How do you get your clients to keep coming back to your website? An e-newsletter with links is a great way to keep your clients up to date on the latest news and products, and encourage them to visit your site again. This is a very cost effective way to build customer loyalty, which could result in sales. An e-newsletter could even generate new business for you.

What is an e-newsletter and why is it important?

An e-newsletter is a newsletter that you deliver to your subscriber list via email. It can contain company news, information on new products or services, tips, advice, pictures, or even videos. This helps you to stay in touch with your clients and provides a valuable service to them.The following are some reasons why an e-newsletter can benefit your business:

E-newsletters are cost effective.

Paper newsletters are costly to print, produce, and mail. You can write an e-newsletter in just minutes, and it costs nothing to mail to your subscriber list. In addition, it is a great way to further develop business with your existing clients. This means you do not have to spend money on marketing campaigns to try to draw in new clients who may or may not use your services or products.

An e-newsletter can convert into sales.

If a client likes something they read or see in your e-newsletter, they can click on the links and go directly to your site. Customers that click through to your site via a link are much more likely to buy something than a chance visitor. An e-newsletter can also alert customers to new products or services that they may not have been aware of otherwise.

You can build strong relationships with your customers with an e-newsletter.

By providing your customers with valuable information, you can create a bond with those clients so they continue to choose you over the competition. Furthermore, customers will constantly be reminded about the quality and professionalism of your business.

You can track customer behavior through an e-newsletter.

Your website analytics can show you how many people enter your site via your e-newsletter links. You can also see how long they stay on the site, if they buy anything, and what page they enter and leave your website from. This can give you valuable insight into what your customers need and want.

An e-newsletter could generate more business for you.

If a client reads your newsletter and sees something they like, they may just pass the newsletter on to a friend or colleague. Forwarding an email is as simple as clicking a button, so it is very easy for clients to share your information and links. Often this happens as a chain effect, so before you know it you could be seeing huge increases in site visitors and sales.

In this digital age, paper newsletters are almost extinct. If you want to stay ahead of your competition, an e-newsletter is an effective and economical marketing tool. Not only will you build stronger relationships with your existing clients, but you may just see an increase in new customers and sales.

Article contributed by Stephanie M.

Newsletters are a great way to promote your business and products without spending a lot of money. Sending emails is free, and when prospective clients sign up for your newsletter, it doubles your chance of receiving business from them. But for a newsletter to be effective, you have to present valid reasons why clients need to sign up for it.

Create an attractive landing page

Your landing page, as well as other website contents, will help your target clients decide whether to sign up to your newsletter or not. Most users are very careful about giving their out their email address, so take the extra steps to make your website as credible and trustworthy as you can.

Customers will only sign up to a newsletter if they feel a strong need to learn more about your services or products. Your job is to create this need. Give enough information on your website to pique the clients’ interest without revealing too much. Give them reasons to want more, and offer them evidence that only you and your business can provide the answers. This way, you score some positive points and earn their trust beforehand.

Write an easy to read newsletter

Signing up prospective clients is just half of your mission. The other half is to make sure that they do not click unsubscribe or tag your email as spam. Remember, they are probably receiving hundred of emails daily so your goal must be to attract the receiver to open and read your newsletter. And once they do, your next task is to keep them wanting more, and subsequently, keep reading your newsletter.

This is only possible if you can offer useful information without sounding like you are desperate to sell your products. Nobody likes a desperate person and nobody like to buy things if he doesn’t see the need for them. Don’t push too hard in your newsletter. Just present the good things about the products and services that you are selling and let the customer decide.

Just how long should your newsletter be?

Experts suggest that you keep it short if you are selling everyday items and services. The more your clients know about your product in advance, the less information you should pack into the newsletter. Only write an extra long newsletter if you are introducing a relatively unknown product as you need to explain its features and functions more.

Keep a friendly, yet authoritative tone in your newsletter. Sound like an expert. But do it in a way that your readers don’t feel like being lectured at. Keep a balance between being friendly and being believable so as not to drive away your prospective clients. Your tone and your message’s content will determine whether the reader will keep your email or send it to the trash bin in no time.

The more your clients read your newsletter, the more business will coming your way. Aim to inform, do it effectively, and sales will come naturally.

Article contributed by Dina D.

Email marketing has the potential to bring in a higher return on investment than many other marketing strategies. The cost of sending an email can be very cheap. Email marketing can also have a high response rate, since the message recipients will already be interested. Many will be current customers or will have signed up for the mail list to receive promotions.

For email marketing to not qualify as spam and for it to have a maximum response rate, the email marketer must get permission from the recipient. There are many ways to do this.

One is to offer customers a free gift in exchange for providing an email address. For example, the email marketer could offer a free PDF download if the user provides an email. Websites that ask for users to create an account with them could ask their visitors if they would like to receive promotions by email. Another method is to offer the visitors a free newsletter and ask them to sign up for a promotional mailing list when they sign up for the newsletter.

Businesses that have access to an email address should not abuse the privilege. Most people will not want to receive dozens of emails a day and will be more likely to unsubscribe or put those emails in their spam folder.

Speaking of unsubscribing, another important rule to follow when sending solicited marketing messages is to always give users an option to unsubscribe. Ideally, this should be a simple link that the user can click on to immediately unsubscribe. The process of unsubscribing should not require more than two clicks.

One very successful recent email marketing campaign was Kodak’s i4000 Scanner Series. This campaign had a 3.7 percent click-through rate. The email subject line was “Discover game-changing innovation and register to win.” The goal of the email was to generate excitement and awareness about the new product and to increase response by providing a powerful offer. Part of what made the campaign successful was that it sought to integrate email marketing with several other channels. For example, the link for the “register now” button took users to a content-rich website that encouraged users to share the content through Twitter and Facebook.

Another example of a subject line that was successful included the ATP World Tour’s “Welcome! Your Tennis Tickets Are Ready.” This subject line had a 27.7% clickthrough rate. The goal of the email was to provide users with something of immediate value for signing up with the email service.

The key factor in achieving a high click-through rate is to understand the target audience and what motivates them, just like in other forms of marketing. However, in the email medium, the most successful emails are also the least salesy. Simple and straightforward messages that immediately provide value to the customer can compel them to click.

Article contributed by Charles P.

1. Don’t skimp on the graphic design
What you save on printing and posting spend on a good graphic designer. Don’t send a home-made looking eCard. Our research shows that a quarter of people who receive an email card from a company think they send it that way because of cost saving – so whatever you do don’t make your eCards look cheap.

2. Customise it to your business
Do not use a generic off-the-shelf eCard design. Your logo must be included into the graphic design and not just ‘dropped’ into a space. And it must be specific to your industry, even have some information about your industry. 40% who receive an email card from a company think it is a branding exercise so make sure your branding exercise is a positive one.

3. Add an offer
Give something away, especially for birthday eCards. This could be a voucher, special ‘deal’, even a free report but it must be of value to your customer. Make it only available via the eCard so you can also measure its effectiveness, and making it exclusive to the eCard also makes your customer feel extra special. A juice franchise sends me a birthday eCard every year for a free smoothie, I’ve never redeemed it but it was a positive branding exercise.

4. Comply to Spam Laws
Make sure there’s a functioning unsubscribe that will also cancel all pre-set eCards as well as remove them from your email newsletter list. You can be fined if a subscriber removes themselves from your list but then later receives something from you, even if it is an eCard.

5. Use humour
Go on … take the ‘mickey’ out of yourself, or at least your industry. Even purchase a cartoon to use. There are some great sites by very reputable cartoonists that allow you to choose categories of comics. Make sure you change it every year – people don’t want the same cartoon two years in a row.

6. Track the forwards
Measure how many people forward your eCard to friends. Who knows? If you your eCard is worth forwarding to friends, you might initiate a successful viral campaign.

7. Less is more
Minimise the words. Make the picture the focus, just like you would with a traditional card. And don’t try to ‘sell’ on the eCard – it will be counterproductive.

8. “Hi John”
Use your customer’s name. From the Aussie Email Newsletter Survey 2007 we know that 35% of people like personalisation and only 7% don’t (the others don’t mind) so do not address it to “valued customer”!

It’s true sending your clients a greeting card is smart marketing to increase customer loyalty and sales just by showing them you care but here’s the thing … how many businesses actually get around to sending greeting cards. Even if you do it at Christmas, so are many other businesses so yours might get lost in the pile.

