In our last e-newsletter (click here to view), we discussed e-Marketing and how it’s revolutionizing the marketing process. A common concern from companies, however, is that they don’t quite know how e-Marketing can work for them, or if it’s the right tool for them.

E-Marketing has a number of advantages over traditional means of advertising (i.e. TV, print) that translates into substantial benefits for the entrepreneur. Besides being inexpensive, proactive and interactive, and a great way to communicate with your clients, it’s also measurable – you can track what features of your e-marketing your recipients find interesting.

OfficeSmarts uses an e-newsletter to stay in touch with their clients and potential clients. They also develop e-newsletters for other companies who want to communicate with their client base. According to Dan Debreuil, Marketing Director for OfficeSmarts,

“One of the most important benefits of e-Marketing is it that it keeps you in touch with your client. We develop and publish e-newsletters for a number of companies with the objective of fostering long-term relationships between the company and their customers. The e-newsletter allows you to keep clients up-to-date with your products and services, and ultimately results in sales.”

OfficeSmarts has been publishing an e-newsletter for Roy Gardiner, General Manager of Adhere Distributors for 2 years. Gardiner is an advocate of e-newsletters for his business:

“It is an extremely cost-effective way to stay in touch with our customer base. It has allowed us to introduce new products and services to all of our customers almost instantaneously. All in all, we have found our e-newsletter to be a valuable sales, marketing and communications vehicle.”

E-newsletters are definitely a great way to contact your client, but there is more to them than meets the eye. Gardiner also adds that:

“A key feature, and one of the reasons we chose OfficeSmarts as the provider of our quarterly e-newsletter, is the “report generation” feature provided to us after each [e-newsletter] release. These reports track a variety of the recipient’s movements from the e-newsletter to our web site. After each e-newsletter we see a substantial increase in hits on our “Read More” links, as well as more traffic to our web site.”

What’s Next? . . . for your business founder, Laurel Kidder, also uses a quarterly e-newsletter to stay in touch with her clients and concurs with Gardiner.

“Having OfficeSmarts develop my e-newsletter lets me consolidate my ideas and content and put it in a format that I can easily share with my client base. It‘s a great value-added resource to my business, because I can connect with my clients, and, with the report generation from OfficeSmarts, I can see which clients have expressed the highest interest in the newsletter content and my services. It is a fantastic marketing and sales tool.”

Use of e-newsletters isn’t restricted to business. The principal at a large elementary school in Winnipeg uses e-newsletters and mass emails, rather than back pack drops, to communicate with the families in the school. Not only has he substantially reduced the amount of paper being used, he found that parents respond faster to school requests (such as booking parent-teacher appointments and volunteering) and that the number of parents responding has also increased.

So, whether it’s business or some other industry, e-Marketing technology lets you interact with your clients and track what they find interesting about your business. But it’s really about communicating and staying in touch with your client base. After all, if you’re out-of-sight . . . you’re out-of-mind. And in business, that just doesn’t sell.

Learn more about how email marketing can benefit your business. Interested in seeing some examples, click here to see samples.

Got questions about email marketing? Send us an email at besmartaboutit@officesmarts.ca or call us at (204) 254-5136 and we’ll be happy to help you out.