The importance of e-marketing - keeping your clients informed

The internet is a wonderful thing, it has made communicating with the world and their dog easy. Gone are the days of hand written letters and waiting days or weeks for responses, with today's technology we've become so impatient for a reply. I've been guilty of considering people rude if they haven't replied to my text message, I know that working in the IT industry and sitting in front of a computer for most of a day if we send an e-mail we expect one within minutes, the patient people will wait maybe an hour if they're having a lunch break then maybe two, but we are the most impatient of people when it comes to electronic communication, luckily for me I've worked beside people from a wide variety of industries and know that if I don't receive a reply then they're simply busy, not ignoring me (IT people take note of that last point)

But a conversation with a perspective client recently triggered the importance of staying in touch with our customers and clients, and one of the easiest ways is via an e-mail. It's cheap, instant and can be personal or in-personal depending on the requirement, though it is essential to point out that with the amount of spam today, receiving permission to e-mail your customers or clients is a necessity - but this blog is about keeping in touch with your existing clients so you're allowed to e-mail them right?

A business I know of which is suffering in part due to the economy, told me recently that they had a conversation with a supplier who installed their IT system and the suppliers comments were

"wow - you guys are still in business, we thought you'd gone under"

not the sort of words you want to hear from someone you paid x amount of money to recently install your IT suite, we then began discussing what if their customers thought they'd also gone out of business, if times are hard now, how hard are they going to get when everyone thinks they're no longer trading. I did ask if they were doing any active marketing, e-mail or otherwise and unfortunately due to budget constraints (remember perspective client of mine) they aren't.

This conversation only highlighted the importance of staying in touch with your clients/customers and in my opinion e-mail is the best tool for the job. Now you may not have something to tell your clients, though if your struggling then you may want to consider some tempting promotions, but it is still important to remind them that you still exist, your still providing your goods or service, and that if they need you, you are still there! Sometimes, an e-mail or e-newsletter can be an excuse to share some information you believe your customers will be interested in. A bike shop may highlight some of the many excellent cycle routes available to customers when the weather forecast is positive (not that often in the UK) a chocolatier may send some yummy chocolate recipe ideas, its not a direct sales channel, but getting them thinking about your product or service and more importantly your business is a good thing.

So taking some time to contact your customers with some useful tips, ideas or even your latest offers is an important part of running your business, and with an e-mail it can be incredibly cheap, you could reach 1000 customers for only £15 and that small investment could be the difference between your customers coming back to you for business or going to your competitor.