Productive Newsletters
How to create and publish productive and effective newsletters

The problem:
Is the writing in your newsletter consistent? Is each issue as readable as the original standard you set for it?

I don’t take those questions lightly, since I write for many different audiences in my newsletter publishing business. One minute, a professional audience; the next, a blue collar audience.

If I slip into a blue-collar style for a professional audience, they get impatient.

On the other hand, if I drift into a professional style for the blue-collar audience, my writing won’t be understood.

Consistency should concern all writers and publishers, and they should work to ensure that writing in their newsletter remains consistent over time.

Solutions:
My solutions? First, grammar checking software, much maligned by anyone who knows anything about grammar. However, if you put aside the shortcomings of the actual grammar checking and make use of the statistical reporting capabilities, you’ll find you have a very helpful tool.

Second, I use a simple form of quality assurance, a worksheet that tracks key measures from issue to issue. It involves only a few measures, but they do help me stay aware of the readability.

On the worksheet:
Number of words
This measure, taken after completion of the first draft, provides some idea of the volume relationship between words and graphics. Usually, a high proportion of text will be less attractive, and consequently less readable.

Number of Charts
This one doesn’t bear directly on readability, but went in because my client wanted to increase employees’ awareness and use of charts. This measure in the worksheet helped assure that we put at least one into each issue.

Words/sentence
The fewer words, the more understandable the sentence. On the other hand, consistently short sentences lead to choppy sentences and articles, so we want a happy medium of some kind. I averaged something between 18 and 20 words a sentence. Articles written for professionals generally would use more words per sentence.

Characters/word
Again, an obvious measurement. Keeping the average number of characters per word down keeps the readability up.

Passive sentences
A passive sentence contains a ‘to be’ verb, like ‘is’ or ‘are.’ An active verb, on the other hand, describes an action of some kind. Generally, active verbs mean higher readability, so I try to minimize passive verbs. Of course, there can be a price to pay for eliminating them entirely, which is to make sentences sound stilted. For most clients, I aim for no more than 10% passive verbs.

Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch/Kincaid Grade Level
These two measures can be taken together, as each provides a quantitative measure of prose readability. Flesch Reading Ease is a number between 1 and 100, with low numbers being more difficult and higher numbers easier to read.

Those numbers often seem too abstract, though, so we turn to the Flesch/ Kincaid Grade Level, which expresses the same concept in more familiar terms.

For most readers I keep the Reading Ease number above 50, and try to keep the Grade Level at or below 10. This suggests the writing should be easily understood by a person with a Grade 10 education.

Conclusions:
It really doesn’t matter what grammar checking software you use, nor the individual measures, nor the levels of the measures. Instead, think in terms of picking a few helpful measures and routinely recording them. By doing this you should have greater success at keeping the readability of your newsletter consistent from issue to issue.

Technorati Tags: grammar, newsletter, readability, reading

What comes to mind first when you think about publishing your own newsletter or ezine?

For most of us, content enjoys top of mind status. As a professional newsletter publisher for more than a decade, the question I hear most often goes something like this, “What should I write about in my newsletter?”

It’s a good question, and an important one. There’s no doubt content merits your attention.

But, don’t let the importance of content blind you to strategy, especially if you’re just getting started with a newsletter or ezine.

Strategy First
Strategy, you see, is the big newsletter secret. It’s the articulated purpose that ensures you direct your publication to the right people, and for the right reasons. Get the strategy right, and the rest — including content — should fall into place automatically. Miss the strategy, and you’ll be forever frustrated, trying to get the parts right without knowing what the whole looks like.

If you’re not sure what strategy means, take a look at some of the many online sites that discuss it. I found a number of them by doing a couple of quick search engine searches, using the keyword phrase “business AND strategy” (without the quotation marks).

Expect some confusion after reading more than a couple of articles, since everyone has his or her own definition of strategy, and how it should be developed. Still, after you read at least a few of them, you’ll begin to sense a common core, one you can appreciate as you develop your own strategies.

Generally speaking, strategy means putting together the big plan. What am I trying to accomplish? What do I have to do achieve my objectives?

Newsletter Strategy

For a newsletter publisher, there are three key elements to strategy:

• choice of medium
• publishing objectives, and
• reader needs.

Choice of medium: Before starting, asking yourself this question: “Should I use a newsletter, or would another medium (ads in newspapers or direct mail, for example) be better? Think hard about the amount of time and money you would invest in your newsletter, versus the amount of time and money you would put into some other communication vehicle.

Publishing objectives: A newsletter will cost you time and money. What do you expect to get out it? Will you get a return on this investment? The best way to get a return, of course, is to select a few well-defined and achievable objectives and then focus intently on achieving them

Reader needs: Readers won’t look at your newsletter more than once if you don’t provide some information they find helpful, entertaining, or otherwise relevant. And, don’t forget credible; these must be subjects on which strangers believe you have some expertise or meaningful experience.

After Strategy…
Once you’ve worked out a strategy, then you can turn to tactics. In the case of newsletters, this involves:

• selecting subjects (content)
• how you will present that content
• how often to publish
• how many words or pages to publish.

If you’ve done a good job on your strategy, you’ll find it much easier to make these tactical decisions. Much easier to make the right decisions, too!

Finally, a word of warning: Developing a strategy, especially one that?s well thought out, can be time consuming and difficult. But, it’s always worthwhile. And, you may find it as enjoyable a creative challenge as writing and designing.

Technorati Tags: newsletter, newsletter content, strategy

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