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If you aren’t using your email list to get the word out about your­self and your prod­ucts, you are los­ing out on a lot of poten­tial busi­ness. I am just now catch­ing my breath after a remark­able response to an email offer­ing I sent to one of my store’s email lists last week­end, and it just recon­firms for me that I should be doing this on a fre­quent, reg­u­lar basis. The cost was just my time to com­pose the email, plus a pro-rated expense of my monthly ser­vice from Con­stant Con­tact, my email broad­cast­ing software.

I wanted to write an expanded arti­cle about this but I am in a crunch this week deal­ing with orders and new pro­duc­tions and I don’t have time to write it right now. How­ever, just last week I came across the fol­low­ing arti­cle in an ezine I receive. I think she cov­ered many of the ben­e­fits of pub­lish­ing an ezine quite well. In my expe­ri­ence, an ezine does not need to be a big, fancy pro­duc­tion, so don’t let that stop you from get­ting started. When you use the email pro­grams, like the one I use – Con­stant Con­tact – there are tem­plates and wiz­ards to make the job easy. (I can get you a free 60-day trial of Con­stant Con­tact - email your request here.)

My mar­ket­ing back­ground is in tra­di­tional direct mail and let me tell you, direct mail (mean­ing fly­ers, cat­a­logs, post cards, enve­lope mail­ings, etc.) is cum­ber­some to pro­duce, expen­sive to print and ever more expen­sive to mail. Ezines, on the other hand, cost lit­tle to noth­ing other than your cre­ative time and effort, there is no print­ing cost or postage, and they are infi­nitely faster to dis­trib­ute. I love them.

What, you don’t have an email list? One of my next arti­cles will dis­cuss how to build that list…watch for that soon. I hope you enjoy the fol­low­ing article.

Offer An Ezine to Keep in Touch with Your Customers

By Wendy Maynard

Are you pub­lish­ing an online newslet­ter (ezine)? It’s an easy and effec­tive way to stay in touch with your cus­tomers and leads. Your ezine can pro­vide your read­ers with help­ful tips and advice to help them suc­ceed. You can also show­case your lat­est projects and include tes­ti­mo­ni­als from happy customers.

Here are 5 great rea­sons to imple­ment this as part of your mar­ket­ing strategy:

1) An ezine reg­u­larly rein­forces your exper­tise. Over time, a newslet­ter estab­lishes trust with your read­ers. You begin to form a rela­tion­ship, even if you’ve never met face to face. And because you are show­cas­ing your exper­tise on a reg­u­lar basis, your ezine builds your credibility.

2) It’s a great mar­ket­ing tool to keep in touch. When you reg­u­larly keep in touch with your prospects and cus­tomers, they remem­ber you. And since peo­ple don’t typ­i­cally buy some­thing the first time they are exposed to it, an ezine is a help­ful way to stay on their radar screen until they are ready.

3) Your ezine adds a human touch. If you include per­sonal updates and com­pany news, an ezine is a great way to add per­son­al­ity to your busi­ness. You can write as much as you want about your per­sonal life and what is going on with your com­pany and staff. Your read­ers will begin to look for­ward to your updates and stories.

4) You can pro­mote your ser­vices and prod­ucts. An ezine offers a venue to offer spe­cials, high­light new services/products, and pro­vide coupons and dis­counts. As long as the major­ity of your ezine is focused on help­ful con­tent, your read­ers will be delighted to find out more about your promotions.

5) An ezine is an inex­pen­sive way to build your list of leads. Since there are no print­ing and mail­ing costs asso­ci­ated with an ezine, it’s a very cheap way to reach lots of peo­ple. And you can eas­ily grow your list by encour­ag­ing your sub­scribers to for­ward your ezine. Sim­ply add a line at the top or bot­tom of each issue ask­ing read­ers to pass it along to any­one who might find the infor­ma­tion valuable.

To get started, pick out a sys­tem to man­age your sub­scribers. There are many ser­vices that do this — a few pop­u­lar ones include Con­stant Con­tact, MyEmma, and Mail Chimp. Use an opt-in list in which a per­son has to agree to become a sub­scriber and can unsub­scribe if they no longer want to receive your ezine.

Maven Action Item: Start to think about how an ezine can help your busi­ness. Write down some ideas about how often you will pub­lish it. What will it be called? What can you write about? Good luck on your first issue!

