Newsletter is powerful

The newsletter is the most common form of email or electronic circular. It is an effective way to educate customers and, at the same time, deepen their understanding of your product. An effective newsletter has to be designed if it is going to earn the audience’s attention and anticipation.

A newsletter needs four basic conditions before it counts as effective:

1. It provides valuable information. 2. It is regular — ideally once every two weeks. 3. It is short and easy to understand. 4. It provides useful, relevant links.

To send genuinely useful information you have to understand your audience’s lives, interests, needs, spending patterns and habits. That is not far off market research. Sending irrelevant content to no particular target amounts to spamming; do the opposite and it becomes an effective strategy.

Overseas newsletter statistics show that customers can be trained to look forward to yours. The first requirements are (1) content that is relevant and interesting to them, and (2) a regular schedule — every two weeks being the most effective — with each issue connected to the ones before and after.

Length should be about one A4 page. Content that runs too long is an efficient way to turn readers away; concise, to-the-point writing is what modern readers have patience for. At the end of the newsletter you can add three to five short items, each summarising and linking to another piece of useful, related information, and let the customer decide whether to follow them.

If you already use the email editor in our sending platform, you have a powerful layout tool in hand. Use it to design several templates, then edit each month’s newsletter by swapping text and relevant images and sending through our platform — a very good combination of marketing tools.