A great way to keep in touch with your customers in a cost-effective, easy way is to have a newsletter going out to all of your subscribers every month or every two weeks or however often you like really.

This method of keeping up customer relations can be used by any business in any industry. There are many businesses that are brilliant at what they do, but they don't put themselves out there so nobody knows they do it.

Company directors and managers have so much going on all the time by the very definition of their jobs that finding subjects to write about, and full producing a professional newsletter every month is an almost impossible concept.

The large workloads of people in these positions usually prohibit them from carrying out these kind of promotions, but there are services available to take most of the labour intensity out of it.

For example, the new service from SmartMarketing called SmartNews which is a system that delivers professional newsletters, not only to existing customers, but to potential new customers as well.

A service such as this will remove the labour intensity of sending a regular newsletter, but coming up with the content is still down to you. Research shows that it takes around seven high quality contacts with a potential customer before you are brought to the front of their mind, therefore the content of the newsletters must always be compelling and informative, its no good simply churning out pages of bland text because it wont achieve anything.

The most effective method of sending out a monthly newsletter is by email. There are several reasons for this, primarily, its faster and cheaper so nobody spends days and days waiting for a reply to turn up, and the return on investment increases by around 40x.

Another great reason to use email to send out your newsletter is that it makes it much easier to measure the effectiveness of each email because you will have the information as to who has replied to what and when right there in front of you.