Tips To Make A Newsletter A Successful Marketing Tool

I always feel a newsletter counts as a kind of freebie, a company or organization uses to promote their products or services as it tries to convey their missions and visions across to the Markets, Audience, and Publics (MAPs). And it is more powerful than other freebies (like tissue papers, lanyards, and T-shirts) because it carries more words and words communicate better. However, a newsletter also has its shortcoming, and that is it seems less attractive compared to those real, useful freebies. (After all, we cannot use a newsletter to rub our noses, keep our keys and USBs, or simply wear it on ourselves.) Therefore, how to make it stand out from all the competitors becomes very important, and here are some of my thoughts:

The foremost important thing is choosing an audience. Instead of catering to everyone’s taste, the newsletter needs to aim at a group of people at a time. Although it’s a “freebie,” it is still a product, so the idea of market segment still applies. In trying to win everyone’s heart will probably end up losing all of them. The reason is the newsletter will likely become either too plain as it tries to maintain neutrality on everything or too overloaded as it tries to cover everything.

Then, keeping a coherent stance and transforming it into a selling point is the next step. I think The Big Issue Taiwan is a good example. Chartered by The Big Issue in the United Kingdom in 2009, the publication inherits the spirit of giving the homeless a way to support themselves by selling the newspaper on street. To stress its core value, the newspaper smartly includes a “vendor’s profile” section to tell how a homeless person has changed his/her life through this project in every publication. Repetition is a great strategy. These inspiring stories not only demonstrate how the newspaper has achieved its goal in helping the homeless, but also reinforce the public’s impression of its social responsibilities. Therefore, people feel good about buying the newspaper at metro stations or street corners. Similarly, a successful newsletter makes people willing and proud to identify themselves as its readers.

Lastly, a newsletter needs an eye-catching title for the subject line if it is designed for readers to subscribe to their email boxes. I always feel bored and don’t even bother to raise my finger to click on TIME’s or Business Weekly Taiwan’s newsletters when I see “top # articles last week” at the subject line. Their lack of innovation sometimes pushes me away although I subscribe to them because I am interested in contents they cover. Comparatively, an issue-tailored title (like Taiwan Panorama’s “Taiwanese Youth Go for Working Holiday Craze”) easily caught my attention right away when I log into my email box.

Other tits and bits like throwing in some pictures or photos to make the newsletter more colorful and fun seem to be no-brainers. So, I think I better just stop here.

Oh, and speaking of newsletters, did you happen to catch the latest installment of our RedEye Report?

Yating C.