Last year we renamed our company Elect Electric and we wanted to let all of our clients know. We had never emailed all of our clients at one time before, so we started researching how to do this. After looking around for a while we found a service, Constant Contact, that seemed to be a perfect fit. I signed up for the service and made a nice email and loaded all of our contacts into the Constant Contact system. The Constant Contact platform, we realised, also gave us a new opportunity to serve all of our clients. We could use the service to give reminders of important household safety checks and updates on new technology, services we offer or even family happenings to our clients. So we decided to create a newsletter format. I sent a newsletter out to all of my Ehinger Electric clients from Elect Electric with our new email. The response was great at first but a few days later we received notice that our Constant Contact account had been frozen. We were told we needed to call a department that deals with bad accounts. I was bothered so I called right away. What had gone wrong? Long story short, we received a lot of SPAM reports from our list. I found out that when I uploaded my contacts more contacts than I knew were added to the list and that sending from Elect Electric's new email account made people feel like my email was SPAM. They recommended that I clear up our contact list and send three emails WITH THE OLD EMAIL ADDRESS, the one all my clients already had in their contacts. So that is what I did. I sent out three newsletters with the old email address and then started to use the new email address: info@ElectElectric.com . This event made me realise that although I know a lot about electrical wiring I knew nothing about the ethics of emailing my clients. After the December newsletter I decided to study more on emailing and form some more clear ideas about the subject. I wanted to know how to inform new clients about receiving the email and how to get feedback from existing clients. I wanted to know how frequent the emails should be and what would make our emails a good value for our clients to receive. In short we hope to be Responsible, Respectful and Responsive with the emails Elect Electric sends out. So that is what we have been working on and we hope to get our value packed newsletters out to our clients soon. Constant Contact has been a great service and we have received many great responses from clients about our newsletter. It is also very easy to stop them if you do not want to get them, just scroll to the bottom of the page and click unsubscribe. Always learning, Kathy and Danny Ehinger.
