Business Ideas
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August 1-15, 1996
Marketing to Your Market
Your Newsletter:
Effective by Design
Index
Establish Your Purpose
What's The Frequency?
Effective Design Made Easy
Knowing What To Say
Producing Your Publication
What's The Bottom Line?

Smaller businesses usually have limited budgets for marketing collateral materials such as brochures, flyers, direct mail, and the like so they must prioritize how they communicate with customers. Often, a newsletter is the favored method, because it allows a business to provide a variety of information on a regular basis to help aid customer retention, loyalty, visibility, and sales.

If you're launching a newsletter for your business, it's advisable to do some planning before you start so you can ensure that your communication is as cost-effective and has as much impact as possible.

Establish your purpose
quoteWhat's the purpose of your newsletter? If this is the only collateral you produce, you might try to put everything but the kitchen sink into your publication. Establish a clear objective for your newsletter. Is it an update on your latest offers and new products? Is it an "affinity" program designed to get customers to purchase again? Is it a "value-added service" that promotes your business, such as a financial services or accounting firm newsletter that provides information on new investments or tax tips? By developing a clear objective for your publication, your readers will know what to expect - and, ideally, will come to rely on your newsletter as a valued information source.

What's the frequency?
Publishing a newsletter can be an ambitious undertaking. Many companies start with the goal of creating a monthly publication - and then two or three months down the road find that they don't have the time or the material to meet that schedule. Be realistic: It's much better to send out a high-quality newsletter on a quarterly basis than to send out an ineffective monthly publication, or be erratic in your mailings.

Effective design made easy
quoteTo get noticed, your newsletter must stand out in a crowd of competing information. Even if you don't have a big budget, design experience, or a lot of time, you can create a professional-looking and interesting newsletter with the help of Microsoft® Publisher for Windows® 95. Publisher uses PageWizard(TM) assistants that step you through the process of creating the basic design for your newsletter, such as how many columns, how many pages, and what style you want it to have (such as a "classic" or "modern"). Once the basic formatting is done, you can customize the look of your newsletter with the Design Gallery tool. This tool gives you choices for a variety of design elements, such as pull quotes, headlines, sidebars, and other attention-getting devices. And as Walter Mossberg, personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has written*, Publisher (which he calls "simply the best desktop publishing software" for small-business use) is so easy to use that even if you have no artistic sense at all, you can quickly create marketing materials with impact - literally in minutes.

Read about two businesses, Fuzzy Wuzzy Rug Co. and A Hike and A Hydrant , that are creating low-cost, high-impact marketing materials with Microsoft Publisher.

Knowing what to say
quoteMake it easy on yourself. Once you've established a clear purpose for your newsletter, and you know how often you want to send it, create regular "features" that allow you to plan what kind of content you'll create ahead of time. For example, you may want to create some categories of information, such as:

  • A letter from the president or newsletter editor
  • News about your company's products or people
  • An in-depth profile about a product or service offering
  • A regular feature about an issue that your customers care about
  • Answers to frequently-asked customer questions
  • An offer, such as a special price on a product or service
Wherever possible, think about the customer when you're developing your stories. What kind of information is most relevant to them in relation to your business? Of course, your number one goal is to further enhance sales of your products and services (either immediately or long-term). But you will tend to have better success if you do this in the context of the benefit to your customer.

Producing your publication
Once you've designed and written your newsletter, you have some options when it comes to printing. If your mailing list is small, it may be less expensive to print your newsletter yourself on a high-quality laser printer. Or, if your newsletter has color, you might consider investing in a lower-priced color printer that makes producing color documents in-house a more affordable option for smaller companies. If you're printing a large number of newsletters or your graphics dictate higher resolution printing, Publisher also enables you to easily set up your document for printing with a professional print shop.

Newsletter Tip:
Consider 3-hole punching your newsletter to encourage customers to save it.

What's the bottom line?
Finally, track your results! If you feature a coupon in your newsletter, put a code on it so you can track how successful each offer is. And to ensure that the cost of your newsletter is paying off, you can use the Small Business Pack for Microsoft Office to calculate and analyze the cost of your mailing.

*"Contact Customers, Make Campaign Flyers, Do Desktop Publishing," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 1995.