I have spent a number of hours over the past few weeks, bringing air and light to the far recesses of my son’s bedroom and removing a winter’s supply of mud, bugs, dust and pollen from my screen porch.  So that makes it time for my second annual post about spring cleaning your technology.

The Current Clean Up List

To get us started I’ll refer you to my previous posts on the topic – every year you should look at your website to see if needs to be refreshed (and it probably does!).  There are more great tips for cleaning up your website in this post from Moreover Technologies. You should also clean out your old emails or at least archive them out of your mailbox.  Finally, I’ll add here my continued plea to put your fax machine of its misery.

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I know you get a lot of email for your small business – we all do.  Whether you keep your email on your server or on your computer it can build up over time.  It is a good idea to clean up your old email from time to time to keep from running out of space and to speed up your email.  You may find you’ll even save yourself some time when you don’t have to search thru all your emails to find things.

Do you have a lot of old messages out there, in your Inbox or perhaps in folders?  Do you really need those messages?  Some companies do need to keep records of customer correspondence but others can get rid of it after a while.  So that is the first step – delete anything you really don’t need.

Do you have old messages that you need to keep but likely won’t access often?  Archive these emails; most email clients allow you to archive emails to a file on your computer.  This physically stores the email in a separate place from the rest of your email.  You can leave that file on your computer (back it up!) or, if you really don’t think you’ll have to access those email often you can copy that file to a CD or to your backup location.

Now that you have cleaned things up a bit, look at what you still have.  Are there ways to organize it using folders to make it easier to use?  This is a great time to group email in folders.  Common ways to do this are by topic, by sender or by date.

Next, clean out your spam or junk folders if you have them (and likely you do).  Finally, take out the trash by emptying your trash or deleted folder.

There, doesn’t your Inbox feel lighter, fresher cleaner?

In the last post I wrote about how important it is for small businesses to respond to emails from customers and to use it as a communication channel if that is what the customer prefers.  Face it, some people just feel more comfortable with the feeling of distance you get with email as opposed to phone or face to face conversations.  Personally, I like email because I can send and respond asynchronously, at my convenience.

There is another important aspect of email as it relates to customer service that I want to explore today – outbound email. This is where you send email to a customer that are not directly in response to a query or email from the them.

What kinds of email am I talking about?  Email that provides value or information to a customer that is not salesy or annoying.  Assuming your customer has given you permission to send them emails you can send newsletters with educational content, personalized emails with reminders, emails with coupons or specials.  Here are some examples:

• an accounting firm could send out quarterly newsletters with information about tax changes or tips on how to save money on taxes.  They could send out personal reminders when it was time to file quarterly taxes.
• an auto repair business could send out emails when it is time for an oil change, recalls or other routine maintenance.  In these they could provide coupons or services for those specials.
• a hardware store could send out seasonal newsletters that focus on “going green” or weatherizing homes or gardens for the upcoming season.
• a garden center could send out monthly gardening tips
• a hair salon could use email to send reminders for upcoming appointments

There is a marketing aspect to some of these; as a business owner you are hoping that your customer will be reminded about a service or product they need from you.  But beneath all of these there should be a strong vein of customer service, of providing additional incremental value to your customer.  It costs nothing or almost nothing to use Mail Chimp, Constant Contact or Aweber to send out targetted emails to your customers.

Do you use email to improve your customer service?  If not, is it time to look at your technology plan to add it?