Newsletters Still Relevant There has been a growth of mass marketing instant communications methods such as Instagram, Snap Chat and the like, but there is still a place for the well-written newsletter. Whether it is in the form of a physical newsletter or a mass email, the newsletter has a place in almost every company marketing tool chest. The aim for your newsletters is ultimately sales, but remember that people do not want to be sold to they want to buy. These two concepts are related to different mindsets. The modern theories of marketing relate to education and knowledge. If you inform and educate people about what you do and the advantages you offer in a non-threatening way, then consumers will choose to do business from a position of understanding. Such an approach will also result in a more loyal consumer as they know you are looking after them by keeping them up to date. Let s cut to the chase, theories are all well and good, but if you accept it and want to create effective newsletters, how do you go about it? N.B.: In this article, I refer to offerings often, these are your products or services, whichever are relevant for you. As with all marketing, it takes planning, execution and monitoring to ensure it works, so you deliver your message effectively. Let s start with planning and as with the W3 motto, let s start with WHY. The aim of your newsletter activity is to educate clients about services and products they may not know you can offer, while not making it a too obvious advert. One of the most effective ways of doing this is using a case study, but more about that later. As the title of this leaflet suggests, everything within it is a starting point from where you can expand and experiment to create the right solution for you. There is no one right answer for every company, but as a starting point, your newsletter can be built using a simple format. Basic Newsletter Format The base newsletter will contain 2 case studies or educational type items, one special offer and if relevant, an item about the staff or the community activity of the company. This structure allows you to educate clients about how you have
helped others, present an offer that a percentage of your clients might need and show your company off in a good light or build the relationship by showing the client more about your team. When to send them out? How often is too often? If your company has cycles related to the year, then a quarterly newsletter may be the right way to go. If you have enough to talk about, a monthly newsletter will work, and there are a few companies that need to do it weekly due to the frequency of change of their offerings. Creation process The first hurdle to overcome is just who is going to write your newsletter. It does take time, and it takes a little skill to write something people are going to read, be inspired by and understand. If you feel capable that is great, but, most people get their accounts done by an accountant, they use lawyers for legal work, so do not think that investing in getting another company to help you with your newsletter as a cost, it is an investment if you can t do it yourself. Once you have decided who is going to do the creation you need to put a work plan into place. Getting it ready for publication If you are doing a real world newsletter, you need to make sure it will have an impact. Simply copying a template in Word and printing it out on a small office printer will not give you quality or impact. The cost of digital printing is so low that contacting a person to typeset it and professionally print it is a worthy investment if you want to impress your clients. W3 can help with this aspect. If it is a mass email, what programme are you going to use? If you have 100 or fewer clients, it is not a bad use of 2 hours a month to send them a personal email from your email client. It allows you to connect and think about each client as you send their email. You can create a standard template and just edit it to suit the recipient. We believe in and endorse the programme MailChimp. Though there are other mass emailing systems available, we have found MailChimp to be the most straightforward to use, even for newsletter novices. MailChimp allows you to send emails very easily and also has a great reporting system to allow you to see the user interactions with the mail.
