Customer Data: Use Your Website to Learn More About Your Customers

Customer Information Collection

Collecting customer information online is a great benefit to your business. By gathering information like email addresses and mailing addresses, you are adding depth to your marketing capabilities. If your customers have given you permission to contact them using the information that they provide on your website, you can deliver email or postal mail newsletters to announce and market your newest products, services, and special offers.

It is important that you get permission to contact your customers, so your website should force people to either accept or decline the newsletters and marketing communications during their registration process. To help your customer understand your reasons for wanting their contact information, your website should provide a clear Privacy Policy statement that fully and accurately describes how you intend to use the information that people submit on your site.

Website Membership Features

The website should also provide the capability for registered members to modify and adjust their communications preferences. If you are sending email and your website does not provide an "opt-out" page or a way for registered members to remove themselves from the mailing list, you are asking for trouble because someone may report your email as SPAM to one of the many "blacklists" such as SpamCop.net.

Protecting Your Reputation & Investment in Email Marketing

Blacklists are web servers that list website domains or email server IP addresses that people have complained about or reported as sending SPAM or Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). If your email server gets listed on one of the major blacklists, you may as well forget about trying to deliver any email since most big ISPs' inbound email servers check the blacklists before accepting email.

Being listed on a blacklist is not the end of the world and some of them will list your email server for 24 hours and then delist it if nobody else complains during that time. It's better to play it safe and take the precautions and measures necessary to establish a professional marketing email policy and procedure since you really don't want to get a reputation of sending unsolicited email.

Annoyed email users often complain to their internet service provider such as AOL or Comcast about repeatly receiving unwanted email. Without contacting you at all, the ISP usually just blocks any email from your webserver - this can really hurt you since this means that you will probably be unable to deliver email to any other users of that ISP.