How much money to you spend a year advertising to the great unknown about your business in order to sell them goods or services, to pull in new business, to increase revenue, get them to follow you on social media?  Probably a good bit.  If you use social media and email you probably spend some of your time currency as well as dollars.  Now how much energy and dollars do you spend advertising and generating business revenue from within your existing client base, from those that have already bought into your ideas and products?  In theory those guys are the easy sell.  They already know you and believe in you.  A great way to do that is to use a web email site like Constant Contact to communicate with your clients past, present and future.  Now the question is how do you use your existing list of customers, most commonly found in your accounting system, to help generate revenue or just deepen the relationship.

If your accounting system is QuickBooks and your email marketing program is Constant Contact importing your contacts is very simple.

1. Clean up your QuickBooks Customer list.  Get rid of duplicates, make sure email addresses are current, make sure contacts within the companies are up to date.

2. Log into your Constant Contact account.

3. Click on the CONTACTS tab.

4. Click on the “import tools!” link

Constant Contact Import Tool Location

5.  Select Intuit QuickBooks from the window that appears.

6. Agree to the User Agreement

7. Run the Installer.

8. Grant access when requested to do so.

9. Open your QuickBooks.

10. Under the “Customers” drop down menu Select the new “Constant Contact” option that will appear.  QuickBooks and Constant Contact will then do the rest.

11. Then from time to time initiate a sync between Constant Contact and QuickBooks by going back to that same drop down menu and uploading your new information.

That sure beats hand entering new clients into both the bookkeeping program and Constant contact.  I will say the majority of my new business comes from my current and past customers either through referral to new customers from old onces or new projects for existing folks I am working with now.  Why not capitalize on an audience that already knows you?