Marketing Charts has an interesting recap of a recent Habeas study concerning consumer preference for email. It was interesting to note “67% of respondents prefer email as a communications channel over other online vehicles, and 65% say they believe that will remain the preference in five years.”  However, of great interest to me was the sections on “Online Reputation Management Best Practices to Build Trust” and “Online Business Practices to Avoid.”

Online Reputation Management Best Practices to Build Trust

• More than 88 percent of respondents said they would like organizations to give them more choices over the content and frequency of the emails they receive, including options on advertisements, special offers, articles, newsletters, white papers and other specific content options.

• More than 80 percent of participants favor doing business with organizations that use opt-in permission to send them email.

• Monthly emails and content and frequency options positively impacted a company’s reputation.

• Three of every four respondents prefer engaging with organizations that exhibit strong privacy practices.

• Only 12 percent of respondents acknowledged making one or more purchases from businesses they did not know.

Online Business Practices to Avoid

• As many as one in four respondents lose some degree of faith in an organization that is unable to deliver email reliably.

• Daily email messages ranked with pop-up advertisements as the most damaging online tactics to a company’s online reputation.

• On average, about 80 percent of respondents are not comfortable with businesses sharing their email address.

• Internet users believe that about two thirds of companies are likely to share their email addresses with third parties.

• More than 80 percent feel that a business’ reputation is negatively affected if it shares customer email addresses with third parties.

There are some excellent lessons to be learned from this information.

1. Trust the client to know what they want and when they want it.
2. As discussed in my previous post, use of an opt-in mailing list is a business advantage.
3. If you don’t already, have a strong privacy policy on your website.  Our website has a privacy policy that is linked on all pages of the website - while it’s not viewed very often by visitors to the website, I have often referred to the policy with customers requesting information about how we handle their private information.
4. Do not share your customer’s email addresses.  Plus, when you say you will not share their email addresses, don’t!  Even if you think it will help your business, it will only hurt your reputation!

Are you dealing with your customers via email?  I’m aware of several auction companies that regularly dissuade customers from contacting them via email.  If you’re not, you are forcing your customers to interact with you in ways they would rather not, and in the end you are likely losing business.  We have several customers that we interact with solely on an email basis - several of them are our largest auction buyers who we have never met in person much less talked to on the phone.

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