Collecting customer details into an email marketing list and maintaining a continuous relationship with them is an important and inseparable part of the email marketing strategy for all businesses – both small and large. Nowadays, one of the most common and worthwhile advertising routes is email marketing. This type of marketing is cheaper and more target orientated (from the business’s point of view) and less of a hassle (from the customer’s point of view).
However, apart from the ever growing awareness of the advantages of email marketing, it’s important that business owners develop the flexibility to manage their mailing lists constantly and dynamically as they need to fiercely and constantly compete for the customer’s attention.
Generally, managing customer relations is a dynamic area. Thanks to advanced technology which provides marketers with many new ways to win the customer over – managing customer relations in digital media is even more dynamic and competitive. In the past we wouldn’t even think about saving customers details. In the not so distant past, the word “leads” wasn’t even included in the marketing vocabulary. Today any business owner knows that in addition to swiping the customer’s credit card, he or she should also get the their contact details in order to send email marketing messages and interest them in new products and sale offers and to nourish a relationship that will converts them into a returning customer.
Which details should be collected for an email marketing list?
The answer to this question varies according to the type of business and its areas of activity. Are you communicating with customers only via email marketing or do you also have a telemarketing center? Do you base your sale offers solely on age and gender or do you also consider factors such as residency, previous purchases and other, more specific characteristics?
Improving the business? Improve the quality of customer details as well.
Perhaps when you established your email marketing list and collected the customer’s details you weren’t too demanding and were satisfied with just their name and email address. But what do you do when the marketing strategy develops and changes and you decide that you need to start a telemarketing campaign and you don’t have the phone numbers or that they are incorrect or out of date. You could also decide to send customers a birthday greeting or even a special birthday offer, but you don’t have their dates of birth. Maybe your customers have moved or changed their mobile phone numbers, and the last thing they thought about was to update you… (No offence).
Verifying and updating customer details using a registration form.
It’s easy to update customer details when you have an email marketing system account. To be sure that you have the most up-to-date customer information, simply ask your customers to verify or update the details in a simple process. Send an email marketing message explaining that you’re interested in updating their details on the data base. In the newsletter, add a link to a landing page which includes a registration form. True – the customer has already filled this out in the past but this form is meant to verify and update details. The new form will contain data fields that are missing or fields that require verification or updating, such as: phone number, date of birth, anniversary date, does the customer have a driving license, what has the customer purchased recently or any other detail you find necessary to enhance and promote your customer relations strategy.
