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Newsletters
Can Rescue Your Marketing Budget While Increasing Sales! What's a company to do when it has to cut back on advertising expenses, but still wants to maintain customer contact, get out its advertising message, and prospect for new business? A newsletter! Newsletters offer many businesses the most cost-effective marketing tools available: Newsletters have high credibility. Most people, when reading an advertisement or flyer, have a little voice in the back of their heads saying, "This is an advertisement. People lie in advertisements. Don't believe this." Properly designed newsletters, however, are viewed not as an advertisement, but instead as news. People read them with "suspended disbelief," assuming that the information is "news" and not "hype." Offering industry news and presenting information that's useful to clients (how-to stories are a good example) are two excellent building methods for such credibility. Newsletters
are inexpensive compared to other forms of advertising. They're generally
self-mailers, not requiring the cost of
an envelope. They usually don't require expensive printing to look good.
(The most high-credibility publications around — such as Time, Newsweek,
Wall Street Journal, and Barrons — are printed on inexpensive paper,
without super-slick processes.) And, while a magazine ad or flyer may
cost over $2,000 per page to design, newsletter design is relatively
inexpensive because companies like The Newsletter Factory do nothing
but newsletters, and are therefore extremely efficient. Newsletters linger in offices and homes longer than advertisements. Banking News said it best: "Imagine designing an advertisement that your customers will leave out on the coffee table of their reception area, that they will distribute through the office, that they'll take home to read or share with their spouse. Seems almost impossible, right? Except that many banks are doing just that with a custom newsletter..." Newsletters have flexible schedules. While advertising schedules and frequency are tied to the publications in which they appear, and radio/TV demands certain amounts of insertion, newsletters can be mailed according to just about any schedule. If you miss a month, it usually isn't a problem. And, if you want to add an extra issue, your customers won't mind at all — as long as you're providing them with useful information. Newsletters don't burn out. Advertisements burn out over time, and need to be "rested." Yet newsletters avoid this drawback because a properly-designed newsletter is viewed as news. People rarely get tired of reading the news (even though a newspaper comes every day!). Newsletters aren't thrown away by secretaries and spouses. Enjoying higher pass-through than any other type of direct-mail device, newsletters are generally not thrown away in a routine screening of mail. Most secretaries and spouses realize that people pay to subscribe to certain newsletters, and they don't want to risk throwing away something that somebody may have requested or paid for. Newsletters hang around. Because they're viewed as reference or news devices, people often keep newsletters, instead of throwing them away. You'll further increase this retention time by incorporating useful reference information into your newsletter. So, if you're facing advertising budget cutbacks, consider a custom newsletter as a way of both reducing expense and increasing response. Thom Hartmann, founder of The Newsletter Factory, is a leading authority on newsletters and desktop publishing
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