Why do so many businesses treat their existing customers so badly?

We'd had the same satellite television service for eight years. One kid has left home and the other is 17 and never here. My wife and I are bloggers. How much TV do you think we watch?

Correct. Probably no more than 10 hours a week - my daughter watches an hour after school while she eats, and then every now and then we'll catch a series or movie during occasional family time.

So for the last year I've been threatening to stop the service, but I met with some resistance from the girls in my life. It galled me that I was paying ?30 a month for something we don't use, and I hate the dish, which looks ridiculous on the front of our 150 year old farmhouse. I even called the company a couple of times to see if we could reduce the package as we only ever watch 3 or 4 of the 50 channels. But they told me we were already on the minimum set up.

A solution!

Then I had a sales call one evening from the telephone company. They could offer me the same (still their minimum) package for ?10 a month less. So I could keep everyone happy, save ?120 a year and lose the dish! I signed up for the new service. It was installed two days later and everything is good. I don't know how they stream such great quality and still give us 10MB of internet, but I'm very happy.

So I called the satellite company and tried to cancel the service. That first call took an hour. I was gradually passed up the ranks, and with each new person I spoke to I was offered a better deal. Each time I patiently explained that it was too late, I'd already contracted another supplier. I was finally offered the next package up for ?10 a month, for a full year. Once again I explained it was too late. When they finally believed me, the supervisor then told me I needed to take my box, card and remote to one their service centre in the city before the contract would be cancelled.

As you can imagine, I was livid. This happens time after time with businesses I deal with. They spend an absolute fortune on marketing to win my business, then they ignore me until I leave, at which point they offer me the earth, and when I refuse they make it as difficult as possible for me to cancel the contract. It's happened to me with insurance and mobile phones as two other examples.

So where's the relevance of this story?

We need to learn a lesson from this. We all invest time and money to persuade people to sign up to our email lists. And let's face it, we do that because we hope to sell them something some day. Then we go back to putting time and money into getting more people to sign up to our email lists. And in the meantime what do we do to the people already signed up?

• Do we make them feel special and part of our community?
• Do we make sure they get the best of us, the best service?
• Do we give them value in exchange for their email address?
• Do we treat them as more important than the new people we're trying to coax onto our lists?

Or do we send them an RSS feed and quietly ignore them until we want to sell them something?

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3/ How to place an email opt in form on your Facebook page