This morning an article found its way over to my inbox about the ways in which consumers like to hear from companies. This immediately got me thinking about all the brands, stores and social sites I use and which ones I tend to find myself visiting again and again. With very few exceptions, the sites I return to when I’m not thinking about visiting them are the ones that have either just sent me an email or do so frequently. This is even true of sites that I don’t shop with like social networking sites, forums, news sites, etc… The places sending out alerts and updates that match my needs get me back and the ones that do it well get me back often.

Despite all the talk about spam and message blindness, consumers continue to overwhelmingly use and request email as a means of communication. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Most of us spend our days in front of a computer using email to accomplish business goals, arrange evening plans and as an article in from today’s USA Today mentioned, we now even receive wedding invitations via email (but that’s another topic for another post).

Now it’s also worth mentioning (and the survey in the article supports) that email is by no means the only way to communicate and certainly not the only way I would expect to receive information. IM, RSS / Feeds, text messages and dozens of other communication methods exist – even posting a Facebook update can be a great way to remain top of mind. However, rather than using the method that you or your developers best like (i.e. the new fancy tools), shouldn’t you be using the one your customers prefer and actually follow (i.e. the one that they’ll use)? Getting a text from a FaceBook application that lets me respond is wonderful, texting my mother in the middle of my day with a 10% discount at Amazon wouldn’t make nearly as much sense when she can barely use her phone and likely is in front of her computer at that very minute. And when you really step back and think about where people spend their time, email almost always comes up at the top – so ignoring it without throughout testing in place of something else makes little sense.

What baffles me however isn’t that companies adopt the wrong messaging methods for their customers as much as it is that they fail to talk to themat all! Unfortunately this is even truer with content and social sites many of which seem to simply assume you’ll return to visit them. I belong to dozens of forums, possibly hundreds, and out of that entire world the only emails I receive only a handful of proactive emails (aside from post updates and internal message notifications of course). This means I have no chance to be reminded of the site and in many cases, I’ve probably – no – I’ve certainly forgotten they existed or that I was a member. Sending me a basic newsletter, a special, or just a periodic announcement would do wonders to get me and likely many other people back to the site.

For the more sophisticated organizations and sites that already cover the basic promotional email, digging in to segmentation is also a major step and something we need to see much, much more of. Again, it surprises me how many sites treat me in a way that doesn’t describe me at all, when they could fairly easily do this. By giving customers the opportunity to self describe, even if it’s in very small ways, companies gain the opportunity to send the a message that resonates, gets read and will get acted on far more often than not. It doesn’t take having advanced analysis to segment and stand out- today Circuit City sent me an email with the subject line “How to get your birthday gift from Circuit City.” My first reaction – wow – I <b>need</b> to read this; after all, I have to find out how to get my birthday gift (not that my birthday is coming up any time remotely soon). When I opened the email it was an attempt at data capture but the real goal was clear – Circuit City wants to know exactly when they can hit me with a strong sales offer and by using something that appears to give me / the consumer value, they should easily get a response (they got one from me so there’s at least one).

Regardless of where you sit in the communication mix and whether your site is about selling the latest gizmos or connecting people who share a common interest, ask yourself this – am I reminding my users / customers I exist often enough? If so, am I using the right tool and at the end of the day, am I delivering a meaningful message that they want to act on?

Check out the original article at http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006353&src=dp1_home

p.s. As a final thought for those of you with some longevity to your site; when was the last time you reached into your database and sent an email to the inactive crowd to encourage their participation? Again, very basic and something many, many companies are doing but still something that often seems to get overlooked.