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May 4 2013
3 steps to create an email newsletter
Step 1 | Decide what you want to say
E-mail Newsletters can be incredibly powerful vehicles for Customer Relationship Management, Brand Building and Lead Generation. They can put you and keep you in your customers' minds, demonstrate your credibility and trustworthiness, and powerfully connect you to people.
You can use them not just to sell, but to survey customer satisfaction, do product research and learn about your markets.
Email newsletters can also be a powerful vehicle for driving your organization straight into the river.
Remember that old saying about how it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt?
Email newsletters allow you to get in front of people at a depth and
scale few other lead generation or customer relationship management
tools can match. Powerful tools can yield powerful results. We want to make sure that your results are positive.
We want to help you take advantage of the power and cost-effectiveness of Email Newsletters, while avoiding the river.
You will know what to say in your email newsletter once you understand its objectives. What do you want your newsletter to accomplish?
Keep you connected to clients? Attract prospective clients? Encourage repeat business? Demonstrate your credibility? Promote events? Keep donors or volunteers engaged?
Clearly understanding your objectives will help you plan relevant, useful content for your email newsletter subscribers.
Be deliberate in this. Write detailed descriptions of the content you need. Consistently focused, interesting content will build readership.
Eclectic, inconsistent content will be viewed as time-wasting, especially if you are marketing to businesses. If your newsletter doesn't consistently contain relevant, useful information, it will not be read. If it isn't read, it will be a waste of your time and money.
Step 2 | Connect content to objectives
What kinds of content do you need?
Want to keep connected to clients? Identify common interests and supply helpful info and tips.
Want to attract prospective clients? Provide content about their problems, especially those problems that can be solved with your products or services.
Want to encourage repeat business? Include brief descriptions and photos of new or improved items in your catalog. Inform them of the business value and benefits of innovations the new items offer.
Want to demonstrate your expertise or build credibility? Provide answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Educate readers in
your area of expertise. Be open and generous with your knowledge and experience!
Once you decide on your content, stick to it. Yes, you have to keep it fresh, but also keep in familiar and compartmentalized.
Think about the quantity of material you will need for each edition. Come up with regular features that you can build up material for and that readers will grow to anticipate.
If you run a document design business, have a regular blurb educating readers about particular fonts and their possible uses.
If you have a financial consultancy, include an interesting money-related quote from a current newsmaker or from a historical figure.
If you own a home improvement business, run a regular "tips" item about home maintenance.
Regular features will make your newsletter easier to produce, as well as more familiar and interesting to your readers.
Step 3 | Be sure you can execute
Who will be producing your newsletter?
Knowing what to say is half the content battle. The other half is being able to pull it off.
Poor execution will not only hurt your newsletter readership, it will put your�organization in a poor light.
The good news is, you don't have to be a Hemmingway.
The bad news is that you will need to acquire the skills you need to write clearly and compelling--by developing them yourself or hiring someone to provide them (either with original writing or excellent editing.) In either case, don’t scrimp on time or money.
Your newsletter can be a powerful tool for success, engendering trust, and attracting people to your organization, making them want to do business with you—even becoming evangelists for it.
Or, it can be a bright, shining example of organizational incompetence, laziness or worse.
Make sure yours is the former.
NEXT: The Two Inviolable Rules of Email Newsletters
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