How to Use Newsletters to Sell

Some companies refer to their official newsletters as “brag rags.” However, a newsletter, whether four color glossy magazine style, or simple black and white laser printed, should give customers, dealers, members-or whoever reads it-some tangible benefit for the time they invest. Here’s how to create a newsletter that really gives the reader a reason to read.

The Benefits

Marketing With Newsletters (EF Communications, $24.95) author Elaine Floyd advises that the best newsletters keep you in steady contact with your best customers. “The most effective newsletter,” she says, “keeps your name in front of regular customers to let them know you want to keep their business-it’s almost like a customer appreciation tool. These are the people who-you hope-will provide the bulk of your future business. If they like you they will continue to do business with you for years to come.”

For companies with a diverse product or service line, a newsletter also provides an inexpensive way to keep your customers informed about everything you offer, thereby combating the “I didn’t know you did that” syndrome.

But, Floyd emphasizes, newsletters are not solely for current customers. A newsletter also can act as a highly effective foot in the door with your hot prospects. “A well-put-together newsletter can break down a lot of the barriers between you and your prospects,” she says. “It shows that you’re serious about your business, and gives you instant credibility as someone they should be interested in talking to.”

Plan Your Content

In her book, Floyd lists six primary varieties of newsletter content:

1. Information about your products and services, including any new additions to the product line or changes to existing products, services or equipment.

2. Information about your organization, such as recent policy changes, new account representatives or condensations of speeches given by executives.

3. Examples of clients you’ve helped in the past. These may include case history success stories and/or client profiles. To deliver top promotional effect, make sure to include how your company helped clients save money, increase efficiency, solve problems and/or increase sales.

4. Customer support. By giving readers technical information and support, your newsletter gains value in their eyes. It also sends the message that you will still be around for additional service after the sale.

5. Industry summaries. This is the actual “news” in the newsletter which may draw prospects to the publication. Include interesting items about breakthrough research, pending legislation, opinions of prominent industry leaders-basically anything that might catch the readers’ eyes and draw them into your newsletter.

6. Reader service items. To increase response, you may wish to include lists of upcoming industry events, book reviews or philosophical tidbits solely for the readers’ benefit. Coupons, contests and free offers let you benchmark, to a certain degree, the depth of your newsletter’s penetration among customers and prospects. It’s important to keep these items to a minimum, so that the publication doesn’t come across as a pure sales piece.

Getting Started

If you have little or no experience with producing a publication, Floyd recommends keeping the newsletter simple. “For these people I recommend what I call the ‘Quick-n-Easy’ format,” she says, “which is just basically news briefs. Don’t try to write features, just stick to short news blurbs, maybe using the popular ‘dot dot dot’ method. Also, don’t overextend yourself by trying to do too much. Make it one page, two-sided, either letter or legal size, like a flier. If you try to do four pages, you have to worry about spreads, and that can get sticky.”

As for writing the news briefs, Floyd says that KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is the rule of the day. “Writing a news brief is not easy,” she explains, “but it gets less difficult with practice. The shorter, more simple you keep it the better. Try to stick with the who, what, where, when, how and why and then get out.”

For Maximum Success…

Without involvement and support from the top down, a company newsletter is doomed to fail. Floyd recommends that for maximum success either the company president or director of marketing oversee the project. Part of that involvement means committing at the outset to produce at least five or six issues. “A lot of people are fighting against time,” she says. “It’s hard for them to produce a newsletter on a regular basis. They often change the deadline repeatedly, because they want to produce a fancy product but don’t realize what a time commitment that entails.”

To avoid this, Floyd offers three recommendations:

1. Concentrate on getting the newsletter out on time instead of worrying about all the little details. It’s more important to your readers that you be dependable than nitpicky about things that don’t make much difference in the end product.

2. Focus on content, not design. Spend the majority of your time collecting interesting information rather than playing around with different designs. Readers will keep reading because of quality content, not flashy design.

3. Find a nice looking, yet simple, design and stick with it. Neither you nor the readers want to fool around with a new design every month.

In the final analysis, you will get the most out of your newsletter by providing customers and prospects with information that they can readily use and which will keep them coming back-both to you and the newsletter. Most of us are born skimmers, Floyd says, and you should use that to your advantage rather than try to fight it. “I have a stack of things in the corner of my office that I don’t have time to read,” she explains. “But if somebody sends me something I can just skim through, I’ll read it when I open my mail. Once it’s in that stack, however, it’s not getting read for months-if ever. I know one man who does a newsletter on a postcard. He calls it ‘The World’s Smallest Newsletter.’ It’s full of very short news blurbs; I just love to read it. It really catches your attention. Once, I came home and found my housekeeper reading it. Now that’s a newsletter with a hook.”

All the programs we’ve seen come with a tutorial to get you started. If this is your first time using a desktop publishing program, expect a learning curve of from one to four weeks. Most programs come with newsletter samples that you can use with your text and graphics. If you’re working on a PC, the high end programs (Ventura Publisher, QuarkXpress, Pagemaker) all run in Microsoft Windows.