In building a relationship with email, go to your customers' space in your head

Maintaining an email-based relationship with a prospect can be very grueling. "Checking-in" emails just don't work. News from our own companies are usually too self-serving. To engage someone by email, we should first sit and think ourselves into their office... even if we've never been there. What's going on in their world? It used to drive me crazy that I didn't know specifics, but news about their city, their industry, their culture works just as well. Of course, sales people have used sports team connections for years... not gonna work for me, but restaurant news can!

Chicago Creative Space: How a Travel Magazine Helped Build a Company Culture, 2015-Jan-19 by Lou Barreiro

I started to go through each [travel magazine] issue to find articles on places where Performics had offices in. The next time I would reach out to each individual, I would share with them some cool places near them that were being featured. Response times immediately improved, as did turnaround times for the info I needed. Crazier yet, I started to form relationships with these global contacts. I went from being the nagging minion to someone that these people actually looked forward to connecting with.