Should you blog, tweet or start an e-newsletter?

Guest blog by LisaMarie Dias, e-newsletter diva

As a designer of e-marketing materials, people will often ask “Should I blog, tweet or start an e-newsletter?” While the question is usually posed as ‘which one’, I will often answer “Yes” in an attempt to help them re-frame the query. There are valid reasons to start any one of these and in my opinion, often very good reasons to have all three!

First and foremost, you need to be very clear about the message you are trying to share. The mode of transport – and that is all that these choices are, different modes of transport for getting your info out into the world – depends on what, exactly, you want to say and to whom.  Are you selling a product to a new customer or disseminating information to establish your expertise?  Are you speaking to someone that knows of you and your product or are you introducing yourself?  Once you clarify the message and the recipient, it will usually be easier to determine how to share it.

Each mode is best suited for a different type of message with some working well in multiple situations.  An e-newsletter gives you the time to introduce yourself and to provide detailed information.  It also allows you to define your ‘tone’ and to post upcoming events. But it is not a good medium for sharing time sensitive information or for last minute reminders.  Blog posts are excellent for distributing daily and timely comments, insights and musings but work best when they are sent to someone that already knows you. The same goes for tweets.  They are the perfect way to stay on someone’s radar with quick observations, retorts and reminders but only when received by someone that is ‘following’ you.  They are not a very good vehicle for introduction and certainly not for explanation.

One client, a financial planner, offers a tremendous amount of timely and valuable financial information and advice each month complete with references, charts and foot notes.  This is obviously not a message suited to a blog post or ‘tweet’.  His e-newsletter offers the space and time to deliver this information properly.  Blog posts are a great way to define your tone and to grow your following.  By posting frequently, people get a feel of who you are and over time, you can build a level of trust.  This same client might blog about the daily ups and downs in the market as well. It would not necessary conflict with the e-newsletter and, if done well, could certainly support it. And I suppose he could tweet too, though I am not sure if financial advice via tweet is in anyone’s best interests. My point is that these modes are not mutually exclusive.

Sometimes I will hear the question, “I have a blog and I am active on Twitter, do I need an e-newsletter/ e-zine as well? “

I believe that, if you have the stamina – and do not underestimate the amount of time and effort each of these endeavors will require – it is often best to combine all three modes, using e-newsletters to introduce yourself and define your area of expertise, blog posts to build on that expertise and tweets to ensure that you are on your reader’s radar.

Promoting an event is a great opportunity to use the strengths of all three modes.  An e-newsletter calendar, posted regularly, makes someone aware of the event and allows them to register and plan to attend. A blog post can then be used to discuss the event and build anticipation followed by a ‘tweet’ to remind them when the date arrives.  Working together, in a coordinated timeline, these three tools will increase the likelihood of having your message received and in this case, ensure event attendance.

Pick the format that works best for your message.  Or better yet, try all three. This is not an ‘either – or’ proposition.  They are all useful tools which should be created and designed to work together to ensure that your message is broadcast and shared.

LisaMarie Dias works with people to create dynamic online marketing materials using Constant Contact.  She offers individual and group classes for those that are interested in doing it themselves and full packages for businesses that want it all done for them.  Give her a call and let her help you get your message online and into your client’s in-box!

How to use e-newsletters for effective marketing

Marketing is about long term relationship building, and a superb way of keeping your customers informed about your business over a long period of time is through a newsletter.

I have written at length about paper newsletters in the past, but now is the turn of the electronic version or e-newsletter. These are a very effective way of communication with a selection of recipients who should have expressed an interest to receive your publications (these things need to be permission based so not to be classed as spam), with the purpose to inform, educate, publicise and maintain a connection with your customer base so they don’t forget you and go off with someone else.

The first thing is to collect your customers’ contact details via an autoresponder, preferably through a double-opt-in system through a sign up form on your website. Having a secure database coupled with a template system will facilitate the procedure, especially with a large collection of details, and you can divide or create separate lists for particular campaigns or promotions.

