[Cynthia Daniel]

Something you may not have considered when talking to a prospect is to ask for their email address. You're probably used to asking for address and telephone number, but may not have thought of this one. It can be a valuable marketing tool.

Some people might have backoff on giving it out. You can simply say "if you give me your email address, I can include you when I send out new portraits I've done."

Then, in your email program, put them in a mailing list. This should be a feature of just about every email program. You can then email to all prospects and clients in one email. You might even consider having prospects in one list and clients in another.

I've done this is my email program. I named my client list "SOG". When I create the email, I just enter "SOG" and all my clients automatically receive and email. I have another list I call "prospects". If I want to also mail to all prospects, then I enter "prospects" into the recipient area of the email also.

There is two areas of of alert on sending out such emails. When I went from regular dialup service to DSL, I found that DSL service only allowed me to mail to 100 recipients in one email. As a result, I've continued to maintain my Earthlink dialup account and I switch over to that whenever I want to send out a bulk email. I suspect that if I switched to DSL business service instead of DSL home service I might not have this issue.

Also, my DSL home account only officially allows me to transmit and receive files that are 1mb in size. In reality, some that are slightly larger do get through, but it is an issue.

So, keep these things in mind when emailing to your clients and/or prospects. And, by the way, you can also use this method to send out a periodic newsletter if your career warrants it.