One of the most cost effective yet under used ways to keep in contact with your clients is through the creation and distribution of an email newsletter or ezine.

By writing and sending a newsletter regularly you have the opportunity to keep in touch with clients and prospects.

This last weekend at the BT Small Business Show where I was providing advice at the business clinic about branding and marketing your business, the subject of how to start your ezine kept coming up.

What many entrepreneurs don’t realise is that it’s much easier than you might think – in fact for one businessleader, we developed a publishing calendar so that now they have the core content ideas for the ezine for the next 12 months.

In fact, I’ve encouraged some of my smart and savvy clients to repurpose their ezine articles to create chapters of their book or other information product.

I am  therefore delighted to have as my guest on Biz Growth Live, denise cox (that’s not a typing error, it’s how she writes her name) of Newsweaver, Europe’s leading email newsletter specialist, providing businesses with the software to create email newsletters.

Newsweavers clients include Shell, BP, 3M, Irish Rugby, Ernst and Young and the Intercontinental Hotels Group to name but a few global brands that they work with. And we’ll have the opportunity to discuss with denice tips and tricks for ezine marketing that these multibillion dollar businesses have access to.

Here are the detils of the Masterclass on ezines and email newsletters:

DATE OF THE EZINE MASTERCLASS: Monday 19 May 2008

TIME OF  THE EZINE MASTERCLASS: 6pm Dublin and London/ 1pm ET/10am PT

INVESTMENT: FREE

REGISTER: Register at Biz Growth Live if you don’t already receive a copy of our newsletter which as all the details for the programme in it.

If you have questions for denise and I you can ask them by posting them here or on our live questions page.

Here are some of the areas I’ll be discussing with denise:

• Best practice in ezine marketing content
• What we should look for when selecting an ezine service
• An overview of the legislation we need to be aware of in the field of ezine marketing
• How to encourage people to register for your ezine
• The best day of the week to distribute your newsletter
• Best practice in formatting your ezine
• Whether with the increase in business blogging and connecting to customers using social media, the ezine is a marketing tool of the past.

If you don’t receive a copy of my newsletter Biz Growth Express which provides the details of how to join me on this call, you can register today.

Don’t forget to join me for this Biz Growth Live call as what we will be discussing is a strategy that you can get started with straight away to market your business and attract more lead, more clients and more profit.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

You can access a series of six articles I wrote about how to build your brand through writing and distributing an ezine or email newsletter here:

Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4, Part5, Part6.

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With the increasing adoption of social media by organisations especially in relation to brand engagement with customers and clients, we are now starting to see some case studies for how social media can be used to enhance employee engagement through internal communications.

The recent announcement by the company I was on the board of before establishing my own brand engagement and social media practice about the impending significant organisational change they are about to go through made me think back to my time as HR Director where I also had responsibility for internal communications.

At a time of significant change, one of the key challenges was always to ensure that we had pathways for communication open. We were always keen to understand how effectively our line managers had been in translating and engaging their people in the key messages and making sure the communication was relevant for their teams.

We also wanted to respond quickly and effectively to questions raised from our employees as a result of the organisation announcements. No matter how our extensive lists of frequently asked questions were that we created to support all major communications, you could be sure that some questions were never addressed so we needed to respond to these queries quickly.

If only I had had at my disposal the social media platforms now easily available which would have enabled us to add additional platforms that we could have used to support our communications plan.

But where can you turn if you are a leader with responsibility for Internal Communications and employee engagement and want to learn about what your peers are implementing and current best practice?

A conference I will be attending which will showcase some leading case studies in intenal communications in the next few weeks is the International Employee Communications Summit co-hosted by Ragan and Simply Communicate.

Some of the company’s presenting include IBM, Ebay, BT and Microsoft. The agenda for the International Employee Communications Summit includes:

• Building your brand and values through collaboration and content
• Social media inside the enterprise
• Video Podcasting: How to stream key messages to a mobile audience
• How to beat the policymakers, lawyers and IT to get your social media channel up and running 
• How to use social media to energise and motivate the work force.

You can book online to attend the conference which is taking place on the 5 and 6 June 2008 in London (there is also a pre conference workshop).

