Keeping in contact with your customers is vital in the modern business environment, but as your company grows it gets more and more difficult to keep your customers informed. You want to be able to send them newsletters and use them in your internet marketing strategy.
With the right email strategy you will be able to keep in contact with your customers and give them the information that you want them to have, while limiting the amount of time that you have to spend on the mailings.
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Direct Email:
The most personal level of email service that you can provide is direct email. This is where you personally craft the email and send them out to individuals or groups in your email program. Customers who get this kind of attention will feel very special, but it is incredibly time consuming and not a very effective way to spend your time.
You can only email the people that you have already been in contact with, so you are not generating any new sales leads, and you are limited in the number of emails that you can send by the number of emails that you can process by hand. If you are a luxury company, or a company that deals in large orders to very few customers, this is the way for you to go, but if you are a run of the mill consumer goods company, you need help.
Mass Email:
The next step is the mass email. You have seen it, and probably have some mass email in your spam folder right now. These are the messages that are sent out to thousands of people several times a month. The beauty of the mass email is that it does not take very long for you to set up and send.
Within minutes you can have your messages sent out all over the world and you can get back to running your company. On the other hand, mass emailing is very impersonal and many potential customers will not see what you have to say because the email will wind up in their spam folder upon receipt.
Targeted Email:
The most effective mass emails that you can send are targeted emails, and you can only do that when you know your customers and your customer profile. With software, like a CRM service, you can see a profile of your customer and send targeted emails that speak to specific needs that those customers have and you can suggest products or services that those customers might not even know that you offer.
Targeted email is more effective than mass emails because the recipients are not bombarded with offers for products or services that they would never use, so their interest is piqued right from the beginning. This will lead to more clickthroughs in your marketing, and that leads to more potential sales leads being generated and more opportunities for your staff to make sales.
Conclusion:
You have to have a solid email strategy if you want to compete in the modern business climate, and that means understanding how different email services work. Though you want to be personal with every customer that you have, that is not possible, so you should maximize your time and money with email services that can reach the greatest number of people in the most effective way possible.
About the Author: I am Charles West, and I have been a small business owner for the last five years, doing business online and through email. I have used a lot of mass email services in that time, but the SugarCRM software has been by far the best experience that I have had because of their targeted approach and the integration of the software with all of the other software that we use in my office. I highly recommend SugarCRM not just for their email assistance, but as a comprehensive solution to dealing with customer relationships.
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