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Thanks to the Internet, there’s no longer any need to spend money on mailing postcards to your customers to announce sales and special offers.

If you have set up your web marketing capabilities, you can simply tweet on Twitter and send an email blast through your email marketing service.

Let’s look at an example:

Imagine you own a local fabric store and you have just received a much larger shipment of cotton plaids than you expected. Where will you store the inventory? (And we’re not even talking inventory carrying costs.)

Instead you tweet in 97 characters (leaving you 140 more characters to add your website URL, etc.):

Large shipment of cotton plaids with no place to store. Come in today for 50% off these fabrics.

Then you send out a somewhat longer email message explaining your predicament with the same offer. And how have you gotten the email addresses to which to send out this message?

You’ve gotten the email addresses through an email opt-in system on your website in which you offer, for example, a 10% off coupon if the person gives you his/her email address. And the email marketing software system you use stores the addresses in a database, helps you format your email message so that it more easily gets through spam filters, sends out the message for you, and keeps track of open rates.

Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have a website for which you can easily make changes, you’ll also post the announcement in large type on your home page. Anyone clicking through to your website after seeing the tweet or getting the email message will be reminded of why he or she is visiting the site.

By using your website and email marketing system and by sending tweets on Twitter, you can easily make special offers that help you out and make your customers happy.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant whose company website is www.MillerMosaicLLC.com. If you liked this article, you’re going to love her free report on “The Top 3 Internet Marketing Elements” – download the report now from www.WeTeachWebMarketing.com.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.