Why You Need an E-mail Strategy.
Now more than ever, it's critical to leverage this medium to your advantage.
Remember the day you sent or received your first e-mail?
I can’t.
It almost seems that e-mail has always been there—even though it’s a fairly
recent development. Less than two decades ago, most folks considered
innovations like the fax machine and e-mail to be cutting-edge technology.
Today, most of us wouldn't be able to function efficiently without them.
E-mail has revolutionized business communication more than any other technology.
It hasn’t completely replaced inter-office envelopes and the postal service—at
least not yet. But it’s moved us several steps in that direction.
E-mail is cheaper than the telephone, and provides a built-in means of
communicating with whole groups of people simultaneously. And, it
automatically builds
an audit trail when working on important projects. 
E-mail is here to stay. But do we regard it more as a blessing, or a burden? Ironically, the same tool that was designed to speed communication can also reduce productivity. If we’re going to take full advantage of its capabilities in growing our businesses, we need a strategy to leverage e-mail’s power, and minimize its potential to slow us down.
I recommend a two-part strategy: First, forge a plan to keep costs down. Second, leverage e-mail to advertise and market your business with every message you send.
Minimizing Costs
Here are three proven techniques you can adopt to minimize e-mail’s associated costs:
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Control your e-mail software—don’t let it control you! |
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Rather than leave e-mail running all day, set definite times on your schedule to manage your e-mail. Before firing up Outlook or Eudora, review your schedule for the day and identify the work you want to accomplish first. Otherwise, we have a tendency to let e-mail manage our time, instead of the other way around. On my most productive days, I’ve found it useful to open up Outlook once during mid-morning, after the day is underway, and then again toward the end of the day. I’m still able to communicate with people, and if someone wants an immediate response, there’s always the telephone. A different approach might work better for you. But it’s important that you have a plan and a strategy so that you're in control of your schedule.
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Declare war on SPAM. |
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Can you afford to continue on this manual route—picking through an unfiltered pile of mail that’s certain to overwhelm your inbox, hoping to salvage the most important ones and deleting the rest? Depending on your unique situation, it might be worth investing in one or more of the following solutions: · Install PC-based spam killers. Search the web for “Spam Blockers” or “Spam Filters” for a few examples. Or, consider upgrading your e-mail software. For example, Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 offer Junk E-mail filtering capabilities. These can be very helpful. · While PC-based spam blockers are very useful, an even more effective approach is to install spam blocking software on your e-mail server. This prevents most spam from ever arriving in your inbox. What’s more, it reduces traffic on your network. So everybody wins—except the spammers. These server-based spam blockers come in several flavors:
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Context-based
blockers. SpamAssassin,
for example, reads every e-mail word-for-word, searching for word
patterns that identify them as garbage. You can tweak its sensitivity
by monitoring messages it flags as spam. Once you’re comfortable with
its accuracy, you can instruct SpamAssassin to automatically delete
the offending e-mails. 2. Sender-aware blockers. These focus on where the e-mails came from. For example, SpamHaus.com offers up-to-date blacklists which your e-mail server can use to identify junk mail: E-mails arriving from senders on the blacklist, are automatically deleted. But e-mails from people you’ve flagged as trustworthy (ie., whitelisted) are routed to your inbox. 3. Identity-restricting blockers. These spam blockers send “who are you?” e-mails to unknown senders, requiring them to register before any of their e-mails get delivered. And they give you the ability to decide whether you want to continue receiving e-mails from the sender. No spam filters are foolproof, but they’re almost always worth the effort and expense. Consider this: if you can cut that 5-minute-per-day spam volume in half, you’ll save your company hours of productive time per employee each year. ($600 per year for an average small business with a staff of four.)
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Ask yourself, “Is it time to host our own e-mail server?” |
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Consider some of the advantages of hosting your own e-mail server:
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valuable time. Think of it: if each
of your employees and coworkers spends only five minutes per day
reviewing and deleting junk e-mail messages, how many hours will your
business lose over the course of a year? A company with only four
employees would lose a minimum of 21 hours worth of
productivity in this scenario! Some might hesitate to host their own e-mail for fear of the maintenance that will be required. But after installation, e-mail servers sit there quietly, doing their job day in and day out with very little maintenance. We’ve left ours running for months on end without ever touching or rebooting it.
Use e-mail to promote your business.
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Carefully consider the address you choose to identify yourself. |
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Compare the following samples. What impression does each give you about the recipient and the company s/he represents?
What message does your e-mail address convey about you and your company? While we’re at it, let’s consider the wisdom of using free-mail as your primary e-mail account. The term “Free-mail” describes e-mail accounts you don’t have to pay for. Services such as Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Are just a few of the services which offer them. Mailbox sizes are considerable—Gmail currently boasts 6492.263743 megabytes of free storage “so you’ll never need to delete another message.” And many have built-in spam reduction capabilities. So why wouldn’t everyone sign up? The most compelling reason is cost. Yes, there are costs associated with using free-mail. Because no matter how creative you are, a free-mail address doesn’t carry the same marketing weight as one that’s linked to your web domain. In fact, some spam blockers automatically treat all e-mails from free-mail hosts as spam. So you run the risk of people never receiving your important messages.
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Dress up your John Hancock |
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With minimal
effort on your part, you can change your e-mail signature frequently
to advertise special offers and invite customers to upcoming events.
Often you can incorporate your company's logo. You can even
insert hyperlinks that drive traffic back to your company’s web page.
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Use e-mail to keep in touch with customers and prospects |
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Word to the wise: Whenever you launch an e-mail campaign, please be sure to make it easy for folks to unsubscribe. And whenever you receive such a request, please be sure to honor it promptly! |
Considering how widely accepted e-mail has become, it’s easy to take it for granted. But successful business people will recognize its importance as a communication vehicle, and proactively take steps to make e-mail work for them, and not against them.
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If you’re interested in implementing your own in-house mail server but don’t have the time or desire to get it up and running, give us a call. What ingredients will you need? 1. A broadband internet connection (DSL, T1, etc) 2. A static IP address 3. A router that can map ports 4. A modest PC. Doesn’t have to be new. A Pentium IV with a 60-80 gigabyte hard drive will be able to send and receive several hundred thousand e-mails per day. 5. An uninterruptible power supply/battery backup for your PC so that it doesn’t get fried by voltage spikes, and can be shut down gracefully in the event of a power failure. 6. A backup strategy. I recommend backing up important folders daily and ghosting the entire hard drive on a monthly basis. If this all sounds like geek speak, or you want more information, feel free to contact Dave Martin at I/O Technologies, Inc. 262-437-3239 x101 ( dmartin@iotechno.com ).
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