As you know, email is one of the most powerful tools for you and your business. The reason being that it takes little or no time to send personalized email to your customer base if you have the proper tools.

You need to email your customers often enough that you don't lose contact with them... at the same time, you must be careful not to alienate them by contacting them too much. Depending on your schedule, this can be as often as once every week or as rare as once every two months.

You should be emailing your customers to help them. There are two ways of doing this. One is to actually offer content. We do this in our newsletter... we actually offer a great deal of content that helps people with their internet marketing. Based on that, we build credibility and rapport with people so that they know that we are a legitimate company that offers a great service. Then hopefully they will buy from us in the future.

We do this through our Car Secrets and Internet Marketing Center® newsletters, as well as in a few other newsletters we have going on the side.

The other thing you can do is directly email them a sales letter. If you do this, you must make sure it solves a problem. You don't want to come across as if you are trying to sell somebody, you want to approach them with the idea of solving a problem. If they have a problem... you have a solution. Right now, their problem may be costing them money and you can solve the problem for a fraction of what it would normally cost them.

If you try to help people, you will end up surviving and making money because by helping people, they begin to believe in and trust you... so when you do have something to sell that is of value to them, they will buy it from you.

This is the key to what we have done in our business. And it is a key to doing business that you can use as well!

You can completely personalize email so that it sounds like you are talking to your clients personally. There is software available now that can do all this for you. We use software called Mailloop that allows you to personalize your email and do much, much more.

When you personalizing your email, your sale conversion ratio will go up in a big way! This is because:

• It doesn't get discarded as SPAM. People won't automatically delete your email thinking it is spam as it comes to them with their name on it.
• It is very personal. Addressing your customers by their first name, or knowing what products they have purchased from you (or what date they subscribed to your newsletter, or whatever other information you want to mail merge), makes your email sound very personal. This helps build credibility and rapport, the most important things you can do toward getting a sale.

The bottom line is that it doesn't matter how often you email your customers, it matters that when you do, you personalize their email so they don't think they are getting spam. And when you contact them, make sure you are offering value and solving problems. If you are not doing that, you are not doing it right.

In the past we've emailed customers as often as every 3 or 4 days and we've also emailed customers once every five months... they both work. Remember that it's better to keep in touch with customers more often if you can. But be careful with that, because if you email too often, you might end up trying to just sell to your customers instead of helping them. You need to have content for your newsletters or correspondence and it has to be good content. You don't want to email people every day with garbage because you are running out of content. If you only have enough content for one mailing a month, then only mail them once a month. Do whatever works out for you as long as you are giving them good, quality information. Don't just just try to fill up space.

Here are some of the things you can email your customers:

• a newsletter
• an announcement that you are updating products, services or your website
• fast breaking news
• a sales letter
• a reminder to re-order

If you are emailing a sales letter:

• make a trial offer
• offer an exclusive membership
• tell them this is their last chance to buy at the old price
• let them know you have decreased the price
• make them a limited edition offer
• tell them about a damaged goods sale

These are all ideas and excuses for mailing your customers that are legitimate and are worth something.

So you are probably asking by now, "how often do we email our clients?"

We have two newsletters, the first is called The Cutting Edge. The Cutting Edge is for our course owners only. It has the real killer stuff - the real gems of information that we don't want the whole world to know about. As soon as we find out something new, we share it in The Cutting Edge. This is a private newsletter that I give away as a 6-month subscription when customers purchase the Insider Secrets Course. My customers get over 600 pages of information in the course plus over 300 pages of back issues of The Cutting Edge newsletter. If you are a course owner and do not have a subscription, you can purchase a 6-month subscription to The Cutting Edge for $97 (which gives you access to all the 300+ pages of back issues as well). Click here to order a 6 month subscription to The Cutting Edge.

We also have a free newsletter for people who are interested in running a successful web business... our potential customers (this is the newsletter you are reading now). It helps us keep in touch with everybody and lets us give people valuable information about marketing on the internet.

The idea here is that your job is not to sell the customer, it is to help the customer. That is what has made our businesses so successful... we focus on helping people, even if they are not yet a customer! If you come at it with the attitude that you are emailing your customers just to sell them something, then you have a problem. If you adopt that attitude, emailing them even every two months is probably far too often! But if you are emailing them to help them solve a problem, once a week may not be often enough.

