Email Newsletter Programs are Strong Marketing Performers

Small business owners are always in search of cost-effective, time-efficient ways to keep in touch with existing clients/customers, and the internet provides us with a variety of ways in which to achieve that. One method of maintaining regular customer contact is the use of an Email Newsletter program. Using such a program enables your clients to maintain an on-going awareness of your firm, so they remember your firm when they finally have a need for a service such as yours instead of seeking out another firm because they forgot about you.

The use of an Email Newsletter program provides a variety of benefits to your firm, including:

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  A regularly scheduled communication program to remind your clients/customers that you are available to service them
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  A method of communicating new services/products, new staff members with areas of expertise which might be of interest to clients/customers, recent awards or recognition received by your firm, education/information about the latest industry developments
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  A communication that is professional in appearance and helps to reinforce your firm’s branding message
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  A communication that can link clients/customers back to your website or blog in areas that will be of particular interest to them.

Elements of an effective email newsletter include:

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  short, easy-to-read articles
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  photographs
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  interesting, attention-grabbing headlines
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  special limited-time offers for newsletter-readers only
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  information relevant to your industry (statistics and graphs are always interesting)
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  communication regarding new products or services being offered by your firm
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  company information of interest such as new staff, awards, new offices, community participation programs, etc.
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  links to your website or blog that provide greater detail on articles discussed in the newsletter.

Obviously, the use of a professional-appearing Email Newsletter presents some challenges for business owners who do not have HTML programming skills. Luckily Web 2.0 technology has provided us with a variety of resources that enable a small business to send a professional-appearing newsletter with only the most basic of computer skills. Services such as Aweber, Constant Contact and Ennect provide user-friendly, web-based email tools that enable any business owner to develop a professional email program extremely cost-effectively. Added benefits of using such a service are that they insure that you maintain compliance with the anti-spam laws, and they increase the potential that your newsletter will reach the customer’s inbox and actually be read.

Try an Email Newsletter program for 6 months as a test; track who it was sent to, who reads it and which articles they read (the software programs will provide reports), and who you receive additional business from. Compare your cost per person of implementing the program with the revenue you receive as a result of implementing the program to determine your ROI (return-on-investment). Then compare your Email Newsletter ROI with the ROI for other marketing programs you are implementing to determine its cost-effectiveness for your firm. I’m betting it will be one of your top-performing programs!

Using Facebook to Grow Your Business

Like most small business owners, I'm always looking for new ways to promote my business and make people more aware of what I do. And like many of you who are "social media savvy", I've had a personal profile on Facebook for awhile now as one more avenue meant to promote my business. However, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with it, as it really IS much more of a "social-oriented" medium and that's not what I was looking to gain from it. So, I took a couple of basic steps – first, I started another Profile under my company name (http://profile.to/strategicgrowthconcepts), and then I also started a Group under my company name (http://groups.to/strategicgrowthconcepts). Both of these have given me additional opportunity to provide more focus on the business, though not quite yet to the extent that I wanted. The "wall" page is still very "social-oriented" because that's what it's designed to be, and what most people use it for. The "group" has allowed me to do a better job of "controlling content" in order to insure that it stays business-focused. But, I still wasn't happy with it.

So, I did as I normally do, and I started conducting research; in this case on the ways other companies are utilizing FaceBook – and I found the answer I was seeking. It turns out that FaceBook is currently in the midst of implementing some changes that are designed to solve exactly the problem I was having. They have developed a "Page" concept that is meant to focus on different categories of businesses. Each category comes with a specific template of included sections that you can then customize as you like. The "Pages" allow you to include a lot more detailed information about your company, as well as any events you want to promote, discussions you would like to initiate, various applications that you would like to attach, as well as uploading files you want to share, video, photos, etc. It allows you to customize the Tabs included on the page so they are best suited to your company's purposes.

I just set up my company's page today so I still have some work to do to it, but I thought the concept was so great that I wanted to share it with all of you. Check out my "page" at: http://companies.to//strategicgrowthconcepts. Also, to help you learn about this new offering from Facebook, I was able to track down a Facebook location that takes you thru the process as well as providing additional information and resources; see this at: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages .