Communicating with your customers  on a regular basis is important. Often, you won’t make a sale the first time someone walks into your store or gives you a call. If you are able to keep in touch, maybe you’ll make a sale on the third communication or the seventh or even the twentieth.

Communication is good. No doubt about it.

But be careful that you don’t turn into a pest.

Let me tell you a story that’ll give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

Before I started my copywriting service, I worked as lead copywriter at a very large corporation. They hired an email marketing manager to run their email communications and stay in touch with prospects and customers.

The problem was, no one bothered to listen to him when it came to the email marketing strategy.

So, every couple of days, a manager, janitor, sales rep or pizza delivery man would rush into the marketing department with an ‘EMERGENCY EMAIL’! My colleague would politely tell them, “Listen, we’ve already sent out an email to our list this week and we probably shouldn’t overdo it.”

It didn’t matter. The poor saps who had the misfortune of being on the company’s contact list were inundated with email after email, day after day.

I remember that there was a particular segment of only 80 people who received seven emails over a week and a half. Now, we got a few opt-outs which was bad enough, but the most significant problem  we saw was people stopped caring.

They stopped opening the emails, they stopped clicking our links and I have little doubt that many of them stopped doing business with the company. Because nobody likes to be harassed.

How do you avoid PEST SYNDROME? Pretty easy actually.

1) Send an email if you have exciting (and relevant) information about the company. Make sure it’s interesting to the CLIENT, not to YOU. No one cares if Jane in Accounting got a promotion except Jane.

2) Send an email if you have an offer or deal.

3) Send an email if you have a new product or service.

4) Send an email on special occasions. Know your client’s birthday? Send an email.

Please make sure everyone at the company is communicating. Don’t let multiple departments send out emails independently. This will almost surely result in PEST status with your clients.