One aspect to bear in mind for the creation of what is sent out in an email is to put the full article on your website and only use a summary or teaser on the newsletter; this will lead the reader to your website and allow you to get their full attention. Once you have used your news in your newsletter, you can make further use of it by adding it to your company Facebook page. You can stagger the items over a two week period to allow you to have a constant flow of information to your social marketing, with no extra creation required. Feedback Once you have embarked on your desired newsletter process, you need to put feedback mechanisms in place so you can see if you are doing the right thing and delivering the message to the client that the client wants to hear. Collecting feedback can range from you simply asking clients what they thought of the newsletter, to having a let us know what you think request on the newsletter. Systems like MailChimp have built in reporting that can show people's interaction with your newsletter. Understanding the metrics of the reports that MailChimp can give you is important, but do not read stats as black and white. For example, if the person receiving the email has the preview pane open on their email client, the system tags this as being read. So, they may have seen it in at a glance, but they may not have read it. One true measure of interest is clicking on the link to view the full item, which is why having the teaser opening summary and a good image is important. You are trying to attract people to make an effort to go to the website and read the item. Special Offers The special offers you send out with your newsletter needs to represent good value for your existing clients or be an offer they can pass on to their friends and colleagues. Remember that part of this exercise is to turn your clients into your advocates and get them to fire up a Word of Mouth marketing campaign for you. Community Activity / Business News If you are active in the community and feel comfortable gaining publicity from your effort, you can mention this in the newsletter. Again, less is more, mentioning things like charity work once or twice a year is okay, but any more
than that and your motives for helping the charity start to look like just a way to get yourself publicity. Lists To conduct mailshots, in either the real world or digitally, you need a list of clients or interested people to receive it. If you use a customer database, the chances are it will have either a built-in email system or a way of exporting your list to a spreadsheet so you can use it in Outlook or systems like MailChimp. Another aspect of MailChimp that you need to consider is that it has an Unsubscribe system built into it. Such a feature is essential if you are not going to get in trouble for spamming someone both from a legal and a reputational point of view. Ways to invite people to join your mailing list include adding invites to: - Invoices - Email signatures - Your website If you want to add people to your mailing list, you need to ask them to join. It sounds obvious, but many companies forget to ask permission and miss out on the opportunity to maintain a relationship with their clients. However, you do it, collecting and maintaining your marketing list is never finished. It is an ongoing process of harvesting contact details and nurturing it by talking to them effectively. Summary Whether you are trying to talk to 5 or 50,000 people, a well-crafted newsletter can deliver your message in a semi-personal, non-threatening, relationship-maintaining way. Do not be under any delusion that sending a newsletter to people is a magic bullet and all you need to do to maintain an active relationship with clients, but it is a part of a balanced marketing mix that every company should consider.
Planning Guide Subjects to cover Very few companies have only one offering. You need to break down your offerings into a minimum of 6 areas that you can define as distinct. Write them down below 1 2 3 4 5 6 The next part is to create one long and one summarised item for each area. First, you need to write six long items (2 sides A4 - as a guide) with a couple of suitable images. Then you need to create a 2/3 A4 page version of the same item, with a third representative image. By page I mean: 14pt Ariel font singled spaced. As a minimum, try to be at least one month ahead in the creation of your content. Once you have the items, you use them in the following suggested way. Newsletter 1 Subject 1 long Subject 2 short Newsletter 2 Subject 3 long Subject 4 short Newsletter 3 Subject 5 long Subject 6 short Newsletter 4 Subject 2 long Subject 3 short Newsletter 5 Subject 4 long Subject 5 short Newsletter 6 Subject 6 long Subject 1 short
By using this pattern for the content of the newsletters, you can use your content over a 6-month period (if monthly). At the end of the cycle, you can rewrite and update the items to suit your current situation, replace the images with new ones and start the cycle over again. In this way, you are keeping your customers informed and then revisiting their education from a different point of view every six months. You can, of course, vary it to suit your needs and the amount of available information you have, but the core of the planning system works well. You can also insert new products and services as you add them to your total offering. Treat the above like a recipe, as you get good at making it, you can substitute ingredients and try new approaches so that you can personalise the system to match your company style and message. Write your newsletter schedule down so that you know what you are supposed to be doing. You can then follow it, modify it and measure the results. Suggested structure for a newsletter Many clients ask me where to start when writing newsletter articles. I suggest it is like writing a short story. 1. It only has one plot line, do not try to add too much detail of your other offerings 2. It has a beginning, a middle, an end and a call to action 3. It can be read in less than 3 minutes (even the full version) 4. It has an interesting or intriguing image You can also make it more understandable if written as a case study of a realworld solution that you supplied to a client. Structure Framework Intro- state the problem or issue faced from your client's point of view. Approach Explain how your company approached the problem. Solution Expand on this to explain your solution. Recap Recap the problem and the result you delivered. If you have a client testimonial for the article, even if it is only one line, this adds credibility.
Call to action At the end invite the reader to find out more or to see how this could work for you. These calls to action are in fact giving the reader permission to contact you. This guide has been produced by W3 Design to help clients to start to think about how to conduct their marketing more effectively. It is not the only way to conduct mass emails or build newsletters, but many customers have found it a useful guide to getting started or even refocusing what they are already doing.