Productive Newsletters
How to create and publish productive and effective newsletters

Planning an employee newsletter? If you do, think in terms of two primary functions: Instruction, and motivation. Here’s why…

Every employee newsletter (or, newsletter of any kind) should have a specific identifiable purpose. An employee newsletter will cost you time and money, and what’s more, if you give up after a couple of issues, it will hurt your reputation (and, yes, most employee newsletters do fold after just a few issues).

If you take an instructional approach, you want to offer useful information. In addition, of course, you will need to define useful information when considering strategy for your employee newsletter.

One type of useful information is that which helps increase productivity - get more work done with the same amount of resources. It could be anything that helps employees get their jobs done more quickly, or has some other positive effect. Some employee newsletters try to remove barriers to high performance, and that’s a good idea, too.

If you take a motivational approach, your goal will be to provide information that influences the way employees think. You may want your employee newsletter to increase retention, stimulate teamwork, or do something that increases engagement.

Writers and publishers of employee newsletters often use emotion in their employee newsletters when want a motivational effect. Keep in mind, of course, that motivation is strictly internal, which means you can facilitate it, but you can’t directly motivate someone else.

As the person in charge of an employee newsletter, you also have the option of combining instructional and motivational articles. One article might deal with instructional, while another provides motivation. And, sometimes you can put the two into one article in an employee newsletter.

Summing up, when you’re planning your employee newsletter, you’ll find it helpful to ask whether you want to take an instructional approach, a motivational approach, or some combination of the two. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other, and your choices should be guided by the goals and audience for your employee newsletter.

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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.

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Need a newsletter name? Know how to get it? In this article, we’ll look at a process for establishing a newsletter name, and because we’re using a process, rather than guessing, we should come up with a more effective name. And when I say more effective name, I mean a name that will help your newsletter get a better response.

As the title suggests, we’re going to work backward to find a newsletter name. We do that by starting with our objectives and working back from there.

For example, when I started a newsletter about business communication, I started with three objectives, and from those objectives came a newsletter name that worked well.

The first objective for the newsletter was to brand myself as an expert, or at least someone you could trust to provide good information about business communication. That’s how my last name “Abbott” ended up in the newsletter name (and it doesn’t hurt to have a last name that starts with the letter ‘A’ either).

The second objective was to connect my name with the subject matter, business communication. Now, these are a couple of long words for a newsletter name, especially ‘communication’ so I decided to use just one of them. And, for my purposes, ‘communication’ seemed more descriptive than just plain ‘business’.

Third, I wanted the newsletter to be read, so subscribers should know when my message arrived at their inbox that this was a newsletter and not spam of some kind. As a result, I thought it would be a good idea to get newsletter into the name. Another possibility was the word ‘ezine’ (a word often used for electronic newsletters); however, that seemed a bit esoteric. And, again, since length of the overall newsletter name was important, I decided to shorter ‘newsletter’ to ‘letter’ which saves a few letters.

Altogether, then, the name came out as “Abbott’s Communication Letter” and it worked well. It delivered on all my objectives, and I didn’t second-guess myself at all about the newsletter name at any time during the six years I published it.

It certainly beats the old fashioned way of guessing at what might be a good newsletter name, such as picking something like a company name and then adding something rather pedestrian like “Gazette”.

In summary, picking a newsletter name should be a process, rather than a shot in the dark. By focusing on your objectives, and working backward from them, you should be able to find a newsletter name that contributes to your overall goal of getting readers to respond in some way.

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