I am an avid fan of newsletters.  They are a marketing device that, when done properly, are looked forward to by the recepient.

This being the electronic age, and with the cost of postage forever going up, I recommend that your newsletter be the electronic kind.  Also, it should be in PDF format so that all computer platforms can read it.

It can be a simple one page newsletter, or multiple pages, the choice is yours. 

One big mistake that many people make is filling the newsletter with self-promotion and ads for their product or services.  While it can and should promote you, it also needs to provide useful and interesting content for the reader.  If you don’t do that people will ignore it and you.

The more subtle your self-promotion the better.  Press releases are good, as is introducing new employees, or new products and services.  But keep it focused on how it will potentially help your customers.  Remember that they care more about their business than they do about yours.

Provide them with short articles that will help them in their business.  If you are a printing company for example, you might give a series of tips about the best way of dealing with a printer, or graphic artist.  If your customers are primarily in one industry, resturants for example, then provide them with brief bits of industry news.  The content needs to be useful to them.

Since my newsletter is read by individuals in several different industries I focus on general business and marketing subjects.  Also, the name of your newsletter should convey something about what to expect inside; the name of my newsletter is Brock Henderson’s Business & Marketing Newsletter, pretty straight forward. Some companies simply put their newsletter on line, which is fine, but you never know if anyone has seen or read it.  That’s why I like to e-mail mine, I know they have received it, and while it is true I don’t know if they have actually read it or not, I do knpw that they had the opportunity to read it.

With an e-mailed newsletter you really will need to utilize the services of a List Server, that’s a company that will maintain (and back up) all your subscribers e-mail addresses.  I learned this the hard way several years ago when I was keeping the e-mail list on my hard drive and my hard drive suddenly died.  The computer wizards I took it to were unable to recover anything from the drive, so I lost a few hundred subscriber addresses.

If I can help you with your newsletter, I’d be honored to do so; but I really do encourage every business to have one wether you utilize my services or not.  It will take time to build up your e-mail subscriber list, but it is well worth the effort.

To see a sample of my newsletter go to:  http://bhenderson.com/documents/July2006.pdf