When it comes to acquiring new customers, it doesn’t have to be slow going any more. Today the most cost effective and powerful communication solution is email marketing.

Email marketing technology, with their built in advanced analytics, can help you understand, for example, your client’s behaviour and interests, which in turn, helps you build business intelligence.

For example, when you send an email newsletter campaign, you can gather information in real time such as…

• Did they open your email, and if so, how many times?
• What, in particular, were they interested in reading?
• Did they forward the email to a friend?
• Did they click on a particular link, and if so, how many times?
• Was it an invalid email address? It can be automatically tracked and flagged 

TIP. By law, you cannot send an email campaign using Outlook, as it is not SPAM compliant. Also, because you can't measure the success of your campaign, it doesn't provide you with any business intelligence to grow your business.

Here’s an example of how to build one fast.

Organise a competition. If you have a website, get your web developer to organise an online competition. You could have an amount to spend with your business, or your products or services as the prize. The idea is to get people to supply their email address when they register for the competition.

Have a flyer advertisement for the competition designed and printed. Send it out to your existing database, distribute it to your network and at the point of sale. (Yes, you may have to use the old post delivery system one last time!)

Result? Conversion of your old address book to an up to date online database.

The sooner you start building your email database, the sooner you increase customer acquisition and retention at a very low cost.