Regularly communicating with your potential and existing customers is vital for getting those valuable and profitable repeat sales.

So having an online email newsletter is an ideal way to build a strong relationship with your online customers.

An online email newsletter is cheap, eco-friendly and budget-friendly as it is sent via email and doesn’t use paper, stamps, envelopes or trips to the printer and post office while you can send it to thousands.

A regular newsletter can be sent out weekly, fortnightly or monthly and can range from being short and sweet to being long and informative.

Images are important within most email newsletters as people tend to scan through them, reading articles based on what’s caught their eye. It can also help to use bold to highlight key words and phrases that are caught by scan readers and helps them quickly and effectively go through your ezine.

Tip: If your website uses forms then you can’t let readers and customers go to specific pages within your site. Forms as a navigational tool are really bad for internet marketing and search engines so avoid them. Only use forms to collect data carefully online, not for navigation purposes.

You can use your own email tool like Outlook for your database but it is a chunky and slow way to manage your list, especially as all email servers have filters to block out emails being sent to a lot of people so they’ll block your email newsletter if you send it from Outlook to your list.

Instead, there are some great online email newsletter services that provide great templates that make your business look professional while also looking after your database with new subscriptions and unsubscriptions.

There’s usually a monthly fee, unlimited number of emails and unlimited number of subscribers. Two of the leading email newsletter providers are Aweber and Constant Contact. Aweber charges a flat fee, no matter how many subscribers you have whereas Constant Contact keeps increasing the monthly fee with the more subscribers you have. Personally I prefer the flat fee and the features of Aweber. It makes better business sense to me.

Make sure you make it very easy for site visitors to sign up to your email newsletter by having a sign up box on every page. This simple action can make a great deal of difference.

You can also grow your list by offering a reward for signing up such as a limited time offer of a discount on a specific product or service – or on all products and services. A free ebook about the subject of your site is also a good reward for signing up to the ezine.

Content for an online ezine can be easily sourced as well from article marketing websites so if you’re not a writer then you still have good material for regular contact with your treasured customers. You can also publish your email newsletter on your website – creating more content hooks for online search engines and constantly and regularly adding material to your website – something that is important for page ranking for search engines like Google.

You can also get your online email newsletter to earn extra money for you by selling advertising in it. Your ‘sponsors’ can bring you an additional income on a consistent basis that adds nicely to your bottom line.

Having an email newsletter is great for business and is well worth the effort.  Over time you can build your customer database into a highly profitable source for your business by bringing established customers back time and again to shop with you and your advertising sponsors.