Greetings from a warm & sunny South Africa. I am visiting our very successful African business and escaping the New York cold a for a few days.
THE NEWSFLASH ARTICLE BELOW IS A MUST READ, it is the single most important factor in all electronic communication projects:
The most critical requirements for these type of initiatives, is of course having your customers email addresses. Over the past nine years, we have helped hundreds of companies to successfully go about gathering their customer's email addresses. Today we will look at some of the most successful strategies in this regard.
 Before we do however, I would like to take a moment to welcome our newest North American biller, Allianz.
AIMS, an Allianz company, will be using Striata Secure PDF 'PUSH' strategy and solutions to deliver their agent's commission statements.
Wishing you all the very best for Thanksgiving.
Regards,
Garin Toren
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In order to communicate with your customer's electronically, it is of course an essential requirement that you have their accurate email address.
The two most important and critical things that you absolutely MUST do are:
- Have a Champion: Have a single executive within your business, whose function and high level responsibility it is, to fulfill the task of managing and reporting on this strategy & processes.
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Have a Plan: There must be a detailed, documented and 'bought into' plan of action, including:
- Target numbers
- Areas of responsibilities
- Tracking & reporting mechanisms
- Processes
For the purposes of these activities, we recommend dividing your customer base into three distinct groups:
- Customers whose email addresses you already have
- New customers
- Existing customers (whose email addresses you do not have)
Target 1 - current customer emails
It is probable that by this stage you have a certain number of your customer's email addresses already on file. These can be from users of your website, email marketing that you may do, or ones that have been captured by 3rd party payment partners. (It is important to ask any partners for these.)
A good initial step is to consolidate these all into the database where you are going to store all your email addresses going forward. (Note - if your CIS or other customer database does not have the ability to store and flag this data, then companies like Striata offer sophisticated centralized email address management services.)
Target 2 - new customers
Over 80% of all of your new customers have an accurate email address. The sign up process is the perfect opportunity to gather this information. We suggest that it be an almost mandatory field, with 'no email' address being the exception process. As many billers turn over / churn as high as 30% of their customer database in 18 months, this is an invaluable capture strategy. It is also the simplest if done effectively.
We would strongly recommend automating a welcome email message including your company's customer service information and advising the new customer that they will be receiving all communication from you, through email, including all bills & statements. (You can also offer to turn on paper at any time, should they require it. The default position however, should be paperless.)
This welcome email will also determine the accuracy of the email address. Technology allows you to tell that the email has been received and opened. (It is recommended that you send paper if you do not have this confirmation.)
Target 3 - existing customers
The most cost effective way to capture a significant amount of email addresses, is to append every customer contact with a 'may we take a moment to update your details' opportunity. This include all calls into your contact centre and walk ins at your payment centers, and in fact, any customer 'touch-point'.
Other great ways to capture your existing base include:
- Many companies are receiving large volumes of incoming customer emails. These are of course accurate email addresses. The Striata Inbound Email Management tool has the ability to automate the capturing of these email addresses, directly into your CIS, as long as the customer identifier is present. Manual adding is definitely advised too.
- Create an opt-in to email communication location on your website's homepage.
- Create banners throughout your site linking to this opt-in location.
- If your product or service solutions are sold through brokers, in the insurance industry for instance, then create a mechanism for the broker to improve their current process with you by capturing the end customer's email address. As long as they are incentivized to do so through time & efficiency advantages, this can be a very good avenue of capture.
- It is also possible to (quite legally) buy your customer email addresses from certain providers. You will need to have common information, like home address, SSN, home telephone number etc, in order to match these.
Using these strategies, and without incurring any marketing expense, you should be able to gather 50% of your customers email addresses within 36 months:
| Year 1: 15% |
Year 2: 20% |
Year 3: 15% to 20% |
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