Staying in touch with, as well as how you treat your customers is the most important aspect of any business, whether it's online or offline. There are many ways in which to do this and your business should make it one of your top priorities. Communication and treatment of your customers can make the difference in staying in business or going out of business.

Below are some basic ways to stay in touch and keep your customers happy and coming back for more.

Email's are one of the first ways to stay in touch. Email's are free, fast and easy to use.

You should always be capturing your customers email addresses whenever possible either through website forms or simple forms in your store after they have finished their shopping and are checking out.

Be sure to offer them a really good reason for giving you their email address and also make sure they know your privacy policies related to spam and email frequency etc.

Newsletters are another great way to stay in touch with customers. Newsletters should be set up to provide value to your customers and give them something of interest.

You should produce your newsletters on a weekly or monthly basis and include your store specials as well as articles of an informative nature that will have them looking forward to the next edition. Use advertising in a low key way or your customers will see right through you and cancel their subscription.

The most important thing to remember when using newsletters is always make sure they are set up as double opt-in. This means that after your customers sign up, they receive an initial email with a link to click on to confirm their subscription.

With spam as rampant as it is on the Internet today, you certainly don't want to risk your ISP shutting you down.

To implement your newsletter you should use an auto-responder. There are plenty of free as well as paid services out there that are very affordable and reliable.

With the free versions you will have to deal with advertisements being placed on every newsletter you send out so I recommend going with a good paid service such as Aweber or GetResponse.

Also the free versions have a much lower rate of being delivered to your customers email's without going to the junk folder and being deleted before they get read.

You will be able to write your newsletters as far in advance as you want and schedule them to go out at predetermined intervals. You can also do intermittent broadcasts when appropriate for; sales, special events, new shipments etc.

Article writing can be a great way to get the word out about your business. You can use articles as press releases or as a stand alone way to attract new business to your store or website.

Search engines love the fresh content that articles provide.

You don't have to be an expert to write articles either. Just write about the things you know about and that are related to your business while using keyword rich content that will attract the type of traffic that you are targeting.

While the ideas above are only the tip of the iceberg when in comes to customer relations and staying in touch, you should always remember that the only reason you have a business is because the customers and learn to treat them appropriately.