Mention newsletters to some people and they react as if you’re suggesting that shoulder pads are a good fashion accessory. However, newsletters do serve a purpose, whereas shoulder pads was a trick played on the entire 1980’s population.
Newsletters – whether internal, external, purely electronic or printed can provide an opportunity for a company or organisation to publish its success stories as well as providing a more rounded view of the company. As has been mentioned before, your customers are not one dimensional beings, so why should your company portray itself that way? I’m not suggesting you put family photographs in or how little Johnny is doing in Home-Ec class, but providing small articles on items you find interesting as it pertains to your work, will more than likely also interest your customers.
Deciding whether to print a newsletter or to only have online versions is a decision each company has to make for itself. I know of one company which does both, though not with every edition. The benefit they find with doing it this way is that the printed versions have much more impact that the email version, however the email version has analysis and tracking capabilities. They’ve only been conducting this form of newsletter distribution for 6 months so far, so we’ll have to see how this progress continues. However so far, so good!
In general, newsletters are a great way of keeping your company’s name in your customers minds. However they are time hungry, and if you think you cannot afford time in writing, editing, laying out and proof reading the newsletters (not to mention distribution), I wouldn’t suggest it. Perhaps an annual newsletter may be a good compromise? Newsletters can be a great source of market research if monitored properly, and they can also provide another advertising medium. If you’re going to launch into producing one, make sure it will be possible to maintain at regular interals – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly etc, and that you let your customers know how often it will be published.
