E-CARE: Using Opt-in Email to Create Customers for Life
http://www.webpromote.com
August 1999

Email is a marketer's dream because it's instantly interactive, 
relatively inexpensive and highly measurable. With email, marketers can 
reach large groups of customers and prospects with customized and 
personalized messages, enabling quick and relevant communications.

E-care is different from the mass interaction of sending announcements 
and offers to your opt-in list. E-care incorporates email and your 
database to customize and cultivate your relationships with your 
customers, one at a time. 

To set up an e-care program, first consider all the ways you interact 
with your customers: phone, fax, face-to-face, letters, etc. Now 
identify the ways you can conduct these interactions--whether they're 
handled by sales, support or other departments--via email.

Conducting these customer communications via email will not only allow 
you to offer quicker responses, but more importantly, you can record 
customer preferences across a breadth of data fields. Some examples of 
the data you could collect include name and contact details, whether 
they own a cat or a dog, what they've purchased from you in the past, 
how often they respond or click through on an email you send them, and 
if they want text or HTML emails.

Having this data allows you to tailor future customer interactions to 
their preferences and background. The database storing the information 
must be available to everyone in your organization who might have 
additional contact with that customer (via any medium). You could use a 
web-based database, for example, to make the information available 
across your company.

*  INTERACTIVE AND AUTOMATED

An e-care system also takes into consideration the response and feedback
from your customers. A tool from a company called Close the Distance 
< http://www.closethedistance.com >, for example, lets marketers create 
automated and interactive campaigns that manage in-bound email, not just
outbound.

With this tool, different incoming messages trigger different outbound 
messages based on specific sorting criteria. An in-bound email triggers 
the database to read customer type, order date, geographic area and 
other data, and factor that into the response. In addition, responses 
can be sequenced, so one outgoing communication can be broken into a 
series of messages that can be delivered according to different 
schedules.

Here's an example of how an e-care system can work. Suppose you publish 
a magazine or run a website that sells advertising. You have sales reps 
located throughout the country. An incoming email tagged from a specific
state would trigger a standard, prewritten response, but it would come 
from the email address of the sales rep that serves that geographic 
area.

Here's another example: Your database includes information on a 
customer, including which product he's purchased, which ones he inquired
about, and the date he made a purchase. An incoming message about 
service would trigger a response from tech support or sales that is 
specific to the product he purchased or is interested in. If you only 
offer tech support free for the first year, the database would read his 
purchase date and send a response saying that his free support has 
expired, but here are some other options. This process of adapting a 
response to a particular inbound email based on database criteria is 
known as adaptive response monitoring.

*  ONE-TO-ONE
"The goal is to develop one-to-one marketing messages, messages tailored
to individuals rather than some sort of demographic or broad customer 
type," says Steve McCullough of Close the Distance. 

Measure response in every possible area: the number of repeat customers 
vs. one-time customers, the number of customers with expanding account 
sizes vs. customers whose accounts stagnate or shrink, and positive vs. 
negative customer feedback. Finally, of course, measure changes in 
profits based on the lower expenses and higher revenues that result from
an effective e-care system.

*  CUSTOMER RETENTION
But remember that the number one goal in e-care is customer retention, 
and keeping customers informed goes a long way toward that goal. To keep
its customers well-informed, Wells Fargo created a web-based 
communication system for its customers, its 4,000-person sales team, and
its marketing staff. The intranet is managed by software called 
Portalware from Glyphica < http://www.glyphica.com >. Portalware 
automatically sends email updates whenever documents or messages are 
changed or sent, allowing Wells Fargo to update customers on issues such
as pricing and availability. 

Implementing a customer e-care plan requires buy in from your whole 
organization, at least everyone in your organization with an email 
account and interaction with the outside world. Set a policy about how 
quickly to respond to every incoming email, and the level of 
professionalism of the response.

But success makes e-care more difficult. The better email communication 
works for your customers, the more active your email will become as a 
customer care channel. Reward employees who understand email's powerful 
impact on your corporate image. Reward those customers who stick with 
you by continuing to improve the care they receive through email. For 
example, make the product improvements they recommend, respond quickly 
to their email messages and make better communications available to them
through this preferred channel.

By Shannon Kinnard

Shannon Kinnard < http://www.ideastation.com > is a writer specializing 
in email newsletters, and the author of "Marketing With Email", 
due this October by Maximum Press.