Customer service & time effectiveness

I like giving my customers a personalized thank you note when they visit my shop. It has brought in more sales and it gives me a chance to get to know my customers and to interact with them.

I should mention that I send these notes by hand. I use a template if someone orders for the first time, but after that I don't want the note to feel automated, so I add personalized comments.

With the traffic I get, especially with any freebies I might post, I sometimes have a very large number of emails to send.

I have thought of using something like Mailbeez, but that is going the automatic route. At the same time, I want to work smarter... not harder.

I would love thoughts & advice on this... thank you!

(Another note - my customers are women, mostly in the 35-45 age range. So thank you notes and personalized interaction really, really helps.)

what a good idea, a fella I know that runs an e-shop throws in a bag of sweets with all orders he gets that are over £50. This is not advertised on his site and his customers love the surprise and thank you note.

I bought some appliance parts online a while back, and the merchant included a business-card-sized refrigerator magnet with the company phone number and URL on it. That magnet is on my refrigerator now and the next time I need appliance stuff, that's where I'll go. Small thing, but effective, I think.

I have developed for myself a custom newsletter , php +mysql + html using it in order to send to customers what I need . Is password protected on my hosting server , easy to use via browser , no modules required. If you need help for build something like that let me know .