Many of us subscribe to online newsletters and attend events to increase our business knowledge. Some companies have even combined the two to great effect. Perhaps you could do the same for your customers?
Your customers are no doubt hungry for relevant information for their industry and always keen to keep learning. Through providing a useful newsletter with up-to-date articles that your customers will appreciate, and that will help solve the issues that they face on a day-to-day basis, then you will no doubt soon have a loyal and responsive customer base, providing useful feedback in real time.
By using Google Analytics, you will then be able to accurately measure who is reading your newsletter, and the articles that are generating the most interest. This will consequently enable you to hone your offering more closely to the needs of your customer base; thus creating a “virtual circle”
You could then take that a step further. By now you have a loyal following, and a good idea of their interests. You can then take this information, and promote an “event/seminar” to this database on one of the subjects. Depending upon the feedback your database gives you, you can then make a decision as to whether to organise an event or not. It has cost you nothing for the feasability study!
If there is sufficient popularity, you can go ahead to organise an event, and then you are generating yet more potential revenue streams; ticket sales, sponsorship, and advertising.
And now that the readers of your newsletter are closely defined in terms of interest, you are now in a position to provide “context based” advertising, offering discounted commercial solutions to specific problems.
My point is this: You have a database of customers/suppliers. They are all looking for relevant information. By creating a newsletter, that is genuinely useful to them, you can create a bundle of revenue streams to back it up. Your customers will appreciate it, more to the point, and you can engage in real time with them.
Take a look at Fresh Business Thinking; they have achieved this with great effect!