5 Pointers on Publishing an Effective Newsletter

"Drip” marketing is the art of keeping your name and offers bright in the minds of your customers and known sales prospects. And publishing a periodic newsletter is the most-affordable and most sales-productive way to accomplish that vital job. If you do it right. Here are five tips on how to get the job done:

Burn in your name.

The #1 function of your newsletter is to maintain market awareness of your business’s name. The easiest, most-economical, most-direct way to keep your hot-list people aware of your name is to use your business letterhead atop your newsletter’s title page. Copywriters and designers say that you need a snazzy title and graphics to make your newsletter work. That is self-interested piffle. Nobody argues that you should make yourself look ugly. However, your aim should be only to identify yourself.
If you take advice to the contrary, 1) It will cost you money 2) Your creative approach may fail 3) If successful, your design may outshine your business identity 4) You may be chained to a four-, eight-, or 12-page newsletter format, which you may not always be able to fill.

Stress your communications links.

Make sure your reader — the source of your next order — knows every pathway he can use to get to you. List your U.S. mail and E-mail addresses ... your phone and fax numbers, especially toll-free ones ... your Web URL ... your sales representative’s name and extension ... every other way to reach you.

Avoid the hard sell.

Typically, your readers are bombarded by more than 4,000 advertisements a day. Another one from you will just get lost in the clutter. Your reader will not read a newsletter that overtly aims at selling him something. He yearns for interesting, trustworthy information. Unless you are willing to risk boring his pants off — and a negative reaction to all your communications — give your customer what he wants.

Do not over-specialize your content.

People who are buying accounting services, for instance, do not itch for technical accounting information alone. Most likely, they want to stay up to date on changes in IRS and state regulations, tax-court rulings they may have missed, and OSHA, fair-employment, and other developments.

Treat your newsletter like a magazine.

The more disinterested your newsletter appears, the more acceptable — and the more believable — it will be to its reader. Put a per-copy price on your first page. Your reader, who receives your newsletter free of charge, will value its contents more when he perceives that others pay $1.50 an issue, for instance.
Give your reader an opt-out option. It will show you how well you are doing your publishing job. And will save you useless postage and printing costs. Ask your reader to help build your newsletter circulation. You do not know the names of your reader’s business associates who might find your newsletter. Your reader probably does.