Keeping in touch with your customers: email newsletters

Email newsletters are a great way of keeping in touch with your customers. Approached the right way, an email newsletter will:

• remind people that you are still here and ready to serve them
• announce your new products and services
• emphasise your expertise in your area to underline your credibility
• ultimately, help increase your sales

As with any venture though, your success depends on your approach. A poorly written, badly thought-out newsletter is worse than nothing at all.

First, think about your audience. What do they need to know, what will they find useful? Can a general email cover all the various interest groups that make up your audience, or do you need to tailor different versions to suit different groups?

What do you have to say that will interest your customers? This is not the same question as what do you have to say that interests you? Your customers are in truth unlikely to be interested in personnel changes in your organisation – it gives them nothing. Special offers, new products, or professional viewpoints on topical issues are far more likely to get them reading and responding.

How long a newsletter do you want to write? Do you put everything you want to say in the newsletter, or keep the newsletter short and provide links to your web site?

How often do you want to contact your customers? If your range of products is constantly changing, or you are regularly running special promotions, you could easily send out brief and sparky newsletters once a week. Once a day is possible, but only if the information you have to offer is really timely. Just don’t keep repeating yourself for the sake of frequency – it will soon become seen as spam.

How are you going to maintain quality in your newsletter? How do you make the words and images attract the attention of your readers? How are you going to get your key messages across clearly and accurately in the least number of words? How are you going to ensure the links to any part of your web site work?

How are you going to get readers for your newsletter? Don’t forget to invite any customers to sign up for the newsletter. Any order you take can include a tick box for a newsletter.

Don’t forget the unsubscribe information. People who receive your newsletters when they don’t want to could quickly move from being neutral about your organisation to being fiercely negative. Not good PR!

Who should produce your newsletters? The chances are you need several groups of people:

· the knowledge holders within your organisation

· the people who can liaise with the knowledge holders and set down information in words succinctly and powerfully

· the people who can put together the whole package into an email format

· the people who can manage a customer mailing list efficiently and send out the emails

· a leader and decision-maker

We find that as copywriters we have differently defined roles according to the needs of our clients. At one end of the scale we are working with agencies, receiving full briefs from the marketeers and wordsmithing the copy. At the other end of the scale we are working hand-in-glove with the marketing manager at the client company to develop content and liaise with designers. How it works depends on your needs.

If you’d like to know more about how Wrightwell can work with you to develop email newsletters (and printed versions) just drop a line to kathy at wrightwell.com