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Many of our clients have found launching a regular newsletter to be an excellent way to build relationships with customers and prospects. Launching and maintaining a newsletter is however no mean feat, it takes a surprising amount of time to manage and many marketers find there’s a lot more to it than they thought. In this article we’ll explore some of the things to bear in mind if you’re considering publishing a company newsletter and how to make sure that it gets read...
So why write a newsletter? We’ve found that there are many reasons why you might want to consider adding a newsletter to your marketing mix – to develop more leads, increase sales, drive more traffic to your website and if you’re taking it really seriously, to build up some intelligence on what your clients are interested in. In our experience newsletters can be highly effective, especially if they are part of a longer term strategy that seeks to add value, build a brand and take customers along a decision making progress over a period of months.
Publishing a corporate newsletter is probably not going to boost sales today but after you’ve published a few of them the rewards will start to follow. Awareness of your brand will be raised and you’ll start to be remembered. So, if you’ve already invested in acquiring a list of email addresses it takes relatively little additional cost (but some careful planning) to be able to communicate your message to customers and prospects and track and analyse their response.
Still interested? Here a few pointers to publishing a successful newsletter from the team at extravision:
What’s the Point?
Be clear about your business objective from the start and ask yourself what is the newsletter’s reason for being. It might seem obvious but without clarity of purpose email newsletters run the danger of being about nothing in particular. Have a clear audience in mind and focus on their needs, niche targeted newsletters tend to be more successful than ones that try to be all things to all people. Before you begin develop a calendar of content, planning themes in advance and agreeing submission dates. Be prepared to review this plan if particular items seem to attract a better response but try in general to structure the production of your newsletter. In our experience newsletters produced on an ad-hoc basis rarely last more than a few editions.
Content is King
It is somewhat of a cliché but content is king when it comes to newsletters. The newsletter will need to offer real value if you are going to build a loyal customer base. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – what do they ‘need’ to read. Email newsletters are ideal for small, easily digestible chunks of information about your products and services, your website, your industry etc, They are a great way of taking your prospects through your marketing curriculum in the process. This content can be dressed in a number of different ways, from articles and features to FAQs, interviews, case studies, success stories, tips and letters from the CEO. A mix of these content types can be very effective – but don’t mix too much. Come up with a content formula and stick to it. There should be no more than 5 pieces of content in each newsletter and your readers should come to know what to expect – your aim is to inform rather than surprise.
Copy should be customer–centric and quick to read. Short and pithy is generally better for business orientated newsletters as readers will often be reading on the go. Think about the tone and make sure that the voice is consistent throughout, this is especially important if you have more than one person contributing to your content. Personalising the newsletter is one great way to use customer data to your advantage and make it more likely that your subscribers will keep on reading. As well as being personal in the way the copy is written the newsletter should address the reader by name if possible.
Make life easy
Always make sure that the readers know what they will be getting. A welcome email to new subscribers should tell them what broad topics the newsletter will cover, how often they can expect to receive them and how to unsubscribe. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that making it difficult for readers to un-subscribe will mean that you’ll retain more of them. People unsubscribe and then re-subscribe to newsletters all the time – making it harder for them to do so will just send them straight to the delete button.
In Summary
E-newsletters aren’t the right approach for every company but can certainly be an incredibly effective way to communicate with customers and prospects. There are many aspects to successful e-news publishing and over the next few months we intend to cover some of the issues, such as personalisation, response handling and building loyalty, in more depth. In the meantime our editorial team would love to hear your feedback on our extravision newsletter and answer any specific questions on the topic of e-newsletters. | 
