Productive Newsletters
How to create and publish productive and effective newsletters

If you’re using your marketing newsletter to sell to new customers, prospects, then your strategy will be different than if you are selling to existing customers. Here’s why…

A marketing newsletter targeting new customers has a couple of hurdles to overcome, hurdles not faced by a marketing newsletter that targets existing customers.

First, there are questions of credibility and trust: Will you deliver what you promised, when you promised? How good is your guarantee or warranty? Will you protect my privacy? Take care of my credit card information? You can answer these questions directly in your marketing newsletter, but there’s more in play here.

For a couple of my clients, which publish business-to-business marketing newsletters, the secret has been continuity. When they started publishing their newsletters, they were small players in their markets. But by consistently publishing, on time, over several years, they’ve developed a stature among members of their target market.

One client is an insurance company. For almost 20 years now, we’ve delivered a marketing newsletter every two months, year in and year out. The company has been very well managed, and the consistency of the newsletter has underlined that competence. The marketing newsletter gives an indirect voice to the company’s growing stature.

Another client sells software to the oil and gas industry. Its marketing newsletter, 12 or more pages in full color, sent a message to prospects that this company is serious. The marketing newsletter was a key ingredient in its rapid and successful growth from a tiny university spinoff into a public company. Again, the newsletter was delivered consistently, both in terms of timing and the high quality of the publication.

So, what I’m stressing here is the need to publish your marketing newsletter regularly and consistently over time, and in time means years, not months. A marketing newsletter that makes an appearance, then disappears after a few months sends the wrong message - a very wrong message.

Be sure you’ve thought out a plan for your marketing newsletter before you start. It’s the only way to create one that delivers the credibility that turns prospects into customers and clients.

Technorati Tags: marketing, marketing newsletter, newsletters

Marketing newsletters can be an excellent resource if you want to keep selling to existing customers or clients. Here’s how…

Because these people have already bought from you, you have an established relationship, which generally suggests you take an information-driven approach. In this approach, your marketing newsletter serves to keep customers informed about new developments or opportunities.

For example, one of my newsletter clients, a software company, used its marketing newsletter to provide quarterly updates. Each issue of the newsletter included stories about new features that had been added; other articles explained how to take advantage of lesser-known or lesser-used features. And yet other articles explained how other customers had used the software to achieve some gain.

Another of my marketing newsletter clients, an insurance company, doesn’t worry about direct selling of any kind in the newsletter it sends to its brokers. Instead, I write abstracts of articles from business magazines, articles with useful information for the company’s brokers. In this case, the marketing newsletter simply reminds the target audience that the company is there to serve them.

I also published a marketing newsletter of my own. Abbott’s Communication Letter, for more than six years. It provided useful articles about business communication, and carried advertising for my own products or the products/services of other companies. The advertising in the newsletter generated revenue, while the newsletter itself helped me brand myself as an expert in business marketing.

Three very different approaches to marketing newsletters, and three effective approaches. And all of them lasted. The shortest lifespan among them was six years, and the longest (which I’m still writing and publishing) is now approaching its 20th anniversary. Their survival is no minor issue — most newsletters stop publishing after just a few issues.

The key to each of these marketing newsletters has been to provide useful information to readers. A marketing newsletter that provides useful information will get read, and a newsletter that gets read will usually be effective: it will get the response you want.

Technorati Tags: marketing, marketing newsletter, newsletters