What if you sent a card to clients throughout the year for other occasions? Like their birthday. All this is fine if you have the system in place and/or the man power. So if sending birthdays cards is one of those things you are always going to get around to, then set it up to be done automatically via your newsletter subscriber list.

Sending birthday cards via email might sound a bit impersonal but at least you are doing it. In fact our research is showing that it doesn’t really matter how you do it, if you acknowledge a client’s birthday, they see you as caring.

Her theories were sound including, I guess, “anyone who carries out cold telephone calling is a moron”. As an under-pressure sales executive looking after the ASEAN region, I had to agree with her! Cold calling is just not the way in this highly complex, culturally diverse, region.

I had been looking at direct email marketing for a while, and my fellow traveler was adamant that it was highly cost effective and provided the highest ROI for her marketing efforts.

However, apart from being indirectly called a moron, I also had some other concerns. For example, my U.K. based Plc did not have a centralized database of customers, let alone potential customers. For sure, I knew my customers, and my business partners in the region had the name of every company, by country, of the “potentials”.

And then it came to me. I needed a centralized database of customers, prospects, and suspects, categorized by country, industry type, and industry segment, and with all the contact details.

So after much pleading to my Head Office and business partners, I eventually had a central database, and started to email my customers, prospects, and suspects. With a net revenue sales target of US$1,000,000, I quickly found out that I was not going to meet it, as I was spending too much time preparing my emails.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I was still being a moron. I was cold calling again, but rather than using the telephone, I used email! This in spite of the fact that the Plc had invested heavily in a CRM application from PAS, or was it SAP?!

Then I discovered the power of a feature rich online email marketing software that totally removed these headaches. I stumbled across a SaaS product- to the uninitiated, a “Software as a Service” CRM and direct email business solution. I liked it so much that I eventually decided to become an expert and represent the software myself years later.

What SaaS means is that for a monthly fee, you not only have access to your database anywhere, anytime, with few upfront costs, and the software application is also included in the monthly fee.

Better than that, you can segment your customers, prospects and suspects in just about anyway you want, and then send segmented, targeted emails that are highly relevant to them. Importantly, with segmentation, you do not need to develop individual messages to your contacts. What this means is that you now have more time to carry out more productive work, e.g. sell, and this just has to be one of the biggest benefits resulting from CRM and email marketing applications.

Let’s take a simple example. You have a database of contacts, segmented by clients and new business prospects. With your existing clients you will want to be leveraging lifetime value by, for example, improving your upgrade and cross sales revenue steams. You will normally be concentrating on selling your products and/or solutions. With your new business prospects, whilst selling your products and/or solutions are still important, you will concentrating more on building relationships and trust.

The message that you send to these two contact segments will not be the same; there is no need to try to build confidence and trust in your company to a client that has just bought from you. Therefore you should design two distinct email marketing campaigns around these different segments.

But the really clever thing is that you can now analyze, by segment, if the target received the email and what they did with the information, e.g. did they forward it on, did they go to your website, and, if so, where did they go at the website, etc.

Now, that’s great for a business person like me. It allows us to understand the relevancy of not only your overall email campaign, but also to specific contacts allowing you to better understand individual needs and interests. And this is the real point of segmentation – increasing the relevancy of your emails to your contacts with a view that they buy from you, and, vitally, continue to buy from you.

Furthermore, email analytics will also allow you to follow up by email, or telephone, or even at the local Rotary International meeting, armed with some superb marketing information that you could not have had by cold call telephoning!

Whilst the client and prospect segment strategy is just one example it is, in most cases, the starting point for segmentation. Other segment types can be demographics, geography, lead source, major clients, products/services purchased, interest levels, etc.

Interest level segmentation is an interesting topic on its own. In order to accurately determine this segment, and again to further understand your contacts needs and interests, you should use a survey application.

In summary, forget telephone marketing campaigns, segment on a database and use inexpensive and functionally rich CRM, email marketing and survey applications.

It is now easier than ever before to make use of email marketing. There are plenty of great software solutions available to make it easy for anyone to send an effective email campaign – you don’t need to be a great designer or IT guru! What’s more, the right email marketing software can help you painlessly manage people unsubscribing or changing their preferences.

But how do you know which email marketing software to use, given there are so many options to choose from. That’s where Email Marketing Shortlist comes in – here we provide a wealth of reviews, articles, online comparisons and other resources to help you choose the right email marketing solution for your business.