Typically small businesses worry about how to manage their client relationships on a small budget. Especially in these economic times, promotional gewgaws are quickly becoming one expense too many.
Email, however, is as close to free as possible–it’s really only the cost of your time–which makes it the perfect vehicle for deepening contact with dedicated followers. Here are some rules to make sure you don’t shoot yourself in the foot while taking advantage of this tool:
- Set specific expectations on frequency of delivery, content, and information privacy at the onset of the email subscription
- Follow the guidelines you established in step 1! Otherwise, send out a notice of expected changes, with the option for users to modify their email preferences
- Take advantage of any analytics provided by your listserv service to optimize open and response rates
- When users stop interacting with your email, confirm via personalized contact whether they are still interested
All of these options should be available from a reputable service provider, like JingTone, should you choose to pursue this relationship-developing tool. A few things to keep in mind:
- Most users are already overwhelmed by the amount of traffic their inboxes are seeing; for purely promotional emails, less is more
- Beware of key spam black-list words, and avoid their use (for instance, “free” is almost guaranteed to land you in the spam box)