Avoiding the Spam Folder: How to have Stronger Email Communication with Your Customers

Email is a critical piece to the puzzle of reaching and holding onto the attention of your customers, but often this powerful mode of communication is wasted. Email spam has become an accepted reality for most information age consumers, however that doesn’t stop some from employing heavy filters on their incoming mail to avoid having to deal with the garbage that is sent their way. Your company’s ability to establish a meaningful conversation with consumers will help keep you out of the snares of these filters so you can maintain your connection with your customers.

In many ways, email is one of the true equalizers in terms of communicating with a different party. Anyone can have an email address, and send email to and from that address. This is different than, of course, regular mail, which requires a physical location someplace to house the mail and actual postage being paid to deliver your message. One of the fundamental facts of email is that it’s free – a gift and a curse, as many companies and other nefarious entities choose to exploit email to send all kinds of nasty and pointless communication. And it’s the pointless communication that actually does email as a whole a disservice: we expect our filters to screen out the nasty stuff, but what of the generic cookie-cutter messages large corporations or well-meaning small businesses send out as a puny attempt to connect with thousands of consumers at once? The truth is, if these messages aren’t targeted or personalized, they do more than bore the consumer—they risk turning off the customer completely and lead them to find a new source of services.

The first step to writing effective emails is to just stop abusing the ability email provides where you can send a mass amount of messages at once. Sure, there’s nothing stopping you from sending out emails to every address collected by visits to your website, but you need to pause, take a breath, and ask yourself why you’re doing such a thing. You certainly don’t want people to regret having visited your website, as the wrong kind of word-of-mouth can spread faster than you can say “Kanye West Twitter feed.” Instead of doing this kind of easily avoidable damage to your brand, consider how identifying key issues for your prospective consumer can help establish that initial foothold to build a relationship going forward. They took the time to visit your website—do they have one of their own? Maybe a social media presence that’s open to the public could provide a few clues to writing the best message to them. Doing a little research on your end so that you can craft something meaningful for that person is simply a better strategy than firing away random messages into the wide expanses of the internet, hoping for a response that, in reality, has to be earned.