Communication

Stay in touch with your customers and communicate with them on a frequent basis. It is not easy to determine the optimum frequency for contact initiations that you contact them often enough that they do not forget about you, but not too much that they get annoyed by it and start ignoring it or worse, consider it spam and filter it out by automated means. This is a science by itself. Next to the frequency is also the message itself very important. Not every customer has the same needs or interest. The “one message fits them all” approach is not only less effective and converts poorly, but also increases opt-outs and filtering out of those messages.

Making a message personal for every customer is not easy, although it is the ultimate goal, but you can at least make customers feel as if the message is personal for them. The easiest thing to do is to address them with their name rather than addressing them like “Hello Customer”. To provide messages that are as relevant as possible, is it useful to segment your customer base. The segmentation can be done based on a number of criteria and depend on what you offer and the types of customers, their interests, financial status etc. A single customer can be assigned to multiple segments, which overlap and serve different purposes.

There are numbers of methods you can use to contact your customers. While a phone call or snail mail can be appropriate and useful so is email still the most common and cost effective way of communication between e-tailers and customers. There are tons of services out there that let you manage your email lists, segment your customers and keep the list clean and up to date. The cost vary significantly and depend on the number and type of features you need, how much of the work the services will do for you, if you can’t or do not want do everything in-house and from the size of your mailing list and frequency of mailings (= email volume).