If you're a medium-to-large company, what do you do when you have 1,000 or more email templates?  Mind you, I'm not talking about the number of emails that your company sends each day but the number of email templates that are actively used within your CRM system or marketing systems?  These could be driven by collections, sales, marketing, operations, product marketing, legal, etc.

I'd like to suggest that the first thing to do is to audit what you have.  Find out what is in place and build a map of how many email templates exist, how they are used and how they relate to each other.  You should do the same for printed form letters and other standard or repeatable messaging processes.  This will undoubtedly lead to some very interesting discussions about customer lifecycle management and who gets to decide how your company talks to your customers and how often it happens.

Oh and by the way, when building out this map of contacts and interactions with your customers, remember to plug in a spot on the map for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any number of other social networks and social technologies. 

This whole exercise will give new meaning to the customer lifecycle.  In a nutshell, it suggests that the notion that some single marketer or panel of marketers within a company can control customer interactions and design how customers interact with companies is outdated and archaic.  Focusing more on balance, reasonableness and awareness of how customers want to talk to and interact with your company is probably more productive.

In the mean time, if you work for a mid-sized to large company and need help getting your arms around the many messages and interactions that your customers experience with your company, consider hiring someone like us to do a messaging audit and help build a picture of what your customers experience in dealing with you.

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