I received a few emails recently from several individuals looking for advice into developing the right newsletter format for newsletters they were tasked with launching. They each had several great questions regarding newsletter design so I figured it would be good to discuss with all of the Understanding Marketing community. For most people, starting a newsletter or enewsletter can be a very intimidating item on your marketing agenda since it’s filled with an enormous amount of strategic questions - along with the pressure of writing lots of articles.
A newsletter is a great way to communicate with everyone involved with your small business - employees, customers, prospects, industry personnel and any other key stakeholders. When developed properly, a newsletter can bring great return from large readership because of its very nature of being informational first, sales second. But in order to develop properly, you have to ask yourself a series of questions. The main questions always revolve around newsletter length and what kind of content.
In my experience, newsletter length is always dictated by your audience. If it’s a consumer audience, you typically want shorter, fluffier pieces since your audience doesn’t want all the details (plus they have a shorter attention span). If the newsletter is for an academic or technical industry, like the medical or legal field, you’ll typically find much longer articles in a white-paper style format containing all kinds of research, facts, stats and perspective from industry experts.
However, sometimes you’re stuck in the middle and you want a good mix of insightful articles and fluffy, short-read pieces. In this case, you’ll want to choose two or three topics for each newsletter that go into good detail (1000-1500 words in length), supplemented with anywhere from 7-10 shorter articles that serve more as industry briefs like an news roundup.
The other thing you’ll want to keep in mind is the frequency of your newsletter. This is all about preference of your organization and/or industry. But keep in mind that if you want to do a monthly newsletter (12 times a year), you’ll want fewer long articles and more industry briefs since you have the opportunity to include more timely breaking news. However, if you move to a quarterly (four times a year), where you don’t have the luxury of having timely news, you’ll then want to have fewer briefs and more long and detailed articles that go into great detail about trends happening in your industry. Here are a few sample topics for these articles:
- Effects of the new U.S. President on your industry
- The environment/green movement
- Economic slowdown
- New legislation being passed and how it affects the industry
- Case studies and success stories
As always, the key to an effective newsletter is all about identifying the characteristics and needs of who you’re writing for. Understanding your audience always goes a long way towards understanding marketing and the tools you have to reach them. And if you find yourself having trouble getting started, you can always do a Google search on different newsletter examples.
Have you had success with developing your own newsletter? Tell us about it here.
