When customer retention and education is the goal, an email newsletter is the champion of cost-effective marketing tools and tactics. In fact, according to the Forrester Research report, U.S. Email Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014, 70 percent of email marketing dollars are spent on retention efforts.

Although its strengths are retention and education, an eNewsletter can also double as a cost-efficient and powerful lead generator. A few simple strategies woven into the framework of an eNewsletter can generate leads while simultaneously educating and building relationships with current customers.

Among these strategies:

1. Offer valuable information for free — Getting something valuable and relevant for free goes a long way with customers and prospects. Most will gladly share at least their name and email address with you in exchange for access to an interesting and timely white paper or new data about a specific area of industry research.
2. Use customization — In her column, Karen J. Bannan suggests that marketers should “handle lead-generation emails as you would in-person sales calls; it might be the electronic equivalent of a cold call, but there should be nothing cold about it.”Email software technology allows for microtargeting and list segmentation, meaning it is often possible to address recipients by their name or even how they opted in to receive your communication. This adds a layer of familiarity and trustworthiness to the eNewsletter, which can help facilitate responses.
3. Clearly demonstrate how you can solve a particular problem for your customers — Know your audience’s “pain points,” those challenges or nagging issues that are inherent to their business, and show succinctly how your products or services surmount them. This is often best demonstrated through client testimonials. Bannan advises that “messaging should as always be highly focused on the prospect’s business problem, and marketers may best achieve that goal by using customer testimonials in their email copy.”