Using your email campaigns to educate your clients/customers, on a relevant topic, will help to ensure that they stay on your mailing list. If you continually email your list with special offers and sales, some will eventually tire of the emails unless you have a huge product range and always have something that they would want to spend their money on.

Obviously the type of your business will determine what you can educate your customers about. But don’t constrain yourself to the obvious. Here’s just 2 tips on how to add further value to your customers:

1. what do my customers do prior to needing my product / service? Can I provide education to help my customer reach the point of needing my service more easily or more quickly? e.g. a travel agent could provide tips on how to prepare for a holiday so that you arrive relaxed.
2. who in my network of contacts could write something for my email campaign, helping my contacts with a related need? e.g. an Accountant could have a document image storage firm provide information about how to store documents electronically, saving storage space.

Businesses talk about providing value to their clients through their communications, but unfortunately so few do it. Instead they simply resort to specials and sales announcements, probably because they are daunted by the task of creating useful information. That’s why I’ve suggested that you ask a contact in your network to provide some valuable content, creating a win-win-win for you, your customers and the business writing the contact – they get to promote themselves to your contacts.  The business you ask to include content in your email campaign is likely to already have the information written – you will just need to tailor it for your communication.

Feel free to post to this blog if you need some ideas for adding value to your customers in your business communications, or if you want to share your ideas / experiences?

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 1:31 am and is filed under Email Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.