The big question is how do you keep in touch with your customers without being accused of spamming or just making them unhappy with all of your emails? There are a couple of easy ways of doing this while building a stronger relastionship with them.

The first way is by doing a series of follow-up emails to your customers. Here is how I have mine setup. First let me tell you that I use eBay’s Blackthrone auction porcessing software. It still has some bugs in it since it is new but I think it may be the best product overall. There are dozens of other services out there that do the same thing. Anyways, using some kind of auction processing software just makes life easier but you can do everything yourself.

I take every chance I get to document each step in the post auction process by notify my customer through email. I send out an email when payment is received, when I ship the item, I wait one week before telling them I posted feedback and two weeks after shipping I send out a survey to make sure the customer was happy.

This whole process keeps my name in front of them for almost one month. You will never get one complaint about spamming but just the opposite. Your customers will thank you for the great communications. Oh yea, I wait until Friday to send out the feedback and survey emails so they will get them just in time for the weekend auctions. Sending these out in the middle of the week won’t get that good of a response.

At the bottom of each of these emails I have three links. Something like this (links are not real):

This weeks current auctions
stores (dot) ebay (dot) com/xxxxx

Join my Newsletter of interesting Postal History Facts
mynewsleter (dot) com

Visit my Postal History Blog
blog (dot) com

I use tracking url’s in my emails so I know how many people click on these links and trust me a lot of them do.

You may have noticed that I also have a newsletter, which is a double opt-in newsletter. This is not the newsletter feature that ebay offers but from a third party service. Of course I also take advantage of the ebay newsletter feature but use it more as a weekly announcement email.

Between the emails and the two newsletters I can reach out to over 500 people each week. For me that really helps kick-start my auctions each week.