If your online marketing efforts focus most of your energy and resources on new customer acquisition, you might be able to significantly increase your profits for very little extra expense.

How’s that?
By using direct email marketing to boost your customer retention you can earn additional revenues from your existing customers at a very low cost.

Most marketers know that it’s cheaper to earn a sale from an existing customer than to land a new customer. Most know, too, that it can take up to seven points of contact before you turn a hot prospect into a buyer.

What you might not realize is that you can take advantage of both these marketing truisms with a single tool. Direct email marketing.

Get Invited into Your Customer’s Living Room
When you build an email marketing list, you build one of the most powerful customer retention and prospect conversion tools available to you. When a customer or prospect signs up for your email list, they give you permission to come into their home to share valuable information with them, to let them know about special discounts, and to educate them about how your products and services can benefit them.

This is powerful stuff.
A consistently executed email marketing campaign can help you extend the life of your existing customers, increase the frequency at which they buy, and improve your conversion of prospects to buyers. That’s three ways direct email can improve your bottom line.

Three Ways to Connect with Customers and Prospects
There are three primary ways you can use email marketing to build stronger ties with your customers and prospects. (Stronger ties means more trust and the more a person trusts you, the easier they will find it to buy from you.)

Useful information: You can send your email list a regular newsletter with relevant articles, helpful tips or insightful reviews. By giving your subscribers information that they can use, you’ll give them a reason to keep reading, to visit your site more often, and to purchase your products and services.

Direct Promotions: You can also use your email list to educate your customers and prospects about your products and services and to increase your sales. Direct response promotions sent to your email list work to directly convert sales or to bring your readers to your website where they can buy.

Special Offers: You can add value for your subscribers by alerting them early to special offers or making special offers just to your list. By making offers exclusive to your list, you make your readers feel valued and you make your list even more useful to them… and to your business.

You can use these three methods in combination and come up with endless variations. There are three important guidelines to follow. First, do what you say you’ll do. For example, if you promise to deliver a newsletter each week, make sure you’re timely. Second, if you combine editorial content with advertisements, make sure you offer substantially more editorial content than advertising. And third, keep the look, tone, and voice of your emails consistent. This is how you build trust among your readers. They learn to recognize you and know that they will appreciate what’s coming.

Direct email marketing is a powerful tool that can help you build your bottom line through better customer retention. It’s low cost to execute and can provide a substantial, ongoing return on your investment.