John Wall: Email is a super effective channel for talking to your customers and prospects. There’s a few things to keep in mind. The first is just that house list that you’ve got of your contacts, your friends and early adopters. That’s invaluable as a startup. You know, being able to email people and get some feedback on what’s going on or announce launches is a great way to go. We always advise people to have, even as your first web page, if you’ve got nothing, at least have a single page that says, “Hey, this is what we do. Enter your email to learn more when we launch.” So that you’ve got something out there, grabbing email addresses. As you start that house list, you can start off emailing directly, one-on-one. One thing that we advise people not to do as a startup is to use a bunch of BCCs. You know, don’t put your address in the two field, then copy and paste a whole bunch of addresses into the blind field. That tends to already have you tagged as spam and getting you in trouble.
John Wall: Eventually, you will want to jump onto a bulk email service,whether that’s on its own or part of some kind of customer relationship management software. There’s a bunch of resources on the Mass Founders Network to dig into as far as that, trying to make those decisions. But there’s a few things for bulk email. One is you want to look at warming up email addresses. This is something that’s become more important, especially with the way Gmail tends to put promotional stuff into one folder and, you know, your regular personal mail in another. The idea is that you want to be doing a number of emails to people that are being opened and read. It’s even gone so far that there are services you can use to make sure that when you send out a blast of email, those emails are being opened and read, so that you’re getting a decent reputation score, so that your emails don’t end up in spam traps and get caught. And as you get further, eventually you’ll want to reach to a point where you may consider having your promotional emails on another domain, because you don’t want to run into a situation where, if you’re doing a lot of email promotions, if your emails end up getting blocked or spam blocked, you don’t want that to interfere with any customer service emails or transactional emails that your product uses to send out invoices or support records or anything like that.
John Wall: Keep track of how often customers and prospects want to be contacted. Give them the option to go monthly, weekly or more, but test everything. That’s the most important thing. Subject lines, open rates, offers. There’s a million things to talk about with email, but this will at least get you started and getting you able to communicate effectively with customers and prospects.
