An email newsletter or ezine (email magazine) is a very popular form of email marketing. An ezine is an electronic form of communication that is sent out on an ongoing basis and used for business to business or business and consumer companies.

Because email marketing doesn’t require printing or postage, staying connected to your audience via email marketing is a more cost effective alternative to traditional print newsletters.

Email marketing is an essential tool to growing your business in today’s fast-paced world of Internet business. Offering open, conversational, and interactive communications is quickly becoming a necessity for business marketing. In fact, these days, it seems as if everyone already has, or is currently developing some type of email newsletter or email marketing system.

No matter what type of business you have or what services or products you sell, a value-added ezine can be a great tool to help build your business. Publishing an ezine, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even quarterly (if it makes sense) helps you stay in front of your customers and prospects, increase your marketing “touches,” and generate more leads and referrals.

Publishing An Ezine or E-Newsletter Will Also Help You:

• Save valuable budget dollars (and some trees) by going digital. By producing your ezine online, you’ll save on design fees, printing, postage, envelopes and mail handling, not to mention the fact that your ezine will get to your audience much faster than snail mail.
• Increase your brand recognition by getting your image and name in front of your customers and prospects more often. Include your logo, tagline, ezine title, color palette, brand graphics, and photo in every issue.
• Connect with your target market, customers, and prospective customers on a regular basis, keeping you at the top of their minds and the tip of their tongues, ensuring that when your services or products are needed they will buy from you or refer you to their friends, family, and business associates.
• Increase your credibility and gain the trust of your target market, making it easier to sell your product or service.
• Educate your current clients on all of your services, products and talents, enticing them to expand their relationship with you and increase profits from your existing customer base with the “I didn’t know you do that, can you do it for me?” response.
• Attract new opportunities, such as strategic partnerships, joint ventures, media interviews, speaking engagements, and more.
• Create new passive streams of revenue by referring products or services that earn you a commission (affiliate programs), directly selling your products or services, or selling ad space in your ezine.
• Expand your network and build your list by capturing the email addresses of your website visitors with an opt-in box and getting permission to market to them.
• Organize your industry knowledge and package it into products, programs, reports, ebooks, tips lists, articles, and endorsements that can easily be reused and/or repurposed.
• Reach a wider audience and bring in more potential customers by repurposing your email newsletter content on your blog or submitting your articles to news bureaus, PR websites, and ezine article directories.

From designing and programming your newsletter templates, to writing content, and implementing each issue, if you want to publish an email newsletter to enhance and build your brand, Bourn Creative can help. We offer design, copywriting, and full-service email marketing implementation services for businesses just like yours.

For example, when my client Melissa first came to me and asked me to help her figure out why she wasn’t getting the sales results she wanted out of her email marketing efforts, she was shocked to hear my recommended course of action – To STOP focusing on list building.

You see, Melissa had been focusing on steadily growing her list and had grown it to almost 3,400 subscribers. Not only was she was proud of her BIG list, but others were impressed as well, which lead to joint venture invitations, teleseminar guest speaking opportunities, and more.

But, her BIG list wasn’t producing results and her conversion rates were low, which means so were her overall sales.

Luckily Melissa was using an email marketing service provider for her ezine that offered robust tracking tools. Those tools allowed me to analyze previous email campaign reports and her list.

So what was the problem?

Melissa, may have had a BIG list, but her unique open rates and click-throughs were in the toilet. That means less than one-third of her list actually opened the emails she was sending, and of those one-third, even less actually took the time to read the content she was delivering! You see, Melissa had a high quantity list, but it was a low quality list.

My recommendation, and what she ultimately hired Bourn Creative to do for her, was to help her transition from a focus on list building, to a focus on list nurturing. Getting people to join her list wasn’t her problem, but she wasn’t engaging them and nurturing her relationships with her subscribers. She wasn’t connecting.

I told her she needed to STOP focusing on list building and instead start focusing on list nurturing.

By focusing on list nurturing, and making list building a secondary task, Melissa began to build relationships with her readers. She was focused on providing great content for her tribe and helpful, valuable information. Soon saw her conversion rates on email promotions and sales steadily begin to improve.

What do you think? Do you have any thoughts on list size? I’d love to read them!

