Come In. I've Been Expecting You

Tweet

You've Got Mail (from Me)

My last column explained the value of creating personal pages for your best customers. (See " A Fine and Private Page," Inc. Technology, 1999, No. 4.) That strategy works great for sites serving a handful of corporate accounts, but if you sell to hundreds or thousands of customers, it becomes unmanageable. An alternative is to send those hundreds or thousands of customers newsletters that address them, if not as individuals, then at least as members of discrete and cherished groups. This is a case where a little technology -- specifically, the software that customers use to sign up for the newsletter on your site and the software that manages the mailing list -- goes a long way.

Like most personalization efforts, newsletters require segmentation. Identify the ways various customers use your goods and services. Think about the different problems they're solving, the different industries they're in, and the different reasons they do business with you. Use those distinctions to divide your customers into groups -- and then keep your eyes peeled for news and ideas pertinent to those groups. Your basic newsletter will probably provide information of value to everyone. But if you can include some advice on finding prime office space in the letters that go out to dentists in private practice, and notices of institutional discounts on X-ray film for hospital procurement staff, your customers will know you're thinking about them.

When customers shape their requirements, they generally feel better about their purchases.

Does that mean you have to send out 4 or 8 or 32 full-fledged newsletters a month? No. Sometimes it's more effective to shoot off snippets as you stumble across them. Just make sure anything you direct toward your customers' mailboxes is really interesting or else you'll risk becoming a pest. How do you know when you're hurting, not helping? When customers unsubscribe.

If that type of customization sounds like more than your Web-hosting service can handle, you might consider some products and services that allow you to get personal without going personally bankrupt.

MessageMedia's UnityMail ( www.messagemedia.com), for example, is a Web site that assumes the burden of handling newsletter mailings and other customer-segmentation tasks. Customers will still go to your site to sign up for your newsletter and select the subjects they want to hear about, but you'll construct the sign-up form on MessageMedia's digital turf. The service handles addressing and distribution for about $500 a month (plus a $2,500 initial setup fee).

Entice, a software product from Multiactive Software, lets you drag and drop your way to answer-dependent paths so that if visitors express interest in the bagels and the jam rather than in the croissants and the jam, your site can also recommend the cream cheese. In addition, Entice sends your customers different E-mail messages according to where on your site they touched down. (Someone landing on the bagel page, for example, might find in her mailbox an announcement of a sale on slicers.) And you can use the product's nifty dashboard to observe customers' real-time peregrinations around your site. Entice costs about $25,000 for the initial setup, which isn't bad when you consider that it also includes an E-commerce engine.

If that's still too rich, you might try the combination of GuestTrack and GT/Mail ( www.guesttrack.com), which together offer many of the same personalization features that Multiactive Software does but for only $6,000. What's the catch? GuestTrack is a developer's tool -- -albeit an easy-to-use one -- so you have to be ready, willing, and able to build your own SQL databases and E-commerce applications.

Of course, all of these tools merely give function to the form that you provide. And that form derives from an intimate understanding of your customers as individuals, rather than as some undifferentiated, money-waving mass. No, you may not be able to afford to treat each customer like a king. But if you treat them all like archdukes, chances are they'll go away satisfied.

Jim Sterne, president of Target Marketing, in Santa Barbara, Calif., is a speaker, consultant, and author of the books World Wide Web Marketing and Customer Service on the Internet (John Wiley & Sons).

 PREV  1 | 2 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Technology Newsletter

Email Address: