How to Use E-mail to Build Client Relationships and Generate Referrals.

In a world moving at a faster pace every day, where people expect their needs to be gratified instantly, there is no better tool for relationship and business building than e-mail. How else could people keep up with the demand for prompt and quick service that exists in today's frenetically paced market? E-mail can help you add value, increase customer loyalty and generate referrals.

E-mail is instant, inexpensive, and you can personalize messages and information to suit your clients' exact needs. The process can even be automated and linked with an up-to-date database, making it incredibly efficient. For example, take the following comparison of how a typical company newsletter could be managed using e-mail instead of conventional printing and mailing methods:

The traditional approach to creating a newsletter requires a lot of time and money. Think about how much energy goes into writing, designing, printing and mailing a newsletter created for clients and prospects. The cost of a professionally created newsletter can be $6,000 or more for five thousand copies--and almost $2,000 of that is postage. In addition, due to the complex nature of most newsletter projects, by the time clients read the newsletter (if they read it), much of its content will be stale or out of date. Never mind the fact that it could contain large portions of information that may not interest certain clients at all.

Using e-mail is a great way to add more value than you can with traditional newsletters, and it's so much more efficient. With a properly built database containing information about individual client preferences and a system to distribute the e-mail, you can send personalized newsletters containing information of particular interest to specific customers. And it's all sent instantly, without any printing or postage costs. Working with e-mail, you can give people what they want, ...