Email List
This sort of goes along with keeping positive contact with your customers. If you have an email list, by all means make good use of it! And if you don’t have one, you’d better get one. Most web hosting companies offer some sort of email list capability and if not, you can always get free ones on the web (such as Notify List)
A lot of folks either think people are going to chuck the email on sight or that a spamola filter will delete it. That might be true but in a lot of cases you’re talking about working the percentages here. If out of 100 people only 10 actually read your newsletter and out of that 10 only 1 person buys something, I’d still say it’s worth it. (I think there is a term for this, something like “conversion rate”, but I didn’t take marketing or econ so I’m not sure.) Unlike real mail through the post office, it doesn’t cost stamps. You only need to send one newsletter for those 100 people after all, so you can think of it as a half hour of your time = getting one possible sale. Well, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, but you get the idea.
Anyhow, the newsletters don’t have to be particularly long, and in fact they shouldn’t be. And try not to send emails more than twice a month. People don’t want to be bugged. They just need to be gently reminded once in awhile about your jewelry business and especially if you have any new products available or specials running. And former customers are more than likely to read your emails about your new items. If you’re web saavy, you might want to think about sending HTML email so that you can include pictures, although a lot of mailing programs block images or even the entire email so keep that in mind.
