Keep in Touch Using Email - Part 1 of 4

Keeping in touch with clients, partners and friends is important to maintaining relationships… as well as getting repeat sales and referrals. As the marketing person in your team, this responsibility falls squarely on your shoulders. The challenge is, keeping in touch takes time.

An approach I’ve found to work well for me is to employ techniques that allow me to leverage my time… including, sending emails, attending events and speaking to an audience, in a podcast or to a reporter.

I’m a big fan of sending emails because it is a simple & easy way to keep in front of people you want to stay in touch with. It can give you huge returns on your time investment but you need to be intelligent about how you use it.

In this “Keep in Touch Using Email” Series, I’m going to share tips on how to use email as an effective way of keeping in touch… so let’s get started.

Use emails to provide value to people

If you are going to use email is a strategy for consistently keeping in touch with people, you need to make sure that they will continue to open your 2nd, 3rd and 100th email.

Here are two things you should keep in mind:

a) Find or create content that is interesting

If you bore people to death or try to shove sales-pitches down their throat, you’ll loose their interest quickly. Try instead to add value to their life with your email. How? Here are some types of content that can help you do that:

• Relevant News - For example, if you are changing your company name/location or you’re adding people to your company that your customers will be interfacing with, you can use email to info them of the news.
• Funny Jokes, Pictures, etc - A good joke, funny pictures or just something weird can be great content. Who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh?
• Educational Articles - Do you know something that others want to learn more about? Educational emails are good if they are relevant & interesting. This also has a side-benefit of positioning you as an expert on the topic.
• Inspirational Stories - To inspire is to motivate someone to act. You can have client stories that show the height of success someone can have if they just do things your way… or you can have an inspirational story that brings out the passion in people. Either way, inspirational emails are great.

b) Separate people into lists by interests

I am a 24 year old male who likes to dress elegantly. I am a semi-regular customer at Banana Republic. If they send me an email about women’s clothing, it’s getting deleted… immediately! If they do it enough times (twice is enough for me), I will unsubscribe and they’ll loose the ability to market to me.

Think about the different groups of people you’ve got in your contact list. How can you divide them into lists so that you can speak about things that are more relevant to them, more clearly.

If you have 5 major products/services, create 5 lists and put the customers of each into the appropriate lists… and speak to them appropriately.

‘Keep in Touch Using Email’ Series

• Part 1 - Use Emails to Provide Value to People
• Part 2 - Supplement 1-to-1 Communication
• Part 3 - Use a Good Email Marketing Software

~ mel

Melvin Ram
CEO, Volcanic Internet Marketing
Direct: (916) 743-9369
Email: melvin@volcanicmarketing.com

Technorati Tags: email marketing, relationship building, keep in touch, email marketing software

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under Email Marketing Tips, Relationship Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.