In the last 7 hours I have designed a newsletter and emailed it to 90 of my past customers and prospects. I already know that 8 of the emails I sent bounced, 32 were opened and read and 4 people unsubscribed.

I received in my company email inbox 8 responses in the last hour from customers that I have not heard from in more than a year. All of these made comments about my business or provided testimonials about my previous work.

I did all of this for free and I don’t have a website.

When I started this morning I had nothing more than an idea. My idea was this, “How can I get in touch with my previous clients and let them know I am still alive and in business ready to take another order from them”?

Business has been a little slow and as I have been told, your best sales will come from your existing customers.

Well, how did I do it?

In a word, e-Newsletter Marketing. Here is the play by play account since 8am.

  1. Subscribe to the i-Contact.com Free Trial offer (i-Contact is an e-newsletter management service)
  2. Read the help and watch the video tutorials
  3. Round up 90 email addresses from previous invoices and list them in an excel spreadsheet
  4. Write a short article on the Most Recent Project I have completed (about 200 words)
  5. Write another article on a handy tip my customers could use (about 150 words)
  6. Find a digital picture of me and crop it down in Windows Picture Manager that comes with XP
  7. Find the digital image of my company logo (got it from the people that did my business cards)
  8. Follow the steps in i-Contact.com to Create my newsletter, Upload my email list and Send

Now that’s not so bad. Do you think you could do this on a Saturday afternoon?

Don’t sit there waiting for the economy to get better, Do Something! This simple idea could make the difference in whether you pay the bills this month.

I forgot to tell you about the best part

All I need to do now is write a few more articles (maybe an hour of my time) and I will be ready for the next couple of months of newsletters.

They say it takes at least 7 contacts with your customer before he is ready to buy. I have now found a way to do just that for all my previous customers.

If you decide to try this easy technique, I would be interested in hearing about your experience. You can leave a comment under this post

In future posts I am going to research other e-mail newsletter software and compare features and price.

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