• by Kath Pay , Op-Ed Contributor, September 25, 2014

Picture a coin with two sides. One side is your objective -- wanting to sell your goods or services -- and the other side is your customer wanting to buy your goods or services. You want to sell to them, and they want to buy from you.

Signups to your email programme follow suit. You want to email them and they want to hear from you, agreed? 

So why, when they sign up, do we feel ashamed about emailing them and try our hardest to reduce the frequency that we contact them?

In reality, our fears and concerns are misplaced. I believe we should be spending less time worrying about whether we’re mailing them too much, and more time concerning ourselves with whether we’re delivering what we promised them we would deliver.

You see, when they subscribed to hear from you, a transaction took place: You converted them into wanting to subscribe to receive your offers, and now you need to ensure that you are delivering upon this transaction.

Put it this way. If your subscribers could only access your email programme by paying you to be on the list, you wouldn’t be worrying about whether you’re emailing them too much -- but rather, whether you were giving them enough value.  Although there’s generally not a price tag at the point of subscription to receive our offers, our email programmes are no different. A value exchange happened, the subscriber has an expectation -- and accordingly, we need to deliver the goods.

Enter customer service. Simply put, our subscribers have requested to receive emails from us with offers and news. So, by reframing and changing our mindset, we now see that we are actually providing customer service by sending them the emails that they requested when they signed up.

By doing so, suddenly all of our guilt goes out the door. Provided we have an email programme that delivers value, we can hold our heads up high -- because we are delivering upon the transaction that took place at the point of subscription.

We can in fact take this customer-service mindset even further and package every email as a customer-service-oriented email. Ask yourself the following questions: Why did they subscribe? How can we help our subscribers to achieve their objective?

This change in mindset has a knock-on effect, as it forces us to be aware of the value we are or aren’t providing in our email programme. 

Some of the most successful email campaigns are abandoned cart emails, whose success lies partly in the fact that they are customer-service-oriented.  Everyone loves customer service -- a helping hand that assist in you in achieving your objectives -- and I believe if we were to carry this customer-service mindset throughout our entire email programme, we would reap the results with increased conversions and happy, engaged subscribers.

So go ahead and reframe your email programme in your mind. You are no longer just sending sales-oriented emails which are only focused on your side of the coin, but you are now sending customer-service focused emails that achieve the objectives of both sides of the coin. And don’t worry. You can still sell -- after all, that’s why your subscriber signed up to hear from you!