To many businesses, effective web content management relies not only on drawing visitors to a website, but keeping tabs on them once they’ve come and gone. Most companies with an online presence will offer visitors something—a free download or expanded access to their information database—in exchange for their email address. This is always done on the condition that the customer can opt out of any future communications. Why? Because being able to reach out to past website visitors via email can be an incredibly effective marketing tool.

This is all done by contact list management. Here are a couple of best practices on maintaining and growing your list of customer contacts.

Make it Easy
This means not making the customer’s job difficult by loading your messages with graphics that clutter the message or take an eternity to download. This greatly increases the likelihood that your email will get read instead of deleted.

Save All Customer Correspondence
Any time a customer writes to you for additional information or to report a problem, the message should be saved. But following up on the resolution of past issues also offers you a valuable opportunity for future communication, too. If your company generates enough inbound email from customers to warrant investing in an email archiving program, consider it money well spent.