A newsletter is a good sales promotion vehicle, a way to tell recipients about your products or services. So long as you're offering them information of value in your newsletter, they'll take a look at what you have to sell.
But most newsletters are more than an extended plug. They give you the chance to address your reader directly, show them what you're like, how much you know. It's all part of building your brand.
So what's involved? The first requirement is a commitment to publish it regularly. Second, you need to maintain a high standard. And third, realise that it's going to take time and effort to do it well.
Content
A good newsletter has something useful to say. As well as the "new product sale now on" features, you should have some items that your audience will find valuable - tips and tricks, industry comment, briefs on the latest news in your field.
You could also include some entertainment. Contests are always popular. You don't have to offer too much - a magnum of champagne always seems more impressive than its actual cost. Depending on your target readership, jokes might go down well. The tone of voice used in the articles will also vary according to the audience. In general, newsletters should be chatty and informal (the personal touch) or terse and clipped (for a cool, businesslike air). But either way, content is king: you need to say something worth saying.
None of us have enough time, so make the newsletter easy for the reader to scan - use short paragraphs, bullet points, white space between topics, clear article titles and section heads. For e-newsletters, use links and highlight them.
The tools
You can produce a perfectly acceptable newsletter using Microsoft Word, and there are some decent ready-to-go templates to get you started. You'll need Word 2002 for most of them. For more control over formatting, try Microsoft Publisher: it too has some good templates, and they come on the CD.
But if you're doing a paper newsletter, think about the printing. Single-sided inkjet output with stapled pages might just about be ok for a short run newsletter with a roll-your-sleeves-up feel. Otherwise, use a commercial printer: expect to pay 75p to £1.50 per copy for a 500 copies of good quality full colour eight-pager.
Jobbing printers and print shops might not be able to take your Word or Publisher files, so check what format they require.
Both Word and Publisher can be used for email newsletters, but there are some caveats. Word is good for plain text e-newsletters: just save the document in that format. For the full fancy formatting, you save as a web page - and while this works, it does produce a very large HTML full with lots of extraneous Word-related gubbins. Bigger files mean more expense on sending, and they're slower to open.
Publisher's "create website" facility also does a reasonable job and with less baggage, provided you use Publisher 2000 or later. Earlier versions turn everything into images, including text.
You get a bit more control over formatting and much smaller HTML files if you use a pukka web editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver - or for that matter one of the less well known freebies, like AceHTML Freeware or 1st Page 2000.
The list
You also need to build a mailing list. An emailed newsletter needs email addresses for recipients, and the simplest way to collect them is to invite people to subscribe online at your newsletter website.
All your current customers, suppliers and professional advisors should be on the mailing list as a matter of course. So should the local newspaper, chamber of commerce, industry associations and maybe the tourist office too. But don't forget - junk mail is bad, opt-in is good. For paper or email distribution you must provide an easy way to unsubscribe.
List management
If your mailing list is small, under 250 names or so, you can probably manage it using software you already have. Excel is a surprisingly effective option, with one line per subscriber and information fields for name and address in columns. Outlook is a better solution: it lets you set up several contacts folders, so you can have one exclusively for newsletter subscribers.
As your mailing list grows, maintenance will become more of a chore - adding new names, deleting the dead addresses, unsubscribing people. You might also want to add extra information and relate subscribers to customer records. Use a true database application like Access or FileMaker for that. And don't overlook Microsoft Works, which includes a surprisingly nifty mailing list application as a sample for its database.
Email or paper?
Given the amount of email that people receive, your newsletter will have to be pretty distinctive to avoid being "trashcanned" - so the to and from lines are almost as important as the subject, the subject should enable the reader to see the main topic and distinguish legit email from spam at a glance, and your strongest story had better be the first thing that is read.
Email can (probably should) include links, so the newsletter itself might be an extremely short message with brief synopses of the articles that can be read at the website.
Email isn't great for a graphics-based message, though. And since email addresses go out of date very quickly, there will be a lot of list maintenance to do. Paper is more substantial, slightly less easy to bin, an object that the reader might return to more than once.
There's no reason why you should try to do both email and paper versions - except that very quickly you'll see how the cost of print and postage tilts the balance.
