Marketing Your Business with E-Mail

Promote Your Business with Electronic Mail -- It seems that everyone has a e-newsletter or e-zine these days, but most lack an important ingredient -- information. How many e-zines do you receive that actually inform? If you're thinking about publishing an e-neighborhood newsletter to market your real estate business, make sure the content is of a quality that makes it worthwhile for the reader to open.

A good e-zine or newsletter does 2 things - it educates and it entices. Even if your newsletter only has one article in it, or one snippet of useful information, that can be enough for getting people back to your site to learn more. Ensure that each newsletter you send out clearly states that people can forward it on to others - a reminder works well!

The fact is, for the small business owner, an e-zine represents the first time in history that we've ever been able to cost effectively communicate with our entire customer and prospect base over and over and over again. Not only that, but thanks to the inherently democratic nature of email (i. e. the big boys don't get any more space in the email inbox than the rest of us), an e-newsletter gives you the opportunity to compete with and outperform your competitors.

Think of an E-Newsletter like an electronic magazine, with three principal pieces:

1. Content: The words themselves - what you write and how you write it.

2. Formatting and Layout: Like a magazine, an E-Newsletter has a consistent look from month to month for organizing and laying out the content. Fonts, graphics, sections, headings, links, etc., all come together to create the design and layout.

3. Delivery and List Management: Once the newsletter is assembled (content + layout), there needs to be a "machine" for sending it out to a predetermined list of people (your subscribers). The machine takes care of the logistics behind delivery. In addition to sending the newsletter out, that includes things like adding/removing names; managing bounced emails; sending automated messages to readers as they come on the list or make changes to their personal information; and collecting and reporting on data
regarding reader behavior and preferences.

As a rule of thumb, if you do the work yourself, you should figure on two full days of work per newsletter – one day to develop the content; one day to manage the layout and delivery logistics. You should also count on the first newsletter taking an additional two or three days to develop the format and style.

Whether you do it yourself, farm out the entire process, or strike a balance in-between, this new tool is well worth adding to your aresenal of marketing tools.

N.L. Amelse
Treasure Coast Host
http://www.treasurecoasthost.com
Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing
Web Hosting & Domain Registrations
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Phone: 772-214-4670 or send an email to: nikki@treasurecoasthost.com