Use marketing campaigns to collect customers’ details through the incentive system. Playing on the customers’ greed factor is an appropriate way of gathering contacts. But one thing that is not polite is to assume that after a networking meeting you can take advantage of ‘business card dumping’, which is uploading these details directly into your database, as not everybody would appreciate receiving your newsletter without their permission.

Newsletters should only be sent with a direct purpose which should be valid and appropriate. Don’t be compelled to send something out just because you said your newsletter will be bi-monthly or whatever. You want your readers to look forward to the next issue, and receive it with interest once it pops into their in-box. The last thing you want is for them to unsubscribe (a facility which should be available with every publication).

Using a template to make your newsletter ‘look pretty’ seems to be a specific requirement, but I would like to add that some businesses do very well without any special effects, as the success of a newsletter should depend mainly on the content. But if you think your readers ‘expect’ this treatment then there are plenty of templates available.

Don’t fall into the trap (myself included) of just sending out newsletters without a proper purpose or call to action.  Successful businesses always have an aim or reason for their messages, culminating in signing up for an event, publicising a promotion, highlighting a new concept that has become available, as well as increasing your expertise status. If you don’t have a call to action, ask your readers to send this newsletter to someone else who might be interested, which is another way of increasing your database of recipients, or allow them to reprint its content in another publication such as a blog or forum.

My call to action is, as well as passing this on to your friends and colleagues, if you are interested in setting up a newsletter and would like help in creating one, then I am writing a series of packages in ‘how to create marketing newsletters’ through systems such as ConstantContact.com. This will accompany a similar package called ‘How to beautify your blog’ of which details are now available through the link.

My 2009 blogsites and newsletters

There are several new ventures I will be undertaking in 2009, and one of them will be my new blogsite.

A blogsite is a hosted blog. A blogsite is not free like this blog, it has an individual URL and has to be web-hosted. One difference between a blogsite and a website is not only the special programming used, but the way it is treated by the search engines. Spiders are trained to visit websites depending on how frequently the content is updated, and visits can range from days to weeks. But a blogsite, which looks like a website, is treated like a blog, so the spiders visit hourly or even less, especially if there is lots of new stuff for them to feed on.

Another reason why I want to create a blogsite is because I believe in visitor interaction. Using Web2.0, I want to create a social network within my blogsite, with comments in the blog section, suggestions in the forum, submissions into the directory, and lots of valuable information to help you in your businesses.

Now none of you will know of my developments and how they are coming along unless you join up to my newsletter. As part of my community, you will be the first to know of the birth of my new ventures, be offered discounts on my marketing packages and special deals if you find new followers or clients, as well as keeping one step ahead of everybody else.

Interested? Then join up now to my newsletter from my website, to find out the best way to combine design with marketing to make your promotional literature start to make you money! Go on, join up now!

How can your newsletters become successful?

Recently I was asked this question: “I need to know what is the success criteria of a newsletter, how could we know it will be appreciated or not?”

Success of a newsletter will be measured by the response you get from your readership, how many more subscriptions you get from word of mouth or referrals, recommendations from people viewing past issues, people contacting you to ask to submit articles or to advertise, and general feedback from the readership.

Don’t forget that the initial point of getting feedback is to ask for it. Set up competitions or other interactive activities that demand a response to gauge your popularity or whether your content is right. If you are sending out your electronic newsletter from an autoresponder, then your click rate should indicate how many are reading and reacting to your newsletter. Don’t just sit on your laurels and wonder if anybody is reading your stuff, set something up so you can measure a response. Good headlines leading onto apt, up-to-the-minute or relevant stories and content are key to encouraging a good click rate or passing interest.

Success depends on whether your newsletter is readable, easy to understand, has consistent areas or departments your readership can relate to, for example the news section or letters page, is well designed with appropriate columns and relevant pictures, headlines that grab the attention of the skimmer reader, uncluttered design for instant readability, noticeable banners for fast recognition, full use of effective colour if your budget affords it, or plenty of ‘white space’ if only in black and white.

