 Marketing
Best Practices
The Power of
the Newsletter
Things to Consider
By Dale W. Hutchings
Nine
times out of ten I recommend to clients that they have a
newsletter as part of their marketing initiatives. Why a
newsletter? Read on for the answer as well as answers
to other common questions I am often asked about the
power of newsletters.
Q. Why
should my business have a newsletter?
A.
Newsletters are an excellent vehicle to deliver
information and bring customers up to date about your
business, your products and/or services and your
industry. You can publish them as often as you like. I
usually recommend they be monthly or quarterly
publications. But there are exceptions. For instance, a
special edition newsletter focusing on a special
anniversary or milestone in your company’s history could
be a wonderful PR piece, as well as a great marketing
tool.
What is
also special about newsletters is they give you the
means to really communicate with potential or existing
customers perhaps unlike any other medium. A newsletter
allows you to truly explain what you have to sell; to
talk to people about why they should use your company
and not the competition; to give readers consumer
information they can use in their daily lives; to
entertain, if you choose to do so; and to market your
products or services in more creative ways.
Q.
What kind of copy content should the newsletter have?
A. If you
want to include a discount coupon or a notice of
specials you are offering, that’s okay. But the vast
majority of the newsletter should be “news,” information
of benefit to the reader about your business or
industry. In general, the copy should be
“reader-friendly.” Don’t use a lot of big words or
industry jargon. Write it as though you were saying it:
conversational style is usually the best, rather than a
formal approach, although there are exceptions. For
example, if you are revealing new medical research that
may help prevent Alzheimer’s Disease you most likely
will want to use a formal style. On the other hand, if
you have a travel agency business and you’re telling
people about great places to visit in Europe, a
conversational tone would be far more suitable and
appealing to the reader.
Along the
same line, whatever “news” you decide to put in your
newsletter, make sure you know your target market, and
tailor the information to be useful to that audience.
Help readers better understand your business. Tell them
about your products or services from a consumer
education perspective. What does your widget do that
makes it a better product than the competition? What
kinds of studies/surveys have been done showing your
products or services to be superior? Tell them about the
interesting history of your company or your industry.
Give them helpful hints and tips. The bottom line: give
readers the kind of information they need or desire, so
they’ll want to come back and read your next edition.
Finally,
make it fun. Sure, not every business can do this. For
example, it would obviously be inappropriate for a
funeral home business to publish cartoons related to
death and dying, but for many businesses, tastefully
done cartoons, having a true or false trivia contest, or
publishing a crossword puzzle can enhance readership.
What will
also help is graphics. Don’t publish a newsletter that
is strictly text. Try to have images (photos, line art,
charts, graphs) to compliment many of your articles. By
doing so, your newsletter will be much more visually
exciting and reader friendly.
 Q.
Which is better – publishing an online (E-zine)
newsletter and e-mailing it or one that is printed and
mailed to my target markets?
A.
Designing and writing your newsletter and putting it
online is perhaps easier and less expensive to produce,
but there is one big drawback. I think it goes without
saying that anyone who has a computer is getting more
e-mail every day than he or she wants to mentally
process. That includes online newsletters. I don’t
even want to begin to count the number of online
publications I get per week. Some of them I subscribe
to and want to see every week. Others I don’t have the
time for, or interest in, reading, and those are
immediately deleted. On the other hand, almost every
newsletter that comes to me the old-fashioned way via
the U.S. Post Office to my mailbox, is read. I may only
read one article or skim headlines before it goes into
the trash, but I do read it. I think this is the case
for many people. Therefore, I usually advise clients
starting a newsletter to print the first few issues and
mail them. Once a business has built up a substantial
audience for its newsletter, then it can consider taking
it exclusively online.
There is
so much more that can be said about this marketing
medium. Hence, I will be addressing more on this
subject in future issues of Bay Area Business.
In the meantime, I hope you have been given some insight
into the power of newsletters. They truly can be great
marketing tools for many businesses.
___________________________________
Dale W.
Hutchings, APR, who specializes in “out of the box”
marketing, has more than 30 years of Public Relations,
Marketing and Advertising experience and has had his own
practice since 2001. Dale can be reached at
hutch7@verizon.net
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