How to write great newsletters and e-blasts

Tips for increasing engagement and response 

Start with your audience. As you’ll see in these articles, that’s pretty much always Step 1. Never just “write a newsletter” in a vacuum. The work you put into understanding your audience is essential, and it always pays off. Are they current customers? Former customers? Prospects? (That depends upon your list.) What’s the split among these categories? That’s an important question, since (unless you want to do multiple versions of your newsletter, which is not out of the question), you’ll want to craft the optimum message that addresses your recipients’ concerns.

And what are those concerns? What problems do they have that your business can solve? More immediately, what would they look forward to receiving from you on a regular basis? Put yourself in their shoes: Do they quickly scour the web and their social feeds each morning, looking for news they can use? Are they the type of people who follow particular thought leaders, searching for opinions that help them digest the facts?

This is an ideal entrée for you. Since you’re an expert in your line of business, it’s easy for you to comment on relevant news; congratulations, you’re a thought leader!

• Research. This is the hard work of doing a newsletter. You’ll want to search news sources for stories that pertain to your customers’ businesses—and yours. Go for quantity. Get a bunch of stories, and paste their URLs into, say, a Word doc, along with a phrase or two about the story to remind you of what it was about. 
  

• Rank. Once you have a decent list of, say, seven or eight stories, rank them in terms of relevance/importance to your audience. An easy way to do this is to use a five-star rating system: Beside the name of each article in your notes, type in asterisks based on importance, with ***** being the highest, and * being the lowest. 
  

• Cull. Keep the winners. Set the losers aside. Don’t trash them. You never know when they may come in handy someday. If you end up with, say, four stories that are keepers, you’re in good shape. 
  

• Craft. Here’s the framework for a basic e-newsletter outline that works well and is easy to adapt to your purposes: It has three parts: 1) a quick intro about what’s happening at your company, 2) quick descriptions of the “keeper” stories you’ve found, along with some juicy opinions thereon and links to the original articles, and 3) the closer/call-to-action. 

Be careful with that intro/talking about yourself. Always view it through the audience lens of “how is this going to help me?” So while you may be proud that your company just upgraded its equipment, your customer will only be interested in the way that that upgrade makes life easier, better, or cheaper for them. Get it? 

• Button it. Sometimes you’ll find a story that’s simply odd or amusing. (While researching a newsletter about near-field communication or NFC chips recently, for example, we found a story of a man in the Netherlands who had them injected into his hands to keep his bitcoin wallet safe—along with a creepy X-ray photo.) If you find one of these, that’s great. And save it for the last article; it will “reward” your reader for reading the entire newsletter. 

• Beware of over-linking. While you certainly want your clients to contact you, avoid the temptation to include tons of e-mail links to yourself in the newsletter, since they can trigger spam filters. 

• Send it. Using your own e-mail or a popular program such as ConstantContact or MailChimp, send out your newsletter. Many of these services provide free analytics after the fact, so you can check rates for things like readership and unsubscribe rates, allowing you to tweak your offerings going forward.
  

• Leverage it. You’ve got lots of channels by which to share all this hard-earned content, so use them! Repurpose the copy for blogs, your website, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+. Scale it down to a tweet. 
  

• Be consistent. Be advised that once you send out that first newsletter, you’ve committed yourself to continue doing them, and regularly. The worst thing you could do is start to send out newsletters, and then diminish in frequency or stop altogether: This would make your audience question your business’ commitment and staying power. 
  

Consider getting help. While the guidelines above can certainly help you, there’s no denying that creating a newsletter takes time and effort. Experience and a flair for the language don’t hurt either. And it’s not worth doing unless you do it right. If you find the prospect daunting, or simply want to keep your time free for core activities, consider bringing in expert help. The results will be the best you can get, and the investment will pay strong dividends. Contact us and let’s get a quote in your hands. 

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