Oh, yes, and great content!

Any other questions, please feel free to go ask Alice!

What goes into a newsletter?

When you write about a specific subject in your newsletter, the best way is to break it down into its basic components, and explain it simply using everyday language. This exercise is more difficult than it sounds, because the idea is to make it not only interesting, but to appeal to as many readers as possible to gain their trust and form relationships with them. By breaking down a subject, it will then lend itself to a number of other subjects which will become fodder for future articles.

Do a postcard campaign to gain interest and increase your readership. This is cheaper than creating a large quantity of the first edition of your newsletter and potentially losing most of them to an uninterested audience. The postcard campaign would have to be run over a series, as in today’s society not everyone responds immediately to information, they may need to be coerced into your way of thinking, seduced into the benefits of your profession, and stimulated by fascinating facts that they may not have thought of before. Sometimes it can take several goes to gain a follower.

Please don’t bore your readers too much about your business (this may sound unkind, but people are notoriously self-centered, and only think in terms of what is in it for them). You could easily explain the various features of your company through the benefits it offers, by writing about successful case studies, funny stories with good endings, witty and entertaining information articles about certain subjects you want to get across, special offers that cannot be resisted, competitions to raise awareness, ‘try before you buy’ offers to get them across your threshold…

Selecting certain pages for particular subjects is a good idea, because if you are going to make your newsletter a regular feature, people will like to look at a particular page first (like as for the local newspaper the sports section, the horoscopes, the letters page, the classified ads, for example) before reading the remainder of the newsletter. Keeping a consistency will help your readers in gaining confidence, and they will then look forward to the next issue. It’s like a supermarket that always has its basics like milk and bread, but the way there will offer all sorts of more provocative products to entice their interest.

But it is all very well giving them all this wonderful information if you don’t get anything in return. The idea is to get more people to try what your organisation has to offer. Therefore you must provide special offers that have a time dependent call to action. These must be worth the reader’s while, maybe even a lost leader to get them to sample what you have to offer them. Usually if you do a really good job, it will sell itself and you will get more customers. I say time dependent because if you leave it open ended, the lack of urgency will disappear from their busy minds and the opportunity will be lost or forgotten.

Why not create a blog as an archive medium for all the really important or successful features and articles of your newsletter. Because it is a blog, it would be frequently visited by the ‘internet spiders’ compared to that of a website, which can wait weeks for a visitation. The more frequent the postings, the more often the spiders visit. These postings could have links to your website or any other internet based information, which again would raise awareness and click value of your website, because it is not only spiders who roam the web and click on links but people too.

Create a sign-up form on the homepage of your website to increase your newsletter membership. You could have past copies in pdf form on the newsletter page, which readers could download if they’ve lost their original copy, or interested future subscribers to see what it is like. Again the spiders trawl the pdfs, so more info is passed onto the internet, encouraging more visits to your website, blog and sign up forms, especially if you include web links in the newsletter.

Get noticed above your competitors

Today I met a office furniture company while out networking. They were an established foreign firm who were looking to expand into Europe and the UK, and had formed a Reading branch. The sales rep was out networking around various groups to tout her wares, which included a well designed brochure sporting the clean, simple lines her furniture was valued for.

Now there are plenty of other office furniture businesses in Reading, so how could she get her company’s reputation levitated above the rest? I suggested she should first collect some testimonials of satisfied clients, and also statements of successful return on investments, such as how the lives of their workforce had been improved through a better environment, increased their sales because of the ambience and quality of their premises had impressed prospective clients, and the efficiency of layout of furniture had made the processing and resourcefulness of their business that much easier.

How to get all this information out to the public? Well, take this newly resourced material and use it in  articles, press releases, blogs, newsletters, speaking events, direct mail… just to get your concept out there. Keep the same clean, simple style as the company’s branding, in both presentation and writing style, to promote your branch effectively. All this can be accommodated in both a paper format and the web, as combining the two can produce very powerful results. Using all the technology resources to best effect can have quite an impact on your business’s success and sales…

Want to know more? Then go ask Alice!

