One of the greatest challenges facing business owners and managers is finding a way to cost-effectively communicate frequently and consistently with their target markets.
It is nearly impossible to profitably hire enough people to personally maintain frequent and regular contact with your existing clients, let alone profitably seek new clients.
If you company grows in size or becomes busy, at some point a few (if not significant numbers) of your clients and prospects will fall through the cracks. It’s inevitable. Especially if you are using human beings to try and stay in touch one-on-one with each client.
Even companies with deep pockets have found that trying to hiring enough people to communicate monthly, weekly, and in some cases daily with all of the clients within the organization is just plain ludicrous. The high cost of human-to-human contact makes it impractical to attempt to implement a steady stream of consistent personal communications with every lead, client, or prospect who’s come in contact with your business at some point.
A common solution is to set aside a certain number of clients, the cream of the crop in profit potential, and regularly communicate with them, while forgetting the remaining clients. It becomes a game of economics. The problem is, these neglected masses of clients often make up 80% or more of a company’s income. So isolating them from communications can be a big mistake.
There is a better way. Due to the internet, regular communication with ALL of your clients and prospects is now possible. No one needs to fall through the cracks. The internet makes it possible to maintain regular contact while at the same offering additional valuable services. Internet eCourses and Webinars in place of in-person courses and seminars has proven profitable for many companies.
Electronic seminars (eSeminars) are similar to real seminars or real courses that you attend at a local college or meeting facility. Just like real courses you have a fixed term or time period in which to complete the course, and a fixed subject to discuss.
For example let’s say you sell automobiles and you want to maintain regular communications with your automobile buyers. What you could do is conduct an electronic seminar every month which discusses a new facet of maintaining the vehicle or informs the course participant of new developments in the industry that may affect them and that they may be concerned with.
The purpose of the eCourse is not only to provide a valuable service by keeping your clients educated, but to insure that they remember you now and into the future when they are ready to buy again or refer business to you. The more contact you maintain the less likely they are to forget you. The less contact you maintain the more likely they are to forget you 
A side benefit to regular communications is that within your course you can refer to other products or services that you offer, provided the discussion remains within the theme of the electronic course. If your course drops into hard selling or hucksterism then most people will drop out of your course or add your email address to their spam filters.
That’s bad!
So keep the discussion centered on topics that are of real value to your course participants and they will remain with you for as long as the course continues. These virtual seminars eliminate most, if not all, costs ordinarily associated with communicating with clients on a regular basis.
You can now afford to reach all clients, not only those considered to be ideal. This is possible because your electronic messages will be available online 24 hours, seven days a week–without the need for any employees to maintain the contact.
Now don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that the Internet can completely replace people, especially in areas where high personal contact is necessary. I’d forego a virtual handshake for a real one any day. However the strength of the Internet is such that it can decrease the common costs associated with communicating to large numbers of people on a consistent and regular basis.
This is important because the more frequently you communicate with your target market the greater the chance of their remembering you, and the greater chance of their buying from you again in the future.
Even if they don’t buy from you right away, communicating regularly helps maintain the relationship you worked so hard to build. You’re able to eliminate losing your clients to your competitors as a result of letting even one person slip through the cracks.
To keep things simple communicate your electronic course or electronic seminar via email. Though MS outlook or other email client could do the trick, I don’t recommend that.
The workload of conducting an eCourse with hundreds or thousands of clients via a normal email client would be tremendous. It could easily become a full-time job to send messages, subscribe members, unsubscribe members, avoid sending duplicate messages, and so on.
Doing all that ‘junk’ via email is completely unnecessary.
Sure, there are several stand-alone programs that are designed specifically for electronic courses. However I do not recommend any of them. This is because you can simply accomplish exactly the same thing by using an inexpensive remotely hosted autoresponder instead of spending several hundred (or thousand) dollars on autoresponder software programs that run on your own computer.
A better solution for operating your own ecourses is to use remotely hosted autoresponder service like aweber. Aweber handles all subscribe and unsubscribe requests for you. Using a remotely hosted autoresponder is ideal for conducting eCourses because once the autoresponder is setup it requires no daily maintenance from you. Ever. You set it and forget it.
Software that you run on your computer however requires you to start the software daily, import and export contact info of subscribers, process subscribe requests, process unsubscribe requests and other general daily maintenance tasks. and then there’s always the risk that a hard drive might fail, virus attack, or some other hassle that ruins your data. I’m speaking from experience on this one. I have more than a dozen dead hard drives on the shelf near me. Each has died, taking critical data along to hard drive ‘heaven’ with them.
A real drag. You are protected from losing your data when you use a remotely hosted autoresponder service such as aweber.
And the nice thing is, you can load a series of sequential lessons or messages into your autoresponder, set the frequency of communication whether that be daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly and sit back and let your messages get communicated to your market. Your autoresponder handles all the tedious tasks for you.
The beauty of this is that whether you’re communicating with one person or one million, the daily workload to communicate with the course participants is exactly the same.
Zero.
Another way that you can implement eCourses or eSeminars is to tie your autoresponder messages in with multimedia formats like MP3 files, flash animation, and even live video.
You simply preload your autoresponder with instructions on where to access the next lesson, set it and forget it. Each day, week, month, or quarter your course participants will receive instructions and you will maintain regular communications with them. All on autopilot. This is a win/win for everyone.
The choice to use email, flash, streaming audio or video is best decided upon your circumstances and your technical ability.
I strongly recommend keeping things simple though. Stick to email autoresponders.
However if you hate typing then at the very least record the information with an audio recorder such as All Sound Recorder. Upload the audio recording and use your autoresponder to inform your clients and prospects that the information is available for download.
That way you communicate the same information with less typing involved. The downside is that multimedia files will increase your monthly bandwidth significantly compared to sending a text-only email. If you have tens of thousands or millions of clients and prospects downloading your multimedia files, you might want to stick to simple text-only email eCourses.
Take full advantage of all the virtual marketing tools available so you can gain tangible assets you can deposit into your bank account while at the same time continue to provide valuable information to your market, remain in touch with them, all while keeping your life as simple and stress-free as possible.