When it comes to marketing your online business, the perfect amount of communication with customers is a fine line between doing it too often and not enough.
Constant emails and sales letters are an annoyance to most people, while communication that is infrequent and minimal (or even nonexistent) is ineffective.
How then do you strike the proper balance? Let’s take a look at the options and how they affect sales numbers.
Communicating With Online Customers – How Much Is Too Much?
Contact your customer base too often and your messages are going to be regarded as spam. How many of us give our email address to a website and then find our inbox inundated with daily messages? And how many of us quickly unsubscribe because this is an annoyance? Chances are you won’t buy from that company again simply because of the aggravation factor. This could have a real negative impact on sales.
Don’t fall prey to that same mistake. Obviously, daily contact with your customers via email marketing is overkill.
Before you initiate any kind of contact with a customer, ask yourself if it benefits them in some way. Does it offer them a special price, discount, or offer? Does it provide information that is needed or wanted? Does it give real value to the customer? If you cannot answer yes to any of these questions, then chances are you shouldn’t send that email.
Communicating With Online Customers – How Little Is Too Little?
On the reverse end of the scale, if you fail to stay in contact with customers, you are missing out on a great opportunity for further online sales and referrals.
All of the biggest retailers worldwide use the marketing concept of branding to promote their products or services. They have big budgets that allow them to advertise constantly and consistently and keep their brand at the forefront of consumers’ minds. What they can’t do is keep in personal contact.
Take a cue from the most successful retailers. You need to brand your business. No doubt you are not working with the huge advertising budgets available to major corporations. Instead, you have something they don’t – the time and ability to personally stay in contact with your customers. Use it to ensure that your database doesn’t forget about your company.
Weekly or biweekly messages are good but if you can’t come up with something valuable to offer in each one, consider limiting communication to monthly customer newsletters or special promotions.
Do be creative about the type of messages you send. Ask for referrals and offer something special in return. This is a great way to find potential clients. Announcements of news in your company are good newsletter inclusions. Discounts on future purchases are always appropriate. Solicit feedback; ask for a customer testimonial that you can post on your website. Send a short satisfaction survey. All of these messages are easy ways to stay in touch that won’t be considered spamming.
Staying in contact with your online customers can be a very effective form of marketing that costs little, if anything. It is an excellent internet marketing tool, but only if it is used with some discretion.
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2010
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks Sean.
Frequency of contact – It’s a fine balance, isn’t it? I know most people say daily email contact is overkill. But Scott Bywater, Australian copywriter, sends almost daily emails… I guess it comes down to your relationship with your list, the purpose of your emails and what you’re offering. Most of us could probably contact our list more often than we do though. I think a lot of it is about confidence. If we’re confident in our business, relationships and offer, then we shouldn’t worry about annoying people. Scott Bywater also says risking annoying a couple of people is worth it to stay in touch with the majority who do want to hear from you. As your post says, it’s also about being creative with the reasons you’re getting in touch.
Thanks for the informative post and nice reminder about keeping top of mind.
Lina
Hi Lina
In “certain” situations it may be all well and good to send daily emails to your opt-in list, but in many situations this may also have a serious negative effect. Certain subscribers may look forward to a daily email and others may regard them as complete spam and decide to opt-out. I guess it depends on the type of business and the type of content as to how often you choose to contact your list. Whatever way you go, you will certainly get a feel for what rate of contact works best by looking at comments (both negative and positive) and cancellations etc.
Regards – Sean
As I get more and more into IM’ing, by inboxes are growing by the day! I’ve started to opt-out from the people who contact me too often, partly because they barely give me a chance to read their previous email before they send me the next one!
And is it a coincidence, that I seem to get lots of emails around product launch time? These IM’ers are bloody good at getting my details when they’re just about to do a huge launch! Before that, I’d never heard of them! Hmmm.. Is there really a launch? Or do that just market to me to make me think there’s a launch??? Hmmm…
Thanks for this advice. I have a built in fear of overdoing this contact and communication thing. I get excited about my product and can’t wait to go on and on about it and cannot understand how anyone could ever find me annoying
:).
However, I am the recipient of an enormous amount of annoying email from those sources which I have invited by initially sending my email address for some reason. I do, as you suggest, regularly unsubscribe to those who truly annoy me. I am afraid I don’t even stop to evaluate what they are sending me.
I know it is a marketing thing today but really what annoys me most is when I gleefully send them my email and every post from then on which I receive is wanting money and more money for something that I can’t live without.
I know that the idea of internet marketing is to make money, but I feel that all too often the approach is overbearing and counterproductive.
So I probably err on the side of caution, but at least I don’t think I annoy a lot of people with my emails. At least I hope that is the case. I don’t get nasty emails in reply, at least not yet.
I agree with you Dobbs, it is no different than getting advertising “junk” mail in your letter box every day.
At least with junk mail, you can see the culprit who is delivering it and politely ask them to stop and you can put a sign on your mail box banning all advertising.
With your email you don’t often know where or who it is coming from and how they got your address. Sometimes unsubscribing can take ages.
Hi Sean,
I understand the need to stay in contact with my customers. However, I would feel the need to ensure that I had something important that would benefit them before I would email them. Having said that though, I think monthly would be the least I would communicate.
I would treat it like an offline business though and try to establish regular communication.
I note that some of the best known internet marketers in Australia send newsletters nearly every day. To me this is spammy and despite their reputation, I have filtered them out. I think they should all have a look at this post about Communicating With Your Online Customers.
Certain marketers can tend to go a little overboard indeed
Hi Sean,
This is sure a tough choice, I would be annoyed if I received more than 2 a week unless they contained usefull information. Maybe a link to your latest post”Magic Pain Cure” on your blog could be acceptable, this would re-focus them to the main game and give them value.
Hi Sean
I for one don’t like receiving strings of emails from advertisers or pages of copy I don’t have time to read. I am always cancelling out of subscriptions and deleting lines of emails. Sometimes the companies I have cancelled from sneak emails back in and they receive a firm letter to say not to do it again!.
I have been reading the comments here, thinking from a marketing point of view it may be better if I did do online marketing advertising by email but I think I may need to build up a bit of confidence with my mailing list to even consider it. I would however be happy to send my newsletter out as I know that will add value to people’s lives and is not cold selling.
“Before you initiate any kind of contact with a customer, ask yourself if it benefits them in some way.”
Finding the balance between overkill and insufficient contact is the key and that advice quoted is a good yardstick. It will stop you writing just for the sake of it or pushing too hard to the point subscribers are turned off.
The broadcast option on your autoresponder also gives the opportunity to send out special messages for those times when you do have something to offer or say that may be of real interest and benefit. This is also a good way to follow Sean’s advice to solicut feedback, do a survey and so on.
Generally, I prefer to send weekly or fortnightly messages rather than two a week even – but that is based on the type of content I am sending.
I Opt-out if I get more than a couple of emails a week.
What is more annoying is someone not having an unsubscribe link, then I just report as spam then delete once a week.
At the moment as I don’t actually have an email list except for family, my question is whats the best way to build an email list ?
One of the most popular ways of building a list is to provide an opt-in form on your website that gives something away for free in exchange for an email address, like a free ebook for example. AWeber is a great tool for automating the process as it provides opt-in forms and helps you to manage and communicate with your list, and lots more
There are many, many ways of building a list Rita, far too many for me to go into more detail here