How do you communicate with your customers and prospects? Are you waiting for them to return to your store, office or website?

It is vital to communicate proactively with all your customers on a fairly frequent basis. Contact is necessary to nurture your relationships with customers. As an added incentive, the frequency of contact will increase the amount of revenue you generate off of your customer base.

Small to mid-sized businesses often face challenges reaching their customers. It costs every time a customer is contacted. If a direct mail campaign is used there are printing costs, stationery and postage costs. This could amount to a dollar or more to talk to each customer. With 50,000 clients, that's $50,000+ and the amount of time taken to carry out the task hasnt even been taken into account.

What is needed is a way to communicate frequently with customers that is affordable. With the advent of email, we now have that means. Email if practically free and takes less time and resources than other means of customer contact, allowing you to communicate more information, more often. It should be used as a way to strengthen your relationship with your clients. It also has the added advantage that information is sent in minutes making results imminent.

Your communications can take the form of newsletters, sales notices and follow ups, VIP customer promotions, product trials, new product and service announcements, event invitations, news items designed to keep in touch, inform and educate as well as to entice customers to make a purchase.

As soon as you mention email communication to large client bases, people immediately think of Spam. Spam is unwanted, unsolicited email that appears in your email box. It is the internets version of junk mail. To take advantage of the benefits of email marketing and ensure your emails get delivered you need to comply with anti-spam legislation.

These guidelines include:

Get permission before you send email. You need to ensure that the persons in your email list have opted in i.e. given you permission. Consider double opt-in, where once you have got permission you ask the person to confirm the permission. Do not purchase email lists, as you mail can become unsolicited and be deemed Spam.

Ensuring that unsubscribing from receiving your email is easy by providing a relevant link or instructions on how to unsubscribe. This is absolutely critical to avoid being classified as a spammer and needs to be in each and every email.

Precisely identify yourself. If you are a legitimate business you should have no problems with this as you want the customer to know who you are. Your actual physical address should be included in all correspondence.

One further point about Spam is that due to the high amount of Spam on the Internet, email services including the software running on your PC have filters to catch and filter out emails that look or are suspected to be Spam. This means that should the header or content of your message contain the incorrect words or phrases, then it will automatically be deemed as Spam. To avoid these filters you need to ensure that the wording and phrases in your email does not contain the offending text.

To ensure that you maximize the potential of email marketing:

Be attentive to the structure and the content of the message you're sending out to avoid spam filters.

Make the subject line of the email relevant to the content and avoid gimmicky tricks.

Provide your customers with valuable content. Dont always try to sell them. Try educating them.

Use the appropriate tools for the job. Auto-responders can make bulk emailing tasks more efficient.

You really need to concentrate on what you are doing in this area to avoid getting blacklisted and succeed in being white listed.

Communicating with your clients is essential and email is an easy and inexpensive way of establishing long lasting relationships. Once you have your database established you can really market effectively. Providing the number and frequency of offers is not too high, customers will respond and you will find that the high frequency contact can drive a large amount of revenue.