marketing, are an extension of your brand. Consistency is key. This means newsletters go out at the same time, and language is consistent with your brand. For my own business, I always start my subject lines with a short tag so everyone that receives it knows in one glance that it is coming from us.

By following these key strategies, your customers will want to know more and will feel comfortable engaging with your company--which should be among the goals of any effective email campaign.

This article was originally published on Inc.