One of the best ways to build your business is to build an email list of your clients. If you're not doing this yet, you need to right away. When you have a list of customers that want to get information from you sent to their inbox, that's gold!
One purpose of your website is to get leads. You want to give people multiple ways to be in contact with you. You want to give them several opportunities to say "yes" to doing business with you. Maybe they're not ready to buy something yet but they may want to in the future. If you're not giving them that chance, then you are simply wasting your advertising dollars.
With an e-newsletter or email list, you are able to blast out an email to your customers and "pre-customers" (you could say) and let them know what special offers you have going on. Of course, you don't want to spam them to death. Sending 1-2 email blasts a month is not doing that and it keeps your business in front of their eyes - which is exactly what you need to do. Again, it's gold.
While it's true that the content management systems that we include do often offer a module or component that will let you set up an e-newsletter mailing list with your clients, we're finding that using a service like Constant Contact works even better for our clients. Constant Contact does a very good job of making sure that emails get sent out quickly, they have excellent statistics on who has opened the email and who has clicked the links in the email, how many opted out and they also tell you how many bounced (to invalid email accounts). The click through stats are pretty amazing as well.
It's important to know a few legal issues with sending email to your clients. For example, if you are simply keeping a list of email accounts on your computer and using a program like Outlook to send out emails to your list, you could be setting your business up for some potential trouble.
Here are some great reasons to switch over to using Constant Contact: