Do Business Well

Every organization, large or small, can use email to establish a dialogue and build loyalty among its prospects, members, and customers. And every organization, regardless of size, needs to follow the guidelines and principles. But size does matter when it comes to the investment a company can make in infrastructure and the number of people it can commit to developing and operating a program. Don’t worry, though. Even small businesses with limited resources have plenty of ways to use email to communicate with their customers.

If your company has only a small number of customers or clients, you may still be able to use your regular email software to send out messages, announcements, and newsletters. This type of program ends up looking a lot like the regular email dialogue you would have with your customers or clients. You send out a message to your client list and respond to their requests individually. The advantage is that you can establish a very personal dialogue with every client. However, this solution works only for a small client base, and even maintaining infrequent communication can take up a lot of time. Fortunately, there are several basic software packages that can help you maintain simple mailing lists and send broadcast emails to your lists. L-Soft’s LISTSERV product, Responsys, and Message Media’s RevNet are just three of these. At the point where your organization starts running its own mailing list, a marketing person and an IT person will need to begin dedicating significant amounts of time to managing the program.

Working with an email marketing service provider is probably not going to be a viable option for very small businesses: it’s hard to justify the level of investment necessary to develop a customized program if it’s going to support only a few hundred or perhaps even a few thousand customers. That said, service providers who focus on the small business market will probably surface in the near future. They’ll offer basic, turnkey email marketing and customer communications services at a much lower cost than today’s higher-end service providers.

Also, there will probably be more advanced products available on the market over the course of the next few years that will enable smaller companies to communicate with up to a few thousand customers in a personal manner by setting up and organizing their own small customer databases. These developments mean that large organizations aren’t the only ones who need to think about the organizational impact of continuous customer communication. Any organization that needs to stay in touch with its customers— and that means every business—will be impacted as well.

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