[RetailEdge Moderator]

It is very important to keep contact with your existing customers. RetailEdge point of sale software can easily give you the information you need to do this.

The simplest ways to do this is to either:

1. Create interests for your customers (like club, e-mailing list, etc.).
2. Associate this customer interest with the customers you are going to e-mail.
3. Export an e-mail list of customers using this interest as a filter.

or

1. Export customers - sales history based on sales histories for a given date range. This can be useful if you want to e-mail customers about a promotion you are having for a particular vendor or department (i.e., export all customers who have purchased items from Vendor ABC in the last 6 months). This export can also be combined with an interest list export (i.e., all customers who have a customer interest in Vendor ABC).

Once you have this file you can do a number of things.

1. You can send the list to a mailing service. There are many companies that will provide this service for a low fee (+/- $15.00/month). Remember that you will may want to modify this file before sending out the information to a mailing service to remove columns that you don't want them to see. This can be easily done by opening the file in Excel.

2. You can manage your own mailing list by uploading your list to a list server that you have on your Web hosting service.
A list server allows you create an e-mail to "ABC_Customers@yourdomainname.com" blindly sends out the e-mail

When creating your e-mails for the list server you have to be careful. Usually e-mail clients have the ability to either view an e-mail as simple text or as HTML and/or Rich Text. Some people choose to view e-mail as simple text. This will strip out all of your formatting. Depending on who you believe on this (and there are many opinions on the web), you might want to consider structuring your e-mail with a combination of elements. So that it can be read easily both ways. Images will also help dress it up but might be stripped out in the users e-mail. You also have to remember that users who are using e-mail browsers that strip out images and formatting are used to seeing e-mail as simple text and so their expectations are going to be a little different from yours.