The key to any successful business model is giving your customers something extra - offering a great price and great customer service, offering buy one get one at 10% or more off. When a great deal of your business is done online, however, you need to look to new ways of offering both your current and prospective customers something more. One great tool for offering more value to your customers is to create a company newsletter.

A company newsletter does not have to fall into the realm of that old folded paper style that is sent out through the mail or offered in a stack for customers to grab a copy of after they've made a purchase. These days, a content rich customer newsletter is something that can be sent electronically.

Your online newsletter isn't just another email message: like a paper newsletter, your electronic content should be presented in HTML format. By creating - in effect - miniature websites to mail to your customers, you'll be able to do a few things.

1. You'll be able to create an extension of your website so that you can continue to establish a brand identity. When your messages have a consistent appearance, the recipients will recognize them; when they look like your website, you'll find that your customers are more likely to explore your site because they've developed a feel for how easy it is to navigate.

2. With an HTML based electronic newsletter, readers will be able to look at a table of contents and jump to the area of the page that they want to read. This will save them time because they won't have to skim through other information to find what they are looking for, or it will provide them with a chance to easily find the one thing in your newsletter that they wanted to remember or look back at.

3. Another great benefit of this format is that it becomes even easier to add the content from your newsletter to your website and you'll be able to add links to your website where readers can go to find more information.

In other words, when you send out an electronic newsletter, ultimately you'll be able to drive readers to your web pages (including those pages where past newsletters have been collected and published). But there's a catch: in order to motivate the readers to click through, you're going to want to be sure that you're providing valuable content to your customers.

Just like web content, you'll want to include photos and images that are related to your products or services that will be visually appealing. You'll want to include great articles - many of which will be shorter than traditional web content - along with advice, suggestions and product reviews. To make the content even more valuable, you'll be able to add polls - to directly ask your readers what information they'd like to see.

When you are able to give your customers the information that they're looking for, they're likely to keep coming back for more. A great electronic newsletter can be just the thing that you're looking for, the right way of communicating with current and prospective customers - whether you set it up and write it yourself or hire a ghostwriting service to generate it for you.