Customer Email: Obligation Or Opportunity?
            by Mike McCandlessy

A recent survey by Shelley Taylor & Associatesof Palo Alto, California analyzed the Web sites of 100 multinational companies representing 11 cotries and 14 industries. The survey found that firms discourage contact from key audiences - less than half the sites gave company contact information.

Personally, I think many Web site owners miss the boat when it comes to understanding the potential benefit that can be gained from providing a way to be contacted and then responding promptly. Maybe responding to email is viewed as an obligation, i.e. a cost of doing business, not an opportunity. Personally, I see the opportunity for Web site owners to create value by promptly responding, and using that as a springboard to encourage an ongoing exchange (and hopefully futures sales) between company and customer. In this article I'll explain how.

Creating Value
OK, let's talk about establishing that ongoing relationship. Remember, the scenario is that Joe Customer has sent your company email, you've responded and done so quickly. Joe Customer should be excited about that. (Oh, I forgot to mention that the Guerrilla Group, http://www.guerrillagroup.com, says that of customers who register a complaint, 70% will do business with you again if you resolved the complaint, 95% if the customer feels the problem was resolved quickly).

Anyway, how about including in your last email to the customer something like "Would you like to be kept up to date on new product news, new store locations, and updates to our Web site? If so, here's how to sign up for our mailing list."

1.    The folks who have just contacted you have differentiated themselves from the rest of the mass market you are trying to reach. They're interested in your company and/or products - if they weren't, why would they have contacted you? These are the people you want to respond to and get on your list. 2. It will be easy to stand out from your competitors. Remember the Shelley Taylor study I mentioned? Less than 50% provided company contact information. You can easily surpass current capability of the "non-contactable" group just by providing an email address. Add a mailing list option and go to the head of the class.

3.    Mailing list participation by the Web community is still relatively low. Sure, there are those who subscribe to way too many lists. But..."for the first time, the Fall 1997 CommerceNet/Nielsen Media Research survey measured email usage among Internet users. According to Nielsen, there are currently 59 million email users, ages 16 and older, in North America, or 26 percent of the total population. One out of five subscribes to mail lists, for a total universe of 11.8 million subscribers (Michael Tchong, Iconocast)". Put another way, 4 out of 5 do not subscribe to mail lists.

4.    Women are receptive to it. The U.S. female audience is around 40-45%, depending on who you believe, and growing. In a survey entitled "NetSmart III--What Makes Women Click", conducted by NetSmart Research, 68% of women indicated an interest in self-selected push content (I think that's a fancy title for "send me product updates because I'm interested").

5. Cost of email mailing list delivery is next to nothing and scales really well.

But There's A Cost to Respond
There are those out there saying that it takes time and money to respond to customer correspondence, in order to put yourself in the position of offering a newsletter. And there are those who would say that handling the inbound mail volume at say, Nike, is a different issue than the mail at BizNexus (well, today it is).

I agree. And I won't say it's easy, but I do believe that over the long term -- it's worth it.

Summary
Start today. Respond to your email and offer a mailing list option. Good news: getting started with a mailing list doesn't have to be difficult or costly. Here's two options:

1. Use the tools you probably have today. If you have a way to send/receive email and Microsoft Office, you're set. Enter name and email addresses in Excel, Word, or Access, and generate your email distribution to the list by using mail merge in Word - just merge to electronic mail.

2. Use a form on your Web site to gather demographics/submit email and then capture the name, address, and demographics in a database. Getting it into a database is something that your Web developer can help with, or look at a tool like SignUp from Arial Software (http://www.arialsoftware.com). Once in a database, you can use Word to mail to to the entire list, or select just relevant portions of the list.

That's it. Now get started.

MIKE MCCANDLESS Receive our FREE newsletter Is Your Web Site an Effective Business Tool? Read Biznews and Find Out How Other Businesses Leverage Their Web Presence To Make a Positive Business Impact For Your FREE Subscription biznews@biznexus.com In the SUBJECT area: SUBSCRIBE Or Read Us On The Web at http://www.biznexus.com/newsletters

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