Keeping in Touch with Your Customers Online

All of us like to feel that the businesses we frequent understand our deepest desires and dislikes. One way that they do this is by keeping in touch. Since most business can not afford to call or send someone to your home or office, this is accomplished via mail or email.

Doing it Like it's 1999

For the sake of cost and efficiency, most customer contact has moved to the Internet. This started by identifying leads, contacts or prospects in your CRM system (if you were lucky enough to have one) and sending out a bulk "targeted" email. The email would take the form of an invitation to a seminar, or perhaps a new product announcement.

Enter Email Marketing 2007

Unfortunately, due to abuse of email by unsolicited marketers or "spammers", our customers now guard their inboxes like Castle of Carcassonne. Many of these policies are set by their personal ISPs, like AOL, or by internal corporate email filters. What are we legitimate marketers to do to get our legitimate messages through?

Make Sure You're in the Address Book

It is a good idea to contact all of your current customers and ask them to add you to their Outlook (or other) address book. Messages coming from these addresses tend to not get rejected. If you use a special email address for email marketing or "e-blasts", advise them to add this address as well in advance of your next campaign. If you collect email address from a web form, place this address book message on your "thank you" page, as well as instructions to "whitelist" you if their email provider allows this feature.

Train Your Customers to Opt-In

"Opting-in" is the email marketing term for voluntary addition to a campaign or mailing list. An automatic response system will automatically generate one of these confirmation emails and send them to your customer. Although not absolutely required, opting-in is a good practice as an email marketer, as it almost assures your customer will not accuse you of spamming. Just make sure to unsubscribe them just as easily.

Deliver Your Message While You Sleep

Now back to those automatic response systems or "autoresponders". Autoresponders allow you to write a multi-stage marketing campaign in advance and deliver this to your customers over a series of days or weeks. So by the time your customer reads the final installment of the "Top Five Benefits of Widgets" campaign, her credit card is already in hand.

Keeping Things on Track

Perhaps the most important part of any marketing campaign is measurement. Even direct mail campaigns in the late 1800's used postcards with different messages to test effectiveness. Some of the better commercial autoresponders support built-in tracking, so that you can test slightly different campaigns and adjust your marketing accordingly for the next campaign.

Summary

Autoresponders can be a powerful tool in your email marketing tool kit. They are flexible information management and delivery systems that can do a lot of the "heavy lifting" in a complex campaign. Bringing autoresponders into your business may just bring you enough new business that you are ready to party like it's 1999!

Andrew Morris covers unlimited automatic responder technology.

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