| One of the basic rules of marketing is that frequent contact with your customers is important for your repeat business. A weekly, monthly or quarterly on-line newsletter (also known as a mailing list) is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. Once your customers sign up to receive your newsletter (opt-in), you can use the newsletter to notify them of current sales, free giveaways, contests, and new products. Used in this way a newsletter can be a great marketing tool to keep your customers returning to your web site. And there are no printing or mailing costs. There are two steps to running a newsletter. First you need to collect and store the email addresses of those customers who sign up to receive your newsletter. Second, you need to send your newsletter in the form of an email message to every address on your mailing list. You will need a small program called a mailing list program to handle these tasks. This program starts with a form on your web site. Your customers will use this form to sign up to receive your newsletter. The form is linked to the mailing list program and when your customer enters their email address and clicks "Sign Me Up", the program adds this customer's email address to your mailing list and also sends a confirmation email to the customer. Now that you have collected your list of email addresses, you are ready to send your newsletter to all on the list. You will use the same mailing list program to do this. The program is set up so that all you need to do is type in the content of your newsletter (or copy and paste), press the SEND button and the program will send your newsletter as an email message to all those on your list. As you can see, a newsletter is a very cost effective marketing tool. It allows you to keep in contact with your customers at very little cost in money or time. |
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