Newsletter - main article September 2005

KEEPING IN CONTACT WITH NEWSLETTERS

One of the best ways to keep in touch with your business network, potential clients and customers is to send them a regular communication. Make it useful by including current news, articles and tips that are relevant to them and it becomes a welcome arrival instead of yet another bit of spam e-mail.

What are the benefits?

• You stay fresh in the mind of the people that you do business with at the same time as showing that you want to help them.
• Your knowledge and expertise in your business area is demonstrated. By including useful information and current, relevant news, you show your understanding and appreciation of the needs of your existing and potential clients.
• By only sending to people that you've met, and who's contact details you've been given, you won't be spamming and will be seen to be behaving responsibly. By providing an easy way to opt-out, anyone who doesn't want to receive your communications can prevent it.
• It's an excellent way to see what interests your business colleagues and, more importantly, your existing and potential clients. By constructing the newsletter in the right way, it's possible to track which articles and links are viewed, and how often. This means you can get a very good idea of what items and articles have been useful. Not only does this allow you to tailor the material for the next newsletter but you can adjust the way you market your products and services.
• Using the ability to see who's opened the newsletter and what links they've clicked on you can also target potential customers more actively. Suppose you put in an article or advert for a particular product or service. By tracking the link(s), you now have a list of people who might be in the market to buy it. If you have their phone number or address you can contact them directly knowing that they have an interest.

How can I use these newsletters?

Assuming that you have an e-mail client allows you to send HTML-format e-mails, you can do it already. By creating a mailing group in your address book you won't have to send to each person individually.

If you want to add formatted pages, graphics etc then you need some way of creating the newsletter body. There are a number of free and cut-down HTML editors around. It's also possible to personalise the e-mails via mail merge using Word or other programs designed for this purpose.

Best of all though is to use a purpose-built e-mail marketing package. They allow you to create e-mail designs in HTML with all of the facilities you'd normally associate with web pages. In addition, the facilities to personalise the e-mails (with name, company etc), create different distribution groups and analyse what happens after distribution makes the tool very powerful indeed.

It's possible to buy the tools yourself but this is very expensive. You can also buy the use of such a tool through an e-mail marketer. They will offer additional services such as the design of the newsletter template(s). Clarihon have an agreement with one of these companies and can provide a full newsletter and marketing e-mail service to all small to medium-sized businesses.

If you'd like more details about how we can help you raise your business profile and stay in the minds of your current and potential clients, please call us on or e-mail us at