Would you rather have a customer for now or a customer for life? Of course the latter. And the way you build a customer for life is by building a relationship with that customer, and that means doing more than just selling to them.

Email marketing makes that easy.

Using triggered emails, you can send personalized, timely messages to people on your list to recognize a birthday, anniversary, life stage or event. To do it, you need a rules-based system within the your email marketing system or your email service provider’s (ESP’s). You define the rule, frequency and outcome. It’s a lot of work to set up properly, but once it’s done, it essentially runs by itself so you can focus on optimizing your emails to have super subject lines compelling content.

Imagine sending your customers a birthday greeting out of the blue, with a coupon included perhaps but no sales pitch, just goodwill and a good deal (the coupon). Think that won’t generate some warm fuzzies and good feelings in your customer? Good feelings that will last until the next time they’re ready to buy!

If you want to know more about using triggered emails, or if you have an example of using them to build customer relationships, do share! Email us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com.

• Use a From name your customer will recognize
• Use a subject line that’s relevant to your customer
• Email your customers with a frequency that works for them, not you
• Segment your list and make your content as relevant to that customer as possible
• Make it easy for your customer by using short emails and obvious calls to action
• Use alt text so with images suppressed your customers still get your message
• Respect your customer’s privacy by not sharing your list

All of these examples are topics we’ve touched on before in this email marketing blog, but if you think of all of them as putting the customer first, it might help you do an even better job of adhering to these email marketing best practices.

Ask yourself every step of the way as you prepare your next email marketing campaign: Am I putting my customer first?

Last month we offered a dozen practical ways to grow your in-house email list. This month, we’ll share one of our favorite campaigns with you. But then we want you to come up with a few other interesting ways and either post them as comments here or email them to us at blog@clickmailmarketing.com. We’ll share them in this email marketing blog.

This favorite example was spotted last spring by a friendly freelance email copywriter. Tully’s Coffee and Pemco Insurance teamed up for a fun campaign that also raised money for charity and collected email addresses to boot. All they did was offer small pieces of paper where people could write extremely long, fictional coffee orders. You, as the consumer, got your name entered into a drawing. Tully’s got the goodwill created when you laughingly made up your order. Pemco got the goodwill created when they donated money to charity…and somebody collected email addresses, because each slip of paper offered a place to enter your email address at the bottom.

You can read more about the campaign by clicking here.

Then send us your clever, out-of-the-box ideas for growing your in-house email marketing list!