Imagine if you ran a business on a small island, every interaction matters and every customer is precious.

There’s a finite number of people you’re going to be able to sell to, and every person you interact with knows everyone else, so you always have to be on your best behavior. You can’t say, “tough” and then go on to the next person. You can’t run ads that churn and burn through an endless supply of naive prospects. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and on the island, that impression matters.

Consider an airline in Chicago that can bully and bluster and greedify its way through an endless supply of business travelers, and compare them to a short hop carrier on Martha’s Vineyard. The Vineyard airline knows that people can always switch to the other short hop airline or the ferry, and they also know that the folks they serve have power, because there aren’t an endless supply.

As you’ve probably guessed, like most things in our ever shrinking world, all marketers are now on an island.

The island perspective is the Zappos model. Every interaction is both precious and an opportunity to delight. Marketers no longer have the money or the platform to harass and promote their way to success by burning through the market. Instead, we have to act like we’re on an island earning and then nurturing a permission asset.

Through this lens, banner ads and various pop ups make even less sense than they used to. So does the insane act of outsourcing the random dialing of businesses to do telemarketing spam. We used up those resources a long time ago.

So think about how you interact and service those customers and prospects that seek out your goods and services. In this economy you cant afford to give good service “most of the time”.

When you consider how you spend your online and offline marketing dollars, think about what makes sense. The shotgun has run out of shells.

While the Internet has opened new marketing channels for small-business leaders, it also has generated challenges. One of the biggest challenges is identifying, contacting and keeping customers.

In two recent surveys by Information Strategies, Inc. (ISI), respondents indicated that they can increase new business by as much as 20% on an annualized basis by creating effective e-mail campaigns. Moreover, from existing clients, the increase in new business generated by creative-contact e-mail campaigns was nearly 40%.

These studies, and others by e-marketing groups, show that maintaining constant contacts with potential and existing clients via e-mail is an effective sales tool, even in this economy.

Said one Midwestern parts supplier during a focus group, “We instituted a program that touches our clients once a month, and we saw the results in under three months.” He added that the initial cost, in terms of dollars and employee time, was repaid within four months. “We then took every e-mail lead we had and sent a biweekly fact sheet that included a tip on using one of our products and a listing of one or two specials we were running,” he added. “From this initial seed list of 1,400 names, we got 24 new orders in the first six weeks, as well as 620 new sign-ups.”

Another focus-group participant, the owner of an upscale salon chain, said she used e-mails collected at her physical locations to start up a new e-mail program. “We started with a prom special in June of last year offering a special ‘prom party’ program that went to 7000 teenage customers,” she said. “From that group, we got twenty five ‘parties’ that generated $12,500-plus in sales that week,” she reported. This Syracuse, N.Y., entrepreneur then launched a Thanksgiving and Christmas program to which she directly attributed $53,000 – and probably more – in additional income.

Experts suggest that companies do the following:

* Always ask for e-mail addresses on orders and requests and on the company Web site.
* Keep the list up-to-date and mail at least once a month.
* Always offer the opt-out option on any mailing.
* Train employees to ask where the order or sale originated, and track results.
* Encourage recipients to refer other possible recipients.
* Make sure to use a reliable agency, like Evolve Media, to manage the e-mail accounts. The relatively minor costs will be repaid with efficiencies and avoidance of problems with Internet regulations.