How To Use Your Email List

Customer retention is a big deal for any company. Your return customers are the ones who will keep the business ticking over, and should be your most prized customers. It is, after all, the return customers, the loyal customers, who will give you some of the most important publicity that any company could ask for – the word-of-mouth publicity that is the lifeblood of any successful business. People are, after all, more likely to believe a friend who tells them that a company is great than a company that tells them it is great.

It is this personal touch that is at the heart of any business improvement strategy. You will build an email list that can be used to keep in contact with the customers that you pick up over time. How you then address those customers is vitally important. Talking to the customers on their level is essential. There is always a danger inherent in constantly talking – or writing – as though there is a very firm dividing line between you, the business and them, the customer. If someone feels that they are simply being sold to, that they are a unit to be treated as a reliable cash machine, they will not even read your email.

Writing an email to a customer presents a lot of challenges. There is a question as to how much you acknowledge that you are a salesperson and the person receiving it is a customer. It is natural to want to be the customer’s friend. To an extent, it is possible to keep this up but you still need to keep the sale at the core of your message. It is not about how much of a salesperson you are, or how much of a friend. Rather it is about keeping a natural voice. You are writing to a customer, but it is a customer that you like. The customer can be happy to hear from you, and ready to make a purchase too.

It is not just about how you use your email list, but also when you do. Too many emails will lead to a customer becoming frustrated and irritated, and therefore less likely to remain a customer. There is a balance to be struck between keeping yourself in the customer’s mind and “spamming”. The golden rule is to have a good reason for sending a message to your email list. The best way to do this, in fact, is to have some “email only” offers that are available only to people on your email list. You can have better offers for your mailing list because they are a select bunch, and it will make them more likely to read your email.

The core message to keep in mind when using an email list for direct marketing is that people need a reason to act. Even if that action is something as simple as opening and replying to an email, you as a business individual need to make it more likely that your customers will become, and continue to be, return customers.