For me, I approach my business in sort of the same way. I decide what I want to achieve, I set a date of completion, and I jump right into the planning and implementation needed to make it happen. Ten years ago, I never would have guessed that I would be running my own business and loving every second of it – It took me a while to figure out I was an entrepreneur.

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday with a fabulous lunch at the Bistro 33 restaurant inside the brand new Mercedes dealership in my home town. It was delicious and I highly recommend it if you’re local. With a giant water feature in the shape of the Mercedes logo pouring down from the ceiling of the second story into a planter on the ground floor, the beautiful cars to check out, and the shop and car lot on the roof of the building (not visible from the street, this dealership definitely lives up to the Mercedes standard.

During our long lunch, I had a chance to reflect on the past year and talk with my husband about all of the changes that we have gone through in my business since my last birthday.

OH MY GOODNESS! Last year at the same time I was working on my website, starting my ezine, pondering a blog, and making a serious plan of action for growth and expansion. This leap into action was launched at the eWomenNetwork Internatonal Conference in 2008 and catapulted into serious implementation at Alexandria Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop later that year.

This past year has been a HUGE foundation building year for both myself and my business and I just want to say thank you to all of you who are reading my ezine and sending me your kind praises, and engaging with me on the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There is no way that I would be I business today with out your support and I am lpoving every minute of it.

I also want to say thank you to all of you who have supported my BIG IDEAS - and matter how crazy or out of reach they may have sounded. I totally embraced THINKING BIG last year and it is very exciting to see many of those exact ideas and visions becoming a reality. (Check out my speaker site www.jenniferbourn.com)

With only goal goals, it is easy for entrepreneurs to feel overwhelmed and actually put off the work that needs to be done to reach those goals because they seem big and scary. Big goals can seem intimidating and without a plan of action, many of us have not idea where to start and what to do first. The key for me has been to THINK BIG and then create a serious, step-by-step plan of action with my big goals broken down into several smaller goals.

By breaking down your BIG goals into several smaller goals, you not only have a much more clear and focused plan of action, but you will be able to celebrate your progress each step of the way and actually see the progress your are making to make your dreams and goals a reality.

If you have any insights on how your break down your big goals or have a success story on how you have tackled large projects, I’d love to hear from you!

Best Wishes & Incredible Success,
Jen Bourn

“Our old website was canned and dysfunctional. We could not make text changes, no statistics were provided, no SEO benefits and the list goes on. Of course at the time we paid someone to create and build it, we felt rushed to get an internet presence and really didn’t put a lot of thought into doing it right the first time. Looking back, the only positive we received was filling a void on our business cards for a website address. Live and learn. Like so many others, our ignorance cost us money and business. We had to make a change.

We talked to many website designers and developers and most could not do both. And, we just didn’t feel they were in tune to what we needed. After all, shouldn’t they interview us too? Finding Jennifer confirms our belief that certain people and situations can cross your path and you better acknowledge the signs or miss out. We instantly felt that about Jennifer. She is the real deal. We knew that she could make a difference in the complete overhaul of our website and give our business the boost it needed.

Jennifer created an entire new website look for Client Retention. First of all, she asked pertinent questions as to how we wanted it to look. Honestly, she did not get a lot input from us, because all we could do was tell her what we didn’t like. Blindly, Jennifer took what little information we gave her and because of her expertise, insight and knowledge she created a couple of sample layouts. We couldn’t have been more pleased and picked one of those without sending her back to the drawing board. In addition, she built an ezine template, an information piece that the visitor can download after opt-in, and hooked us up to Strategic CMS as well. Did I say she trains too?

Since then, we have had rave reviews about the design, ease of reading, contents and most importantly a fabulous, useful reference for us to promote and guide our current customers and prospects. We have repeatedly referred Jennifer Bourn, Bourn Creative, to many of our customers and contacts and will continue to do so. If you are undecided or even a little skeptical about choosing her and want to speak to one of her customers, I encourage you to contact us at www.ClientRetentionInc.com or info@ClientRetentionInc.com. We absolutely love to sing Jennifer’s praises!”

By Jodi Riolo & Sandie Marinoble, Client Retention, Newcastle California