April 2008

Streamline Your Offline Customer List & Bring Them
Online For More Profits

In our previous tutorials we have been talking about
developing a customer list online. But what if you already
have a customer database including email addresses from
people who have purchased at your store but haven’t
had the time to do anything with that list?

First, let’s talk about the list you have developed from
customers who have bought at your store location and
how you are enticing them to give you their information.
Many wine stores have a sign up sheet for their monthly
wine tasting and this is how they develop a list of names
and email addresses. But let’s take this a step further.
Let’s make your marketing work for you and for your
customers. I am going to make some assumptions here
that may or may not be true for your wine store but go
with the ideas and apply those that would work for
your inventory.

You might want to consider different sign up sheets
where customers could give you their email address
depending on their interest. These customer signup
sheets could include wine tasting notifications, recipes
for elegant dinner parties and suggested wines, recipes
for light & healthy hors d’oeuvres and matching wine
selections, new gourmet foods that you carry, new
hand crafted chocolates you soon will carry
—or maybe have an email drawing entry for a free
picnic basket once a month that includes 2 bottles of
wine and selected cheeses, meats and bread.
The more creative ways you can find to get email
addresses from all the different types of customers
you have, the better.

Now let’s talk about how you can take your existing
customer email list that was generated from your
store and put it to good use. First, if you haven’t
done so already, this needs to be placed in a
database format and saved as a .csv file. Then we
need to upload that file to an email list management
service like aweber.com or getresponse.com.
Now don’t let this scare you…. it is very simple
to do!

I use aweber.com. I will show you the exactly how
to do this in my course but for now just know that
they are a little particular about following their
guidelines when importing your email lists to avoid
any type of spam. So what you do is import your
.csv file and send them a customized note asking
them to opt-in. It might read something like this:

“ Hi Jane this Bob & Sally who own the GrapeVine
Wine Store. You signed up for our wine tasting
notifications that we have the third Thursday of
every month. I surely hope you are enjoying them
as we are truly trying to provide a variety of wines
that we think you will enjoy sampling. Anyway,
we want to make sure that these wine tastings
are enjoyable for you and we also want to let you
know about new gourmet foods we will be carrying
soon. And as a way of saying thank you for your
business, we are offering you 20% off any single
wine purchase or 10% off a case of wine this weekend…
just click here if you want to stay on our list to receive
great offers like this…”

Remember it is important that you put your company
name and your personal name in this note so your
customers recognize you and click the confirmation
subscriber link!

And you might want to think about keeping the
email addresses you gather at your physical location
as a separate list from the people who sign up on
your website. We’ll, talk about that later in another
tutorial along with exactly step by step how to import
your email addresses into a list management service
like aweber.com and how to setup your messages to
your list that will encourage them to buy more from you.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial and that it
has inspired you to be more diligent about collecting
email addresses from your customers in your store.
Yet one more fun tip that comes to mind….
why not have a fancy guest book on a stand with
a really nice pen where customers can sign in or
shall we say, sign up to get notices about how they
can buy more great stuff from you!