Running NYC Marathon and your Business!

Today is the running of the NYC Marathon. Running a marathon take desire, focus, and training. It takes the ability to overcome injuries. The decision to run 26.2 miles is one not to be taken lightly. No one can run for you, each step must be made as a result of your conscience decision. Important elements of race strategy must be learned, goals must be set, quantified, and plans made to attain them. (FYI ran the Long Beach Marathon in 1988 - time 4:15)

Running your business also takes desire, focus, and training. Running a business requires the successful application of many elements. One of them being the use of technology to acquire, service and retain customers.

Do you have a plan that outlines how you plan address this issue? Do you know who your customers are? Their demographics? How they found you. What is your plan to keep in touch with them? Do you have a specific place where ALL customer information is kept? Do your customers know who you are and what you believe? Do you have a written process that outline what sales processes you take with a new customer, a repeat customer (to retain them) and a process to win back a lost customer?

Today's post will outline one idea to keep in touch with your customers. Use a periodic newsletter e-mailed to your customer no less than on a monthly basis. The newsletter should have useful information related to the goods or service you provide. If should not be overly long in words or in size. There are many free sources you can Google for how to write a good newsletter.

I want to touch on how to create and distribute them via e-mail. The best way is to address each one individually, and insert in the newsletter body specific information about the customer, retrieved from your customer date base. Your address should be from either your "URL" i.e "yourname@yourwebsite.com" or companyname@gmail.com (Where gmail might be yahoo, MSN etc.). This is to help your customer recognize your e-mail and open it rather than delete it without opening. The easiest way to create and address the letter is to use the "Mail Merge" tools contained in your word processor. Both MS Office and Open Office have there capabilities.

More on these topics in latter posts... Time for me to hit the road and give a "therapeutic massage" to an injured computer in Del Mar (San Diego).