Get a Newsletter, Keep Your Customers

By Aaron Turpen
Posted Tuesday, August 17, 2004

How many return customers does your online business or website have? If you are serious about your marketing, you no doubt have an answer. Is it 10%? 15? 30? Not likely.

What if it were? What if your return customer rate were as high as 30% or even higher? What would that do to your sales figures?!

There is a great way to create customer retention and to drive customers back to your store again and again. It's not some get-rich-quick or magic pill scheme. It's a tried-and-true method…one that the publisher of this very e-zine is exploiting right now…

I think you're catching on now. :

Yep, that's right. Newsletters are the best and most time-tested way to get customers to return to your website again and again.

By building trust, establishing expertise, and by just reminding readers again and again that you exist, a newsletter keeps them coming back to your site regularly. I should know, I've published my own newsletter for over two years now.

So how do you get your own newsletter? What is needed? How do you get started?

Well, first off, now that you've heard all the good points about newsletters, let's get into some of the bad news. This is the reason many online entrepreneurs do NOT publish their own e-zine:

Newsletters are time-consuming, difficult to publish regularly and timely, and are very, very high maintenance. In order to create a solid, dependable, and interesting newsletter, you have to spend hours culling free reprint articles (or writing your own), organizing your newsletter's layout, dealing with signups and opt-outs, handling inquiries… Did I mention the promotion and marketing of your newsletter?

In fact, most newsletters disappear after only a few weeks because of these very issues.

Time for more good news! You don't have to kill yourself to reap the benefits of a great newsletter. There are tons of resources out there for the newbie-publisher to use.

The most important of these are the free-reprint article sources and the newsletter announcement resources available. Most can be found at the same spots:

(http://www.topica.com/)
(http://groups.yahoo.com/)

These two places have more of both resources than any other place online. Go to either/both and do a search for "free reprint" and "news announce." Refine your search by adding subject matter ("business," "internet," etc.) and you should have a HUGE number of places to go for information.

Happy publishing!

About the Author
If you're serious about having a successful newsletter and treating your customers to something great (giving them lots of incentive to come back to you), visit us at (http://www.ezine4hire.com/) and for as little as $4.95/week, you too can have a professional, quality newsletter!