Does Your Business Need an E-mail Newsletter?
An electronic newsletter can help reinforce customer relationships.

By Mary Jo Draper

You may be asking yourself if now is the time to start an e-mail newsletter. Before you plunge into the mechanical challenges of creating your newsletter, it's equally important to think about the goals of your newsletter, who will write it and what it will say.

Why Do a Newsletter?
There's only one reason to send out a newsletter: because you have something important to say. Don't send out an e-mail newsletter just because you want to sell more products or make more money. That's called spam and everyone hates it.

The reason to do a newsletter, and the motive that will make it succeed, is that you or your company are experts in your field, have a unique and/or entertaining perspective or have information to share that will be valuable to your subscribers. 

There's a difference between "news" and "advertising." If your only message is that your products are available or that you're having a sale, you might save money and more effectively convey your message by taking out an advertisement. Your customers (and newsletter readers) will accept a sales pitch in an advertisement. In a newsletter, however, they expect something more subtle and more useful.

An often-overlooked motive for doing a regular newsletter is to generate ideas for other marketing and public relations activities. For example, if your newsletter features an article from one of your experts, that article could be converted into a brochure, speaking topic or by-lined article for a trade publication in your area or industry.

Where to Start?
The first step in creating your newsletter starts with your marketing goals. You might save a lot of agony and money in the long run by doing a survey of your current and prospective customers or clients to see if a newsletter would meet their needs and asking what kind of information is valuable to them.

Next, set a timetable for your e-publication. Will you produce your newsletter once a month, four times a year, or just at key times? You need to consider your resources, how many possible topics you have a year, and how often your customers need to hear from you. It generally takes about three working days to get a newsletter out, so make sure you have the staff or outsourced capacity to handle it.

Start small with your newsletter, but be prepared to grow. If you start tracking your subscribers by categories from the beginning, you will be in a position to segment your lists into categories of interest and custom-tailor your content later on. 

Prepare your staff by explaining the importance of the newsletter and your expectations for their participation. The biggest obstacle to getting an e-mail newsletter going is actually getting the people in your organization with the knowledge to either write or verbally share the knowledge. There are plenty of reasons to resist: your staff is busy, they don't realize what valuable information they possess and they hate writing. You, or your company leaders, may need to send out reminders or personally contact staff to make sure the writing gets done. Or, you may need to bring in an outside writer or editor to help your staff produce the content.

Where to Get Content
If you have an in-house marketing department, you can probably produce the newsletter internally. Someone with marketing or journalism experience is key, because whoever is primarily responsible for writing and editing the newsletter has to be able to think like the customer or client.

There are many sources of ideas for content, and even sources of "ready made" content or prepackaged news on the Internet. However, the best source of content is from your own experts. If your experts can't write the articles themselves, consider having your marketing department do it, or hire a writer, public relations professional or marketing firm.

Writing for an e-mail newsletter takes a little practice. The content needs to be short, easy to digest and straight to the point. In some cases, the newsletter may be the "headline" for a longer or more detailed article on your Web site. A link under a story summary can take your readers to your Web site for more details. But to get them to click, the opening few paragraphs need to hook them.

An e-mail newsletter produced for the right reasons and in the right way can reinforce your relationship with customers. But a poorly executed one will quickly be labeled "spam" and deleted.

Mary Jo Draper handles media relations for doc Communications, a public relations agency in Kansas City.  She can be reached at .