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Think of the large unknown number of emails coming to your company’s employees every day from customers. They arrive in email boxes for inside sales personnel, outside sales people, quality control technicians, customer service employees and sometimes straight into the main receptionist desk possibly through your company’s website. All of these come directly from your market. These email inquiries also provide a great source of future business opportunities coming directly to you. The question lies in whether you are doing anything with them or not?
If you must answer ‘no’, start capturing this valuable data tomorrow. Assign someone to review all of the customer emails daily. Instruct your designated employee to capture pertinent email and physical addresses, correct name spellings, telephone numbers, fax numbers and company titles to enter into your company’s customer database. Add information to designate the product of inquiry or service requested so the customer may be properly targeted for future sales, discounts, coupons, weekend sale events or any type of promotion that may lie within his area of interest or desired product type.
Assign an employee to enter this data daily. Train your employees to forward any new name to this department in order to capture customer information. See if all incoming emails can be copied to this person for daily data mining.
Before this occurs, send out a preliminary memo to let all employees know copies of all incoming emails to internal company addresses will be forwarded to this person for recording into the sales database. The subjects of the emails are unimportant but the contact information in them is. Let your employees know ahead of time so they may understand that the sales database holds the keys to future sales and will be monitored from the announced start date.
Suggestions for compiling company databases from emails:
- Sales List: Accumulate all buyers’ names, titles, email addresses, physical and mailing addresses, telephone numbers and other likes and dislikes or interests for a company sales list.
- Vendor List: Accumulate all salespersons’ names, titles, email addresses, physical and mailing addresses, telephone numbers and other likes and dislikes or interests for a company vendor list.
- Government Agencies: Accumulate all tax agents’ names, titles, email addresses, physical and mailing addresses, telephone numbers and other data to create a company government agencies list (i.e. EPA, water authority, electricity oversight, federal, state and local tax offices and audit services, transportation agencies).
