The first step in engineering a relationship with your customers when they come to your website is to build a contact database .  Every time someone visits your site, you are presented with the opportunity to collect contact information like name, email address, and phone number, in exchange for white papers, coupons, contests, newsletters, and also through survey responses.

Often times, an organization may have a comprehensive contact database but aren’t fully leveraging the value of it. The following tips have helped many of our customers create a more effective database marketing program that enhances existing relationships and grows website information banks:

Give your visitors more than one communication option to sign up to – offer newsletters for different interest groups, run a monthly contest, and offer a library of white papers.

Be specific about what they can expect for signing up – are you offering industry news, coupons, or special promotions?

Tell them how often they can expect to hear from you – will you send it out weekly, monthly, or quarterly? Adhere to the schedule once it has been set up.

Provide a preview of what they are signing up for – offer an example of your newsletter on the subscribe page.

Deal with privacy and unsubscribe fears upfront – be clear on your privacy policy and include a clear unsubscribe footer on all newsletters.

Make it easy to sign up – keep the information you collect to a minimum, or use a single field newsletter subscription box.

Promote sign-up options on every page of your site – link your subscribe page to a button , or embed a subscribe box on every page.

Give something of genuine value to entice them to give you permission to email them – things like exclusive offers, deals, or exclusive pre-sales to newsletter subscribers will help.

Ensure the database tool powering your site is robust and easy to query – you must be able to sort and filter your contacts properly to fully utilize the database.

Make your customers aware of your online sign-up when you are dealing with them face to face – add a link to your business cards, or collect their contact info and sign them up later.

Database marketing can deliver outstanding returns, so start using your website to build your business today! Clickspace makes it easy and cost-effective for all businesses, big or small, to start their own contact database. Click here to learn more about our DriveIt suite of marketing software.

We hope you have found these tips useful and will soon be reaping the rewards of an improved relationship with your customers. Do you have any success stories or unique database marketing experience that you can share with our readers? Please be sure to leave us a note below.

Tags: database marketing, newsletters

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Business, Quick Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.