I’ll be attending with my notebook and recorder in hand and hope that I’ll get the chance to capture some great insights to share with you. and if you are considering attending, let me know as it will be great to connect with you at the International Employee Communications Summit.

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I recently came across some interesting research which if you are based in the UK you might find of interest.

Earlier this year, insurers Hiscox published the Hiscox Wealth Review for 2008 and identified that some 10% of the UK population, nearly 2.5 million households can now be  identified as wealthy.The report states that:

An average ‘Working Wealthy’ household in Britain earns £88,000 (close to triple the average household income of £33,000), takes two foreign holidays a year and has over £20,000 worth of disposable annual income.  Despite this over 90% of them do not consider themselves at all wealthy. 

However, this population described as the ‘Working Wealthy’ say they would need to earn around £150,000 per household, have paid off their mortgage, own more than one property or a holiday home and send their children to private school before saying they are well off. 

The report uncovers that:

• Four in ten go on more than one foreign holiday a year (38%)
• Almost a third own a luxury home entertainment system (29%)
• Almost a quarter have savings of more than £25,000 (23%)
• 15% own a piece of art work
• 14% own more than one property.

Here are the persona’s for the ‘Working Wealthy’ as defined in the report:

The Home County Happies

• A wealthy mature professional couple in their 40s and 50s, living in a 4-bedroom house in the Home Counties
• They are likely to have more than two cars, go on more than two foreign holidays a year, and are interested in golf, arts and charity
• Often with a second home, their children will have expensive possessions, such as laptops, and they spend a lot on private education
• Women likely to shop in Waitrose; men most likely to own an Audi  

The Shire Squires

• A wealthy professional living in a small village with his/her partner but commuting into a city for work
• Likely to be over 45, they live in a detached four-bedroom home in a small village, with two or more cars to help them with their hobbies of antiques, arts and nature
• They may have benefited from dramatic rises in the property market of the 90s
•  They spend their money on home entertainment, household appliances, restaurants, hotels and clothes, in that order
• They lead a comfortable lifestyle

The Urbanite Professionals

• Often categorised as the ‘late to start a family’ earner, the young professional has a high income but won’t necessarily think so, as they compare themselves to higher ‘city-esque’ earners
• Regularly drinking lattés, they can afford to indulge in expensive disposables, from fashion, wine, electronics to art
• They may also have benefited from an inheritance of antiques, art or jewellery, and are likely to go on annual ski-ing and/or diving holidays abroad
• Women shop in Whistles; men shop in Reiss

So if you are considering your target market for your products and services, consider how you might want to include the information from the Working Wealthy report to support you developing the persona’s for your core clients, customers and patients - does it give you a better understanding of what motivates them to spend and what their priorities are?

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This week we have started to plan for PodCamp Ireland 2008 which will take place on Saturday 27 September 2008.

However if you can not wait that long to connect with colleagues about social media in a virtual world, then head on over to the website for 3Dcamp, a non-conference focusing on virtual worlds (Second Life, the Metaverse), mirror worlds (Google Earth and Virtual Earth), mapping mashups, GPS, Location based Services (LBSs), haptics (eg. Wiimote hacks), 3D modelling (Blender, Sketchup) and all things 3D.

And if you don’t understand what all these terms are (I certainly don’t), then it’s a good reason to attend 3Dcamp!

Here are the details:

DATE: Saturday 24th May 2008

VENUE: Engineering Research Building, University of Limerick

TIME: 10am start, 5pm finish

SPEAKERS: Go here for the curriculum and line up of speakers

REGISTER: Register to attend 3Dcamp online

What’s interesting about the registration process too is that 3Dcamp are integrating social media into their registration page asking for the following information:

• Your Twitter username: For notices and discussion on 3Dcamp
• Your Jaiku username: For notices and discussion on 3Dcamp

In addition, you’ll be asked where you are travelling from so that they can calculate the carbon-offset calculation and plan carpooling.

So if you are interested in learning more about virtual worlds, 3D modelling, mirror worlds and mashups and what benefit they can bring your business, head on down to Limerick for 3Dcamp later this month.

Remember, like all non-conferences, it’s FREE to attend.

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