If you have a business, whether you are a one man operation working from the small bedroom in your parents’ flat, or a multi-national conglomerate, you will indeed know by now that the money you can make is in your list. Yes, that list you worked so hard to grow and maintain. Saying this however you may be surprised to hear that less than 10% of businesses are keeping in touch with their existing clients and reaching out to potential new customers by email.

To be in business you must have a clear understanding of gross profit and net profit, to me it simply means gross profit is what you have from sales, and net profit is what you have left after paying the main business bills; what’s left for you basically.

The most cost effective business strategy you can be utilizing is your existing clients; some call them ‘sticky customers’ yet very few are doing newsletters.

Many people shudder at the idea of newsletters. They see it as something that just goes straight to spam and has the interest level of drying paint, something you got tricked into and never really wanted. It’s a time consuming chore to try and unsubscribe to at least see your main emails somewhere in the mountain of spam.

But many who are using newsletters see them as a vital part of their business and one of my clients calls it their most effective marketing tool they have ever used.

There is a vast difference between newsletters you love opening that are of interest to you and a hum drum pathetic attempt to raise interest done by someone who has no real passion or invested interest in your business.

The business owners that do newsletters effectively don’t call them newsletters as it inspires boredom and is trash fodder, they call it anything else but newsletters.

Historically, back in the late 1990’s when the pioneers started sending out email to their list, they were phenomenally productive. The ‘start of the bell curve’ followers then started chucking out ads on email as well, and at the top of the curve by 2010 people had grown very tired of the hundreds of newsletters and spam emails and the world turned against the spammer, and started a movement to close off our inboxes to spammers and produce unsubscribe laws and spam scores to stop unsolicited mail.

The ones that rode the wave, stayed the course, and just produced good regular content and people still open their email correspondence at a very good rate and they make sales every week.

Email marketing works but you have to know what you are doing and have a list. It takes time and effort to get a good list, but nothing in life worth doing is easy!

So how do you start? Better late than never. Well done you are a serious business owner.

First of all I hope you have a lot more summers in front of you than behind you, because email marketing is about time and not a quick fix!

You need a list of subscribers, a list of people who have double opted in to your email list and are happy to receive your email.

Double opting in means they clicked a link to receive from your website and then again from the link in their email you have to send, and this  means your regular correspondence will go into their inbox and not spam.

To get these subscribers is a subject for thousands of other blogs. Mainly, they come from e-books, blogs, incentives, and the most common, a sign up form on your website often in the form of a pop up with some kind of gift for signing up.

You must have prolific traffic visiting your website on a regular basis to have a ratio subscribing, so it is all work, work, and more work. It is not surprising that Digital Marketing Managers are a prerequisite for any business who wants to progress.

Once you have your subscribers then you need to give them regular content every week at the least and this content should be relatable, informative, and passionate and educate your audience as to why you are the best in your industry and should be trusted to turn to when they need your products or services.

Across the board there are figures of 20% open rates and 3% click through rates

So if you have 1000 subscribers, around 200 (20%) will open your email in their inbox , and it really depends on how good your heading is and you gave them what you promised in the heading. It’s the same premise used in movies where the opening sequence makes you want to watch the rest of the movie.

Then from the people that are now looking at your newsletter, 6 will click links and then it depends on your ratio of websites visitors to sales that will determine your end result of sales.

One other way you can find leads is to check our sales Leads we get each week on Biz-find. We have a team of Customer Service Reps who contact our members each week and find out what products and services they are buying each week, and we have 6,000+ members and growing each week.

If you found a buyer on our site and you did not have to do any content marketing to get subscribers and years worth of newsletters to find the buyers, how profitable will your efforts be?