If your small business relies heavily on communicating with your customers (and what small business doesn’t) a newsletter may be a good idea for you. Newsletters allow you to keep in contact with your loyal customers and some prospective customers, while getting feedback from them at the same time. They are relatively inexpensive advertising tools that have much more flexibility than most ads.
With the growth of the internet, many companies have turned to sending email newsletters for the cost savings. While they can be effective as well, the old fashioned, newsletter printing on paper design is still the most powerful way to communicate with your customers. Here are a few additional tips to guide you in writing your next newsletter.
Give Them Something to Talk About
The most important part of any newsletter is the content that you include. There are certain elements that are essential, such as contact information, specials or sales information, and product information. But you have to give your customers something that interests them, as well. Include things that they can read for pure entertainment value.
Use All of Your Space
Don’t forget that you can use the back of each page in your newsletter. Many businesses do not include any information on the back page, but you should. That is a whole lot of space that you would be wasting if you did.
Keep Things Small
As a general rule, keep your images and design features as small as they can be while still providing the impact that you need them to provide. This provides you with more space which you can use to add more content.
Throw in Some Teasers
At strategic points in the newsletter, include small bits of information that you have pulled from the content that you wrote. Pull the most entertaining of important information, which will catch the customer’s eye. The idea is to entice the reader into reading the entire newsletter, and these “pull quotes” can do this very effectively.
Buy Into Color
Obviously, using color in your newsletter printing project costs more than plain old black and white. But color brochures are also far more effective. Readers are far more likely to read something that attracts them visually, and color certainly does that. If you can afford to use two colors, do it. And if you can afford full color newsletters (which can be surprisingly affordable) you should definitely use it. Full color brochures are much, much more valuable, and will probably pay for themselves in increased sales.
Be Consistent
However frequently you decide to send out your newsletters, stick with it. If you want to send them out weekly, make sure you can devote enough time to do so. Generally, you will want your newsletters to be monthly or quarterly.
