“Dear Valued Customer” … the fastest way to losing a sale

Address as many of your online customers as possible by name. Make your emails personalized.

Email is cheap and easy to use, so Internet businesses are using it all the time. But if a business is unorganized, the owner may find themselves having to revert to “Dear Sir” or “Dear Madam”. Or even worse, to “Dear Sir or Madam”.

Can you imagine how that would work if you were doing it on the phone?

Email gets the same response as a phone call. So resist the pressure to simply use email because it is cheap; even if you don’t have a name to match with the email. Instead take the time to put a system in place in your business so you will always have a name to link to an email.

With an autoresponder, this is easy, because you can set them up so a visitor to your site will have to leave their name as well as their address before they can get onto your subscriber list. Then the autoresponder software will send all the emails in the sequence to “Hi, John” or “Dear Robyn”. Its automated.

And of course, you can do a lot more than just personalize autoresponder messages with a first name. You can require your visitor at the time he signs up to give almost any personal information you would like to have. Their city, their age, their income band, the organization they belong to, their marital status. Anything, as long as it doesn’t deter the visitor.

Once you have these details, you can easily set up your autoresponder to send out to only people in a certain city, or only to married subscribers, or just to low income names.

Can you see how personal and specific some of your sales messages can now become? And can you sense how effective these messages could be?

Make your business emails personal.