If you sell consumable products, one of the best reasons to email your customers is to remind them it is time to re-order. Say, for example, you sell a diet pill, cholesterol reducing pill, shampoo... or other product that "runs out". If they originally purchased a 45-day supply of diet pills, email them a reminder to reorder at the 30-day point so that they won't run out!

You can set this up on an autoresponder so that the message goes out automatically 30 days after their last order. Sweeten the deal by offering them a special 10% discount "for existing clients who reorder at this time." The idea here is to email them based on the consumability of the product. This is an excellent way to bring in a lot more money to your business, with very little work on your part! It's all part of automating your business and you are offering them a service by reminding them "hey, don't get caught short!"

What can this mean as far as profits go?

You will not believe the money that this can mean to you! I am telling you this because there are so many people that do not understand the power of email. It costs you nothing to send the stuff out. You can make it very personal and you can automate a good part of it.

In some shape or form you should always be making money from it!

I estimate that a minimum of one third of your business will come from emailing your customer if you are doing it right! That's 30% of your earnings! If you are earning a hundred thousand dollars a year, you could be earning an extra thirty grand simply by keeping in touch with your customers on a constant basis.

You might say, "Oh I have nothing to sell these people." Well, you DO... you can easily offer content that can benefit your customers. In your search for content on the internet, you will find great products at a great price. You can become an associate for them and recommend their product in the article. For complete details on how to become an associate for a company and to determine if their compensation is fair, check out a few articles I wrote at http://www.marketingtips.com/newsletter/issue17/index.html

If they don't have an Associate Program, say "Hey, I am doing an article with this following content, can I offer your product as a solution? All I want in return is a referral fee for making the recommendation." Is it your product? No. Did you offer content? Yes. Did you give them a solution to their problem? You bet! And that's all it takes.

Even though you don't have something to sell, you have found a fantastic, well-priced product that is a solution to your customers' problems. You tell your customers about the product and make a referral fee for doing this. If you are truly helping your customers by finding great products and services for them... something that is of value and something that solves their problems, they will love you for it!

This is a great way to increase your business by over 30% every year. It has been proven that if you have a good offer, a minimum of 30% of the customers will come back and buy from you again and again and again. As I mentioned before, to find out about becoming an associate and reaping the best rewards possible, read the newsletters I've written at http://www.marketingtips.com/newsletter/issue17/index.html Here I talk about how to get involved in Associate Programs, what to look for and how to use them as backend products for your existing clientele.

Here's a concrete example of what you could do. Say you have a great little book for $20 that shows people how to pick the best web host, how to get online, etc. Once you've sold the book, you have nothing more to sell them, right? Wrong! This is where joining an Associate Program comes in. My Insider Secrets course would be the perfect back end for this book.

A few days or a week after selling your book to a customer, you would email them and say "Hey, by the way... since you are interested in website hosting, I assume you are doing business online, therefore you definitely have to get a hold of Corey Rudl's course. He's an expert on how to profit online using unique and unconventional techniques to build an online business and explode your profits. Go and pick up this course at...." Then you provide a link to my website. For doing this, I give you a $65 cash reward for every sale you make of the course.

If you have never done business like this before, or if you have never heard of an Associate or Affiliate Program go to http://www.marketingtips.com/sr/t.x/7999. You can read all about how we give you $65 for every sale made from any referrals you send to our site that result in a sale. It does not matter if this referral was through banner links or text links from your site, or even if it was a recommendation sent in an email you made to your customer base, newsletter base, ezine base or opt-in base, you will still get the commission.

The bottom line on all this is to keep in touch with your customers as often as you have something of value to give them. Personalize your correspondence with them and make them feel like they are special. Solve a problem, whether you do it by simply offering them content, or by selling them something... it only matters that you've solved their problem. But just remember to make them feel like you are helping them, not selling them.

Email is one of the most valuable business tools out there... use it to your advantage!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Derek Gehl specializes in teaching real people how to start profitable Internet businesses that make $100,000 to $2.5 Million (or more) per year. To get instant access to all his most profitable marketing campaigns, strategies, tools, and resources that he's used to grow $25 into over $60 Million in online sales, visit: http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/892189

Article Source : 
http://www.bestmanagementarticles.com
http://marketing-tips-ideas.bestmanagementarticles.com