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Mailing List Management

Mailman

The best way to remind your customers of the value your business can deliver is by sending a carefully crafted email, such as an electronic newsletter, with details of your new offerings and special sales. This may stimulate additional purchases from your loyal and receptive customer base.

Large email mailing lists run off a PC may slow your PC, and errors will bounce back, potentially clogging your inbox. A better method is to offload the processing from your PC to a server. You may be able to use your own email server, which is often the same as your Web server if you use a Web hosting service.

Mailman can be set up on many Web hosting services, where your business Web site typically shares server resources with others. It has a polished look and an accessible menu interface andcan automatically process bounced messages by temporarily retaining unavailable addresses while removing truly dead addresses from your mailing list. Always check with your service provider to determine what size and configuration of mailing list your server can handle.

Mailing List Management

PoMMO

PoMMO is an open-source mailing list manager with an attractive and easy-to-understand interface. It uses templates to control the look and feel of subscription forms, so you can match them to the look of your Web site.

While Mailman is designed for sending standardized messages from a list, PoMMO offers handy personalization capabilities that make it easy to customize outgoing messages, such as adding a customer name.

You collect information about list members in customizable data fields and use these fields to set up list groups. You can send a different message to each group, useful if you have product lines that appeal to widely varying customer interests. If you are familiar with installing software on your Web server, the installation is relatively easy.

Business Plan Workshop

CIT Small Business Lending Corporation

If you are starting up a new school or expanding your existing school, you will need a business plan; it is required by banks and most other sources of finance. Your plan must outline a workable business model, answer key questions about the purpose of the business, and explain how your business will generate enough cash to pay back the money required for expansion or startup.

CIT offers a free, online multimedia tutorial that explains how to develop your business plan. It includes a list of items which should be discussed in your plan and a useful glossary of terms to help you decipher financial jargon.

Business Planning

Planware

If you do not plan your business, you are planning for your school to fail. An important part of business planning is forecasting likely future financial results of the school over the next five years. The first year or two will show results on a month-by-month basis, while later years show only annual estimates. At a bare minimum, the financial projection will show details of future cash flows. An integrated financial projection will also show future income, expenses, and balance sheets.

Many banks and other financial institutions have developed financial projection model spreadsheet templates or software applications that they distribute at no cost to loan applicants. Planware offers free Excel templates for financial projections and cash flow planning.

Business Management Courses

Small Business Administration (SBA)

The SBA offers links to more than 40 free, business-related courses that cover many areas of managing your small business, including finance. accounting, marketing, advertising, e-commerce, and international trade. Many of these courses were developed in cooperation with universities and regional small business development centers. The typical course is self-paced and should require about half an hour to complete.

Project Management

 Basecamp

If you need to work with others on a school project, such as planning for a tournament, then Basecamp will help you keep everyone on track. It is an online service that is particularly suitable for coordinating the efforts of a geographically dispersed project team. Members of the project team can keep up-to-date by logging into the project site, by subscribing to the RSS feed, or by email. You can post messages in a project forum and collaborate on documents in progress using the Writeboard. You can also set up project milestones and to-dos to help stay focused on the task at hand. The free service is limited to one project with two Writeboards.

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