If you have a list of customer names and contact info but aren't doing anything with it, you're missing a golden chance to increase sales and build your business. A key tool in maintaining your relationships and increasing recurring revenue is to simply stay in regular touch with the customers you currently have.

Why contact. Your purpose in setting up a customer contact plan should be to help your customers, whether it's with free advice, breaking news or money-saving solutions. Express a genuine interest in their needs and concerns and your customers will reward you with repeat business.

How often. Opinions on how often to contact customers vary widely. One consultant advises once every 2-5 days, another suggests once every 1-2 weeks and a third says 1-2 times a month. The real answer is, as often as is useful to your customers. Start with once every 2 weeks, testing various frequencies to find the one that gets the best response.

Messages. Offer free advice to your customers or send a regular newsletter with brief text highlighting a couple of different products each time. Email them with product updates or new discounts.You can even tuck a come-back offer into your order confirmation emails. This puts you ahead of the curve, planting the seed of the next sale even as you thank them for their most recent purchase.

Mediums. Email is the easiest and least expensive means of contacting your customers - check out your free version of Express Email Marketing. But don't overlook print, as you can now order high-quality printing online for very little. One really successful approach is to send a direct mail piece first - say, a letter or postcard - followed by an email scheduled to arrive three days after the postal piece arrives.

Tracking your results. The easiest way to track the effectiveness of an offer is through a source code*. By requiring customers to enter a source code in their shopping cart when responding to a promotion, you can see exactly how many people respond to each offer, running the most successful ones again. Express Email Marketing will also track open and click-through rates to help you gauge reader interest.

Dos and Don'ts

• Give them a little text and a small selection of products in every communication.

• Test frequency to see what works (sells) best. Contacting them too often annoys people; too seldom allows them to forget you. Find the sweet spot -- just often enough.

• ALWAYS give them the option to stop receiving your communications. If they ask to be taken off your list, do it. Send them an email confirming the change.

*Don't miss our blog article "Setting Up Marketing Source Codes" to learn how to use this tracking tool in the Reseller Control Center.