E-mail Newsletters (E-zines)

One of the best ways to promote your business is by writing an e-mail newsletter. This allows you to easily stay in touch with your clients and potential customers. It also helps you to generate trust, develop brand awareness, and build future business. By providing something your clients want with every issue, you also have an opportunity to sell additional products and services. While publishing an e-zine is a big commitment, distributing a newsletter on a weekly or monthly basis can keep your business in the minds of your current and potential customers.

As we mentioned in our ‘Top Ten Tips for Marketing Your Business’ a Free e-mail newsletter is an excellent way give something away something of value to prospective customers to give them a feel for the quality of your products or services. When you provide something that people find useful, don’t be surprised when you get a phone call from a potential client that read your newsletter because one of your subscribers found it interesting enough to forward to his colleagues.

Here are some tips for creating your newsletter.

1. Define a purpose and theme for your newsletter.

First, decide what you are trying to accomplish for your business with your newsletter. Then determine a consistent message that you want to get across to your customers with every issue. For most of us, our purpose is to get more business. You can do this by showing your customers that you are an authority in your field by providing them with useful information for free. This will build up a trust in you that will allow potential customers to be comfortable doing business with you even if they have not personally met you.

2. Subscribe to related newsletters.

Here are several reasons to subscribe to related newsletters:

- Keep an eye on what your competition is doing
- Stay on top of the latest news in your field
- Get some ideas for articles you’d like to include in your newsletter
- Have first hand knowledge of quality publications to advertise your own newsletter in

3. Create a template that includes consistent topics and format.

The decision on using HTML vs. Text for your newsletter is not one to be taken lightly. While creating an HTML newsletter is more work than using a Text based newsletter, one important benefits is a more professional look. Either way, make sure you newsletter has a consistent look and has the same ‘Departments’ each time you send it out. For example, we include something about Marketing, Promotions, and Search Engines every month.

4. Find a service provider to handle your subscriber sign-up and e-mail distribution.

There are at least a couple of dozen companies that provide email marketing services. One place that’s good to start out with is MailerMailer.  They have a free service that you can use for up to 200 messages per month.  Once you get beyond that, we recommend choosing a paid for service to handle this chore for you. Another inexpensive service you can try before you buy is Aweber.

5. Set up a regular schedule, and get your newsletter out on time each month (or week).

Put it on your calendar so that you make it a regular part of your routine.  Once your readers get used to receiving your valuable content, they will look forward to hearing from your on a regular basis.

6. Write your newsletter.

Make sure you provide your readers with information that is so good that not only will they save your newsletter, they will forward it to their colleagues. There is so much information available for free on the Web that yours will need to stand out both in terms of quality and in terms of relevance to keep from being deleted before being read.