Any one who has spoken with us will know that we are great believers in email marketing in. It has a lot of fantastic benefits to offer both you and your customers.

Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad fame said in one of this books that generous people become successful (I am paraphrasing) because they offer more of value to their customers, and therefore build greater customer loyalty.

He gave for an example the fact that he was able to buy large apartment blocks in the USA, and now offers a lot of employment to a lot of low income people.

He said that the government has allowed him to buy these blocks (and largely wiped the debt he incurred to buy them) because of his record of good property management. The Government trusts him to run the flats properly and not become a slum land lord. He says that it is his attitude of wanting to provide better accommodation for more people that has helped him to be successful in this area.

If on the other hand he was just focused on himself and how he could milk the most money from the situation, he may not have been nearly so successful, as he may have run his own apartment blocks in a tight fisted ‘slum land lord’ way and the government would not have given him the opportunity they did, because they would not have trusted him. Appropriate generosity builds trust.

You could also say that MacDonalds is generous in this way (!) they aim to serve the most number of people, and to take profits from great turnover rather than individual mark up. They even offer you cheap upgrades on drinks and fries. What ever you might think of their food, they are strong players in the generosity stakes.

And generosity is an important attribute to develop. Not only in your personal relationships, but in your business life. When you are generous in business you do not aim to win every situation, to take home all the prizes. You are prepared to give a little of yourself and your expertise.

This generosity has a couple of really good spin offs for you.

Firstly it establishes you as a nice person. People like to do business with nice people. (Not to mention you will probably be happier, we are just focusing on the business aspect here.) It is one of the benefits for corporations when they get involved with charity events, in this case they are giving money, but what they are really telling you is that they care and they give. And I am not cynical enough to say that they only give to charities as a form of good will advertising, but it certainly does generate goodwill.

Now for most of us at the moment, displaying our generosity by donating 1 % of our total profits or proceeds probably wouldn’t be very spectacular, but we can display our generosity in other ways.

Did you know that you are an expert?

You have knowledge and skills and experience that a lot of people around you do not have. You may know how to design or teach things, or even where to source or how to make or fix things.

Recently we were talking with a client about the benefits of email marketing. They said something to the effect of, “Well I don’t want to pester my clients. Email marketing is spam.”

Go on, all of you who think email marketing is spam put your hands up.

When we queried this client on his point of view he admitted that emailing a newsletter to people isn’t spam, as long as you have something useful to offer them.

Exactly. Offer them something useful. Be generous.

Tell your current or potential customers useful things, and they will come to see how useful YOU are.

You are not only offering them useful info that enriches their lives, but as they see that good info, their trust in you grows and your ‘top of mind status’ with them is strengthened.

By top of mind status we mean that if you were a plumber, that when your newsletter recipients think plumber, they should think of you instantly.

You are ‘their’ plumber.

Now writing newsletters may seem daunting to people for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, none of us want to be blacklisted as spammers. Which can happen. A friend of ours told us how she recently moved her home business from an ebay store to a normal website. She decided to notify every customer that she’d ever had of the change. It was useful information, they might want to know where she’d gone. She was hardly a professional spammer, it was the first mass mail out she’d ever done.

Yet she was blacklisted within hours, because she thought it was as simple as simply just mailing out large batches of mail.

There are a few protocols that should be followed to avoid being labelled as a spammer, that legitimate newsletter senders should follow.

The second obstacle to running a good online newsletter – HOW ON EARTH AM I GOING TO FIND THE TIME!!

It takes time to collect and manage and retrieve your mailing list. You need to make sure that people who opt out are removed from the list promptly and it helps if you are coving keyword relevant topics in your newsletter editions. It can be fairly time consuming, but it is something that you can get help with.

There are ways to get the mail out in a legitimate way, so that you can get through to all types of inboxes, including ones with tight regulations. And if you don’t want to employ us to do it, then we are happy to provide training courses for you or your staff so you can manage it in house.

The third obstacle to writing a useful newsletter is the writing.

Some people view writing as a chore. They don’t know where to go to get fresh ideas. Well, I do recommend signing up for other peoples newsletters or ezines that are relevant to your industry. You may not want to join up with your work address, as some people won’t mail to their competition.

And then you can google topics that you want to get fresh ideas on. And if you are still really stuck you can hire copywriters, your teenage kids or us to write your articles for you. You can provide the info and we’ll write it up, or you can just tell us a topic and send us out to do it.

But having a newsletter has such good benefits for you that it is something you should do despite your objections. And one of the best benefits is that it can keep your customers coming back for different things. We call it back ending to them, and the theory is that it is easier to get someone to buy from you twice than to get two different people to buy from you once. This is because you only have to generate one lot of trust and then keep it.

One of the important things to consider when writing a newsletter is not to get too generous. It is a fine tension, especially if you offer your knowledge as your product.

If you are running an online writing course, as is one of the people whose newsletter I subscribe to, you want to help and interest people, but not give your product away.

I think that it comes down to depth.

The newsletter is great and its info is useful, but he makes us aware that it lacks the depth of the course.

So if you have questions on email marketing or anything else to do with marketing or designing web presence for your business, give us a call or an email!