Practice Development
Make Your Newsletter a Valuable Marketing Tool
The challenge you face in producing your newsletter lies in balancing your purpose (using your newsletter as a relationship marketing tool) with that of your clients (obtaining valuable and useful information).
Your primary purpose is to establish, maintain, or consolidate your relationship with your clients. But what is your secondary purpose?
What do you want readers to do as a result of reading your newsletter?
What effect do you want the newsletter to have? Do you expect immediate responses? Are you prepared to wait for a future benefit? What do you want the reader to do?
Do you want them to file the newsletter away for future reference?
Do you want them to remember your name into the future?
Do you want them to call you for more information?
Do you want them to walk in your door and buy?
You must clearly define your purposes for the newsletter at the beginning so you can effectively measure its success later.
Analyse the communication task
Carry out these three basic steps:
- Identify your audience
- Clarify your purpose
- Determine your constraints
Through this analysis you will discover the suitable style and content of your newsletter.
Get organized
Plan the newsletter after determining your topic, thesis, purpose, audience and problems. This includes lay-out, design, format, repeat columns, rhetorical approach, and more. Don't proceed without a vision of the final product and means to measure whether it has fulfilled its purpose.
Organize the task and the document:
- writers
- editors
- production staff
- requirements of format and production method
- content
Who are your clients?
To launch a successful communication product, you need to know who your audience is. Who are you speaking to? Do you know much about your clientele or your targeted market?
How can you find out what your readers want to read about?
Ask them. Do a survey by mail or telephone. Include a survey in your first issue of the newsletter.
Or research your readers' needs and interests. You can gain information about your clients in several ways:
- Hold a brainstorming session with your staff
- Do a client survey in writing or by telephone
- Obtain demographic information from library resources
- Hold focus groups of clients
Identify the readers and consider their different characteristics, needs, and expectations. Draw up an audience profile:
- age range
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gender
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marital status
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occupation
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sensitivities
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attitudes
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education
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reading level
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interest level
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familiarity with topic
Characteristics:
________________________ ____________________
________________________ ____________________
________________________ ____________________
________________________ ____________________
Information Needs:
________________________ ____________________
________________________ ____________________
Expectations:
________________________ ____________________
________________________ ____________________
________________________ ____________________
What are your own and your readers' constraints?
What resources do you have for producing the newsletter? Who will write the articles, who will edit it? Will you desk-top publish or use a professional service? How frequently do you need to publish? How much time can be devoted to the production of each issue?
Admit to your own constraints
Common constraints on publishers:
- lack of experienced writers
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lack of trained editorial staff
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lack of knowledge of readers
Common constraints on writers and editors:
- limited resources
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time limits
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lack of substantive knowledge of facts
Consider how the readers will use your newsletter? When, where, and under what conditions will they read it? Do they have enough motivation to read a large or dense paper or will they want to skim it quickly?
You must clearly identify your constraints so you can change those that can be changed and work around those that can't. And so you don't expect miracles.
Who can you get to write and edit.
Identify staff members who enjoy writing and give them adequate time to do it. Hire a contract writer. Subscribe to a news service.
Obtain a copy of the membership directories of The Editors' Association. and the Periodical Writers' Association.
If you are the writer
Subscribe to other newsletter from which you can obtain ideas. You may also be able to obtain permission to reprint.
Journalism offers a reliable formula for brief, effective writing. Follow the same rules as the newspaper journalist who answers these questions: who, what, when, where, how and to whom?
Prepare your first draft of an article without a lot of second-guessing. New writers often have difficulty separating the writing phase from the editing phase. This is inefficient.
Write in a readable style using plain language
One in three people has difficulty reading any material that is not simple, clear, and well-organised. The rest of us have grown lazy in our reading habits - we won't be bothered reading anything that is not clear, logical, and compelling.
Print a copy of "Readable Writing" at this site. It simplifies the Fry "Writeability Checklist" which appeared in Rapport: News about plain language. Edward Fry, its author, designed the Fry Graph which is the most widely used graph for measuring readabilty of text.
Reference sources
You should keep basic reference books at your desk to answer questions concerning spelling, grammar and style.
Consider these desk references:
- Oxford Dictionary or Gage Canadian Dictionary
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Roget's Thesaurus
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The Elements of Grammar, Shertzer
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The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
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The Bias-Free Word Finder, Maggio
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A Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms
Editing for your readers
Once you have a first draft, you have to edit your creation from your reader's viewpoint. This is also the right time to:
- Review what you have written for truth and accuracy
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Double-check that your content satisfies your purpose
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Refer to similar articles to see if you missed anything important
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Refer to writing checklists
Be brief and concise
Express a concept clearly, brevity usually helps. Express essential ideas concisely.
Remove unnecessary content:
- Identify and remove unlikely contingencies.
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Always eliminate extraneous information.
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Consider which concepts are not essential.
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Deal with some ideas in a different document.
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Why do you need feedback from your readers?
If you don't seek feedback, you will never know whether you have got the right combination of ingredients. You will never learn whether readers find your newsletter interesting or not. You won't learn if they throw it in the trash when it arrives. You will continue to waste resources. Feedback from your readers keeps you on track and helps you serve and refine the original purpose of your newsletter.
How to evaluate the newsletter
Testing what you write
Even if you have grammar software, don't neglect to do your own assessments. Find a good checklist to use for review of the document. Filling out a questionnaire will give you a quick and easy record of your assessment.
First, give the newsletter a look-over and make notes about this visual assessment. This can be a general feeling about the design that indicates whether you would voluntarily pick-up this newsletter for reading. Then answer questions about the language and organization of the text.
Peer edits
The simplest, cheapest, quickest way to test whether your communication is effective is to ask a co-worker to read it and give you feed-back.
Try-Outs
You can be ingenuous in designing your try-outs. Try it out on your family members, your neighbours, people in neighbouring offices. Mine all resources for feedback before publication.
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