Last week’s job was checking what a stranger sees when they search for you. This week is about the people who already found you.
I asked a shop owner on Sheridan Street how many people she could email right now if she needed to. She guessed maybe fifty. She logged into her point of sale system and found closer to six hundred names with real email addresses attached to old receipts.
That’s the pattern I keep running into. The contacts are already there. They’re just scattered. Some live in your point of sale system from card transactions. Some are on a paper sign-up sheet from a raffle or a giveaway sitting in a drawer by the register. Some are Facebook followers who liked your page years ago and never heard from you again.
Nobody treats those three piles as one list, so nobody uses it. When the Boundary Waters closure scared off some of your out of town business, the fastest way back wasn’t a Facebook post hoping the algorithm shows it to the right people. It was reaching the six hundred people who already trust you, directly, in their inbox.
This week: gather what you already have. Export your point of sale contacts if it has that option, most do, look under “customers” or “reports” in the menu. Type up whatever names and emails are on that sign-up sheet in the drawer. Pull your Facebook followers list too, even without emails, it still counts as a channel.
Put all of it in one place, a spreadsheet or even a plain document works fine. Then split it into two piles. Pile one: locals, people who live close enough to walk in this week. Pile two: past visitors, people who came through once or twice but live somewhere else.
What if none of that exists for you, no point of sale system that keeps emails, no old sign-up sheet, nothing on paper? Start today. A plain notebook by the register, one column for name, one for email, works fine. Give people an honest reason to write it down, first word on a sale, one entry in a monthly drawing, doesn’t need to be clever. You will not have six hundred names by next week. You will have a start, which is more than you had this morning.
Don’t send anything yet. Just get the names out of three drawers, or a fresh notebook, and into one list, split the way you’ll actually use it. Next week we write the two emails, one for each pile.
Richard Stuart builds websites and revenue systems for owner-operated businesses from his home in Ely. Have a question you’d like answered in a future column? Send it to [email protected]. If something’s quietly costing you customers, let’s talk: richardstuart.me.
