What if I were to tell you that your web hosting business could reach out to most of your clients and that it wouldn’t even be considered spam? While it wouldn’t necessary reach every client, it almost certainly wouldn’t be blocked. It may seem to good to be true, but you are actually doing it without even really knowing. The answer would be e – mail auto responses.

The most underutilised and overlooked point of contact in the web hosting industry by far, automated e – mail messages are most commonly found in the form of support ticket acknowledgements. They can also be in the form of invoices and receipts. The retail industry have already caught on to this, very often adverts can be found on the opposite side to the printed receipt.

The benefits of regularly tweaking your automated e – mail messages can be staggering once understood properly. Customers often complain on forums that their billing or sales tickets are not answered quickly. These forum posts could have been avoided if the web host involved only had the foresight to modify their automated messages to contain the available hours per department.

These e – mail message modifications can also simply be good natured and non commercial, for example they could feature a positive New Year message. There is no reason for technical support tickets to be clinical and lack engagement – a season’s greeting message would serve only to boost the reader’s mood.

Let me give you one real world example:

Let’s say a web hosting business has recently implemented a firewall unblocker section which is made available from their client portal. This area can be used to unblock a customer’s IP Address which may have become blocked due to failed login attempts. A good portion of the daily support tickets which are received involve the tedious task of checking and unblocking these affected customers. We can help lower the number of these requests simply by modifying the automated support ticket responder which acknowledges support ticket submissions with a message asking the reader if they are aware of the newly available firewall unblocker.

Even if only a very conservative 10% of readers actually take the time to absorb this information, you have just lowered this particular type of support ticket by a noticeable margin in less time than it took to answer one firewall block ticket.

Special offers can also be advertised this way but be careful not to transform communication into spam. If you choose the route of advertising instead of a season greeting or snippet of useful information, then limit it to one offer and an exceptional one at that. You can also take advantage of issued receipts but do not advertise anything on your invoices – this will look very unprofessional.

Your customers are contacted regularly in the form of automated messages – be different from the rest and use this as an opportunity to engage your customer for the better.