Want to learn more about how to start and pub­lish your first ezine? Then it’s time to grab the Maven Mar­ket­ing Home Study Sys­tem! It’s a step-by-step pro­gram that teaches you the best ways to pro­mote your busi­ness, includ­ing info on ezine mar­ket­ing. You’ll learn how to describe what makes your busi­ness remark­able, how to get new cus­tomers call­ing YOU, and lots of other valu­able strate­gies to help you fill your sales pipeline quickly. It’s chock full of work­sheets, action items, and guide­lines to get your mar­ket­ing ramped up quickly. You can order it at: Maven Mar­ket­ing Home Study System

© 2008 Wendy Gray Maynard

Wendy May­nard, the Mar­ket­ing Maven, is the founder of the Maven Mar­ket­ing Sys­tem, the proven sys­tem to attract more cus­tomers, close more sales, and improve busi­ness prof­itabil­ity. To receive her no-cost report on mar­ket­ing strate­gies, click here.

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Last month we started pro­duc­tion on a new video about how to pro­duce your own videos. My efforts to this point have been to show you how to pre­pare and mar­ket a spe­cial inter­est video, but I just assumed (wrongly, appar­ently) that most video­g­ra­phers would know how to pro­duce one.

Here’s the story: Last Jan­u­ary, I spoke at the Video 08 con­fer­ence in Orlando about mar­ket­ing your Spe­cial Inter­est Video think­ing the video­g­ra­phers present already knew the pro­duc­tion skills. Many peo­ple came up to me with ques­tions on what goes into orga­niz­ing and pro­duc­ing this type of video; they under­stood how to shoot a wed­ding or event video, but didn’t really know how to approach it from the per­spec­tive of plan­ning and pro­duc­ing a care­fully scripted video. So, a new video idea was born!

I am cur­rently in pro­duc­tion of a series of videos on grow­ing cacti and suc­cu­lents, tar­geted to high school hor­ti­cul­ture teach­ers, so I thought I would take you along on what I do to plan and pro­duce a video to sell. Fol­low­ing is a lit­tle excerpt from it. We hope to have it avail­able in August. Make sure you sub­scribe to my newslet­ter if you wish to know when it is done.

Excerpt From How To Pro­duce A Spe­cial Inter­est Video

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The power of a press release was once again demon­strated for me in late April.

In Jan­u­ary, I sent the Liv­ing Arts sec­tion reporter of Florida Today a copy of a new book — A White Deer — we pub­lished along with a press release. I was hop­ing she would read it and give it a good review. I didn’t see any­thing for awhile and frankly, I gave up.

Well, last Sun­day I woke up, went to my com­puter before I stum­bled upstairs to start the cof­fee and was pleas­antly shocked at what I saw. There in my email in-box were sev­eral orders, and they kept stream­ing in all day!

The reporter had finally come through and printed a nice review in the Florida Today Sun­day paper. We not only sold many copies of the book but because she had referred peo­ple to my web­site — patricksmithonline.com - we had pur­chases on other items as well. It took us most of the day on Mon­day to pack­age all of them! And the flurry didn’t stop until Thurs­day or so.

What really added to this release was the fact that the reporter did a review, added her own opin­ions and some excerpts from the book, and highly rec­om­mended it. Although I thought that I had got­ten the word out to my cus­tomer lists, many of them ordered and said that this was the first time they heard about the new book. I then real­ized that it is time for a new PR blitz.

This is another an great exam­ple of how a lit­tle free press can boost your busi­ness, some­times per­ma­nently. As I said in my pre­vi­ous blog post, news­pa­pers and jour­nals don’t have writ­ers look­ing for news about your prod­uct. You have to be proac­tive and send it in to them in the form of a press release, also called a news release. And if you send them a copy of your prod­uct, you may even get the addi­tional power of a great review!

It isn’t that hard to do this but it needs to be done in a cor­rect way so that your release won’t be tossed in the trash. I’ve writ­ten a spe­cial report on how to write and sub­mit press releases. It is avail­able to you free by fill­ing in the form below. I’ll also send you peri­odic tips and resources to help you mar­ket your video business.

Go to my web­site here and sign up for your free guide to writ­ing and using press releases.

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