I ended my last article with this "profound" thought: 

"Where do you get all these wonderful toys? 

In addition to email, there are more low cost, easy-to-use and unique tools to help deliver your message than ever before. The barrier to using technology to deliver your communications is crumbling rapidly." 

The topic in that article was customer communications. We touched briefly on methods of communicating, but didn't get into much detail. 

So, with today's article let's examine these "crumbling technological barriers" to see how we can communicate at lower cost, higher speed and frequency and in the manner in which our prospects and customers prefer. 

Jay Conrad Levinson, the Father of Guerrilla Marketing, originally published "Guerrilla Marketing with Technology" about ten years ago. Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since then, but Levinson's premise still stands. Basically, he wrote that small businesses could level the playing field by freely using technology: 

• To reduce costs;
• To "create" extra time by speeding up processes;
• To encourage creativity;
• To increase profits; and
• To communicate with prospects and customers more frequently and more effectively. 

In fact, today the cost to communicate using multiple technology "channels" is a fraction of what it was ten years ago. And the ease with which even technophobes can use the new technology has increased exponentially. 

Ironically, even print communications have been aided by technology. To be sure, advances in commercial printing technologies, both traditional and digital, have helped to slow rising costs and accelerate turn around times. 

Low tech-gone high tech 

One good example of that is a system for marketing and communicating with greeting cards and post cards called SendOutCards. SendOutCards grew from a desire by founder Kody Bateman to find an easy, timely and inexpensive way to act on his promptings to "keep in touch" with his loved ones. 

The system he and his team developed is all that and more. In addition to being a great tool for staying in touch with your family and friends, SendOutCards is a great marketing and customer loyalty tool. Using this system, you can send out real, printed, premium quality, personalized and customized greeting cards and post cards for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. 

Perhaps the best feature of SendOutCards for business is that you can automate complete personalized, customized and branded marketing campaigns all with just a few clicks of the mouse. 

Learn more about SendOutCards and request a complimentary gift account here. 

Email is dead. Long live email. 

There is some discussion in marketing circles about whether or not email is still a viable marketing tool. It's true that email recipients are wary of emails from unknown senders and, as often as not, just delete unexpected email or report it as spam. It's also true that Internet Service Providers (ISP) have generally been overzealous in their attempt to filter unwanted email before it even reaches the intended recipient. Some ISP's also make it easier for a recipient to report an email as spam than to delete it or unsubscribe from the list. 

What's worse is that there are lots of unscrupulous scoundrels flooding the "cyber post office" with spam and malware, like viruses and spyware. They're making it more difficult for legitimate email publishers to get their messages out to their subscribers. 

That's the bad news; now for the good news. 

Email as a marketing tool is not dead. There are many ways to use email to market your business. Here are a handful. 

• Send a regularly scheduled email newsletter, or ezine, filled with "how to's" or news of the day. You'll demonstrate your expertise, bolster your credibility and establish top of mind awareness.
• Announce new products or services.
• Make special offers on existing products or services.
• Invite your subscribers to a seminar, workshop or trade show.
• Promote a cause, or perhaps a product or service that is complementary to yours. 

Some ground rules apply, though. 

• Always use permission-based email lists. Don't rent or buy email lists. Only send emails to those who give you permission to do so.
• Respect your subscribers' privacy. Establish and publish a privacy policy to which you adhere without exception. Don't share or sell your subscriber list.
• Be sure to deliver content that your subscribers expect and find valuable. Enough said.
• Use an established bulk email service provider to deliver your emails. You'll save time, money and headaches. 

The two services I use to send emails to my subscribers are AWeber and Constant Contact. They each have their strengths and they're each used by lots of businesses, both large and small. 

AWeber has a strong auto-responder function. This means that you can automate the delivery of a series of emails to your subscribers and that the delivery sequence can start automatically based on a subscriber's actions. This is very useful if you're responding to registrations for an event, teaching a multi-part email lesson or delivering a series of timed marketing messages. You can get a test drive here. 

Constant Contact is the service I use for my email newsletter. Its user interface is particularly easy to use and its multitude of design templates are easy to customize. Get a free 60-day trial here. 

Both of these services take email deliverability very seriously and provide plenty of guidance about how you can optimize your use of email for marketing to and communicating with your prospects and customers. They also allow you to track the open rate and other statistics that will help you plan your emails more effectively. 

To find out more about these services and find out how to try them risk free, click one of the links above. 

This article is a little longer than usual. So I'll sign off, and next time, we'll pick up here with some more time- and money-saving methods of reaching out to your prospects and customers.

Pat Hassett draws on more than 30 years experience in sales, sales management and sales support roles across several industries. He stands ready to help you increase your sales, your profitability and your customer loyalty through the use of customer-centric sales methods, high level customer service and customer relationship management tools. To learn more about how SalesNow! can help you, go to www.salesnowonline.com, blog.PatHassett.com, or write to infalesNowOnline.com.

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