A newsletter filled with information valuable to your customers/prospects is a wonderful tool for keeping your customers loyal and touching prospects regularly. Make your content valuable, and you can build your database by offering free subscriptions on your web site’s home page. Send your newsletter once a month if you can, but quarterly at the very least. If you send via email, the costs are negligible. Fill your newsletter with helpful, educational content. No one wants to read a newsletter that only beats the drum about your products, your company, your awards, you, you, you. Don’t create a four-page ad and call it a newsletter. Instead, think about you can impart that will help your customers increase their profits and grow their businesses.

Structure your newsletter
Set up easy-to-find sections and breaks to make your newsletter more easily readable. Consider the following: 1) Section filled with statistics and useful information about your customers’ industry. Include links to resources and interesting articles.. 2) Question and Answer section to address common customer concerns. 3) An offer special to your customers, whether it is a link to a free white paper or a discount to an industry seminar. Make your readers feel like VIPs. 4) Calendar with important industry dates; this might include trade shows or conferences schedules. 5) Updates and first glimpses of your new products or services. Keep this focused on how these new offerings can benefit your customers. 6) A spotlight on a customer. Tell a success story and give tips.

Before writing your own newsletter, study some others. Look on industry association web sites and your competitors’ web sites. Ask your industry associates for the names of their favorite newsletters. Once you see some good examples, think about how you can improve on them in both content and presentation. See Newsletter Access for an online directory of newsletters on all topics.

Name your newsletter
It’s not easy to come up with a short, catchy name. Hold a company-wide contest to name the newsletter. Offer a great prize that will create some buzz around the company and help generate internal support for the project. Once you launch the newsletter, you will want to ask some of your employees to write articles for it, and so you want them to be enthusiastic. See “Pages” for ideas and help on how to name your newsletter.

Delegate
Don’t feel like you have to write the entire newsletter yourself. Draw on the varied expertise of people in different departments of your company. Of course, the content they produce will likely have to be edited to fit the “feel” of the newsletter and to keep it externally focused on your customers (rather than internally focused on how great your company is). Assign specific sections of the newsletter to some individuals on an ongoing basis, and have “guest” writers for other sections. Read How to Delegate if you are concerned about the time demands of creating a newsletter.

Generate customer interaction
Use your newsletter as one of many tools to create an online community with your company at the hub. Solicit questions from customers that can be answered in the newsletter. Have a column that is actually written by featured customers. Possibly they could relate industry tips or describe how your product or service is being successfully used in their companies. To get a real feel for the power of online community, read Shara Karasic’s Guide to Building an Online Community.

Design an easy-to-read format
Design an easy-to-read, attractive format. Ideally, you will hire a graphics designer to give it a clean, professional look that is integrated with your current branding. If you have a very small business, and you are short on funds, consider using one of many online services and templates that will enable you to get your newsletters out fast. See the Guide to Producing Your Own Electronic Newsletter for resources that offer turn-key solutions and templates.

Things to think about:

• You may want to email the newsletter itself, or just email your customer and prospect database a link that takes them to the newsletter on your web site. Since newsletters can easily be emailed, these days there are no postage costs.
• Arm your salespeople with a print version of your newsletter to give them yet another weapon in their arsenal. You should be able to print these inhouse if you are using a well-designed template.
• Write in a casual, conversational style. If your newsletter reads like a quarterly report, you will put your readers to sleep. Of course, you need to keep your image in mind, and a bank’s newsletter should have a more conservative tone than a day spa’s newsletter.

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