Do you regularly communicate with your customers and prospects via a newsletter or other paper-based mailing? Sending this same information via e-mail can be a more effective way to cultivate your customer relationships. There are several advantages to communicating with your customers via e-mail. First, you can customize. With an e-mail based newsletter, you can create different versions for each customer segment. This allows you to more efficiently inform your customers of the latest trends and more effectively promote the most appropriate offerings to them. Doing so via print can be a costly venture, especially at low print quantities. You can also track whether your customers are actually reading your newsletter. With e-mail, you have the ability to tell whether your e-mail was opened and which articles or promotions were most interesting by tracking the number of times links to various articles were clicked. This can help you take active steps to provide more compelling content and promotions to your customers without having to subject them to any surveys. Finally, it is less expensive. With print newsletters, your expenses include the cost of copy creation, design, printing, and mailing. E-mail based newsletters eliminate the need to print and mail, potentially saving thousands of dollars per mailing. While you can send these communications via a standard e-mail program, e-mail marketing software can make the entire process from creation development and sending to e-mail address management much easier. In particular, managing your customer e-mail addresses can be much easier with this software. E-mail marketing software allows you to quickly update addresses, track whether a recipient should receive a HTML or text version of your mailing, generate the appropriate list of e-mail addresses to mail to, and unsubscribe readers who choose to opt-out from future mailings. And when you are sending multiple versions of a mailing to your customers, you can quickly target and send the appropriate mailing to the correct group. E-mail marketing software comes in two flavors. You can purchase software to manage and send mailings using your in-house computer equipment and bandwidth. You can also opt to use an online service provider that allows you to manage these mailings and rely on the third party's resources. Costs range considerably. Software typically costs a few thousand dollars per year. Services typically charge based on the number of e-mails to send and the number of versions you send per mailing. Expect to pay several hundred to a few thousand dollars per year. As you make your buying decision, be careful of succumbing to cool features that you will never use. For example, while it could be nifty to test various e-mail versions, it does require additional internal effort on your part to actually create the copy. Realistically evaluating your company's ability to take advantage of such features might steer you to a more simple offering. Marketing experts claim that it costs less to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. E-mail marketing software can help minimize the cost of customer retention
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