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
What'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
To 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
Make 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.
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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.