In all aspects of your email marketing, communicate with your style, brand and relevance. Your email subscribers want to be in a conversation with you, not on the business end of a monologue. So write to them with the same voice that your brand exudes and you’ll have email friends for life.

Take a look at a couple of emails I recently received from lululemon athletica, makers of chic yoga clothing with a market cap of $5B. I love their stock ticker (LULU). These guys are brilliant.

I recently received an email from them announcing that they are revamping their back-end systems and are going to take a break from sending emails. If you left this sort of message crafting to your local IT guy, the message might have read something like this:

“Please note that our email system will not be operating for the month of May as we are performing system upgrades. We will notify you as soon as we are up and running.”

But the marketing folks at luluemon put it into terms that a yogi like me would get instantly:

“We’re taking an email savasana (a yoga term indicating a relaxing posture either at the beginning or end of a yoga session).” They also included a great yoga/dog picture and I’m loving it.

Next I decided to order a pair of yoga shorts from these guys and the order confirmation message did not disappoint. I carefully scanned the content to see if the same marketing folks are writing and branding everything they send me, including the normally boring auto generated system messages, and indeed they are.

See the yellow highlights below. They want me to play and sweat in my new shorts and tell them if they got it right. These guys know how to talk to me. And I probably will take the time to let them know if the shorts improved my down dog.

Beyond email marketing you may be communicating with clients, prospects, and fans in a variety of ways and online channels:

• Email Messages (including invoicing, system updates, subscribe/ unsubscribe, marketing blasts, sig files, e-mail newsletters, order confirmations and other transactional emails, etc)
• Blog copy
• Web copy

Bottom line: No matter if your brand is casual, approachable, serious or informative; make sure it stays consistent throughout all of your communications.