Advice: Keeping Customers
Administering
The best way to administer this club is with a computer, an email address and a simple database.
Most PC's come with Outlook Express, which allows you to send and receive emails, as well as keeping an address book with notes. This will allow you to keep everyone on file and send blanket emails to everyone in the list. You could set up standard templates to reply to people to save you time.
The more information you have the better. The more experienced you get, you could start categorising people to send them specific messages. As already mentioned, respect people's privacy:
- Do not give their details to anyone else.
- Do not bombard them with emails - once every month or two should be more than enough. Remember, they would only buy from you once a year maximum anyway.
- If they ask you to stop sending them emails, do. In fact, after every sales or newsletter style email, put a footer in telling them how to unsubscribe. The standard is to say reply to this email with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject header. You can then get rid of them from your database.