Just about now you have the feeling you're doing something right. Sales are up, perhaps double or triple what you've done the rest of the year. If you're in e-commerce, these are the salad days. But we all know that after the glow of Black Friday and Cyber Monday subsides, you face the challenge of converting holiday traffic into regular shoppers. How do you keep your customers, customers? You do it by engaging in outbound marketing with catalogues, fliers, cards, coupons and email. It's part of the larger process of customer retention.

Take Care of Business

First and foremost, when you have them, treat them right. Customer service is an investment in your business. Fill orders promptly. Return phone and email messages in a timely fashion. We all suffer from shopping anxiety at the holidays, so do your best to extend a calming hand through cyberspace. The best way to get customers back a second time is treat them right the first time.

Snail Mail Works--for a Price

Once the holiday season ends it is crucial to keep in touch with your customers. The old technology ways can work if they're done well. Fliers, brochures, catalogues, and coupons can all be effective if they're well-designed. But it is a fine line between a catchy snail mail offering and plain old junk mail. Too many businesses cut corners on design and their expensive mailers end up going straight from the mailbox to the trash. Solid Cactus hired long time print expert Randy Llewellyn because we understand the importance of making a good impression in a medium as expensive as print. Hire a pro. And expect to pay a premium for print.

You Found Them in Cyberspace...

Email is a cost-effective solution to keeping the customers you found, but the challenges are the same. How do you get customers to read what you send them? The good news is that email is much less expensive than snail mail. The bad news, bad email has a name: spam. Your job is to cut through the clutter, and a good message is a good place to start. Solid Cactus can design an attractive email template to help with your campaign. A well-designed, interesting message gets through more often.

There are Services for that...

If you are serious about mass emailing customers, you'll also need the help of an online application for list management and email delivery. Solid Cactus recommends Campaigner® from Got Corp. Once your Solid Cactus template is saved to your Campaigner account, you simply update it with your latest contacts and content to ensure captivating, professional looking email campaigns every time. Campaigner manages your email list. It automatically adds people who order from your Yahoo! store so you don't have to update lists by hand. Campaigner will track un-subscribers as well. If people don't want to receive your email it will automatically suppress them from future sends. Campaigner tracks important information like how many people actually opened the email you sent and how many clicked on the links you provided in your email. The information is out there. Take advantage of it to ensure success.

Many Happy Returns

Right now people are knocking at your cyber door. They liked you well enough to buy the first time; don't let them become one-timers. Learn to use email for your outbound marketing. For more information or to sign up for Campaigner, visit http://www.solidcactus.com/got.html.