Is it worth keeping in touch with clients via ezine?

Yes, Yes, Yes and it does work.

Ezines are a great way to keeping in touch with your clients and an effective way to promote additional products and service to your clients. Clients will appreciate your efforts to keep in touch with them on a regular basis as well.

I am amazed by the amount of small businesses that are not using this method to build a relationship with their prospects. Some even try sending and giving up because there is no response from their subscribers.

Isnt it hard for you to get a sales person into the home of a client sweet talking for you?

A campaign is a sustained attack on something. So in other words if we keep sending we will build out list incredibly.

Here are some things you need to know before starting your own ezine.

1. Patience and perseverance

It takes sometime to get a responsive list. Most small business owners give up after sending a few ezines or they dont email their list often. As long as they are still on your list they are still interested in what you have to say. Do you respond to all ezines that arrives in your mail box? You may be interested in the product they are promoting but it could take six months for you to realize that getting the product could be of great benefits to you. So keep sending your ezines and keep it interesting and make sure it contains relevant information for your prospects.

2. Ezine Objective

Your ezine can have a variety of objectives depending on your goals. For instance, your ezine could be used for:

Establishing your name and reputation
Selling your products and services
Keeping in touch with clients
Driving traffic to your website
Announcing new products and service.

3. Good Content

Your ezine needs to content good information relevant to your target market. It also needs to be in sync with your objectives. If its to build relationship you might consider using personally written articles with an interactive question and answer section and if its for advertising you can add an advertising section to your ezine.

Here are a few ideas for contents that you might consider for your own ezine:

How-To tips, hints and articles
Your answers to readers questions
Reader testimonials, opinions, and feedbacks
Guest experts corners
Recommend website resources
Contest
Product reviews (books, tool etc.)

And if you think you cant write an ezine you can go to www.elance.com and have someone write one for you. You can also visit free reprint right directories and use their articles. Here are a few www.ezinearticles.com, www.marketing-seek.com and www.ideamarketers.com

4. Your List

You can dramatically expand your response rate by positioning your ezine to a particular group. Try marketing your ezine on directories of your target market. You might also call a list broker to get a list for your target clients, or run ads that attracts the attention of your clients offering them free information.

5. Your Frequency

How often you send your ezine is important. There are six choices for you to decide to send your ezine.

Daily ezine requires some commitment unless they are short. Normally this type of ezine consists of tips, quotes, or news.
Weekly ezine are sent weekly
Bi-weekly is an ezine sent every 2 weeks
Monthly of just beyond the forgetting point.
Quarterly ezine are simply a waste of time. Its not useful if you are going to be keeping in touch with clients every 90 days. People will forget who you are and just delete your message when it arrives.
Whenever ezine is the worst way of keeping in touch with your clients

Choose which frequency you want and stick to it.

6. Follow Ups

Follow up on everything properly. You can have your subscribers get messages in a certain way. Let them know they are dealing with a real person. Let them know you care.

7. Automated the system

Once you have decided on your objective, content, and frequency youll use for your ezine. Its time to actually set up a system like:

Gathering target clients email addresses
Installing and setting up your email management system
Having a subscription form on your website

The bottom line is this if you dont mail out to your clients you are losing or missing out on increased takings? We all need reminding of everything these days, life is busy. Your clients are no different. Keep in touch with them, set up a system where you mail them at least every six weeks and it will pay of big time for you.

Finally if you start it, never give it will pay off.