Do you have a website? How do you manage your incoming email? How do you collect the important information users are most often willing to share (like email addresses)? How do you use the information you have permission to collect?
These are important questions for businesses with an online presence, but more often than not, the answer to the last question is typically unclear. Why? Because we tend to think about managing email, collecting email and marketing email as three separate functions. Think of it as a dot-to-dot puzzle. You can kind of see the picture from the pattern of dots on the page, but it is hard to truly visualize it until you connect the dots and essentially get them to work together.
To connect the dots, businesses should implement an easy flow of information from their website to the company, back to the user and at the same time, collect and market the email addresses that have been aggregated.
Collect Information
To better manage how users communicate from a website, use forms for contacts, submissions, questions or any type of online communication. Be sure to give users the chance to give you permission to send them marketing email (opt-in emails). These forms should then send the email to the right department or person, and at the same time, automatically add the opt-in email addresses into an email list management database.
I recommend: If you are not sure how to plug your website into your email management tools, get professional help. I'm not talking therapy - but get a qualified web developer that has experience in managing website communication.
Manage Incoming Email
Managing high volumes of email can be tricky, especially if you have multiple staff members, different departments, or are one user that wears many different hats. At some point you have to get rid of Outlook or similar email programs to make this process easier and more efficient. Instead, get a web-based email management tool that includes features that support team-based email management, such as multi-level, multi-user access, a customized standard replies knowledge base, auto-responders and organizational tools to help keep important email from getting lost or unanswered.
I recommend: Look for something that is web-based, easy to get up and running, cost effective, secure, reliable, and well supported. The solution should read directly from a POP or IMAP account and not just forward email into the system.
Email Marketing
Believe it or not, web users are generally happy to give you their email address and even more willing to let you market to them if they are interested in your product or service. But to be really effective, you have to get their permission and build trust by giving users easy access to unsubscribe and by not abusing their email inbox.
I recommend: Look for something that can interact directly with your website, manages email lists, creates and sends email campaigns and provides automatic un-subscriptions. Web-based tools are easiest for the most part. If you get into sending millions of emails at once, you may want to switch to something that is server-side.
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