HTML versus content in newsletters

So many e-newsletters are designed using HTML it is now assumed this is the norm. But does HTML contribute to your newsletter getting more likely to read?

The e-newsletters I most enjoy reading (which seem to be published by successful businesses) are quite plain, just with a logo and a few pictures. Content seems to be more important, with a highly relevant message combined with a call-to-action. Frequency depends on whether they have a valid point to promote or publicise, and always contain important information, impelling action points, contextual links to relevant landing pages, unrefusable special offers, good business or lifestyle advice, and clear, noticeable contact details.

In other words, does content take precedent over design?

What makes a good e-newsletter?

Recently I have been posting questions in Ecademy and LinkedIn to find out what people think about e-newsletters.  The answers have been varied and very interesting, plenty of material to write some articles, fuelled by diverse attitudes and individualistic insights.

One thought is that e-newsletters need to be well crafted and sent to the right people.  Unlike paper newsletters, they are not a medium for lengthy and multiple information.  They are not constructed for leisurely reading-time or many chapters; the computer screen is not suitable for reading, as the light makes eyes tired and swimmy, concentration difficult to focus and, basically, we don’t have time to read newsletters when there’s a full in-box requiring our attention.

E-newsletters should contain only one subject that is relevant, wanted, needed and interesting. If readers consider it good value, gain knowledge and can see how it would affect them and their business, they are then more inclined to look forward to the next issue. The missives that go on for pages, endless scrolling down to find the crux of the concept, or, like many American versions, constantly needing to provide alternative examples to make their point, will not only turn people off but will result in maybe some valid information being missed amongst the padding.

There’s a misconstrued idea that your e-newsletter needs to be full of content. This is not the case: ideally one subject is adequate, as really it should be used to slam home a valid point via quick scanning methods into this time-starved world.  You could tell your readership about a particular post you’ve uploaded onto your blog, where you can elaborate more fully, and also have the benefit of receiving comments as feedback.

And then there’s your readers – are they right for your newsletter, or is the content of your newsletter relevant to them? You need to consider their time and how much is it worth.  Are you providing information that is worth reading, offering time-value benefits to their business, providing contribution that stands out from the rest, presented in a punchy, poignant and potent method to make your audience think, understand, react and come back for more? As long as you are providing equal merits in a quick-read format, then your newsletter will succeed.

Snail mail versus failed e-mail

My friend told me that she recently had an email from one of her newsletter recipients saying that she hadn’t heard from her lately and she thought she had stopped trading.

This was very worrying for my friend. How many other people hadn’t got their newsletters each month? OK, she wasn’t using an autoresponder, which would have made her life a bit more laborious, but the problem was that she was unaware that the emails hadn’t reached their destination.

One suggestion I gave her was to occasionally alternate with a paper newsletter, or even a newsletter postcard as explained in my previous post. It would help to maintain the interest from her subscribers, guarantee getting read and provide another focal point to her communications.

This leads to the question: can you rely on the internet for your communication? Especially nowadays with over-full in-boxes stuffed to the gills with spam and other missives. How do you know your e-newsletters are getting read and not swamped, forgotten or deleted? Sure, you may be able to track that they’ve been opened if you use an autoresponder, but that doesn’t mean they’ve even been scanned for interesting content yet alone properly scrutinised.

What used to happen back in the dark ages before email? Paper newsletters were used to impart news, tell stories and crow about your company. They were a media for advertising and articles. The news was both past, present and future. They were read without eye-strain. OK, you did rely on the Post Office and it cost to send them, but they were more likely to be read at the recipient’s leisure, more than once and passed around our friends and contacts. They were not as frequent, so were looked forward to the next issue. They were not deemed ‘a pain’ when they plopped onto our doormats.

The most important elements of a newsletter are: relevance, of interest to the reader, well designed for readability, legible, captivating and newsworthy, excellent copy, good spelling and grammar, striking pictures, grabbing headlines, and being well read. Can e-newsletters lay claim to all these qualities?

Desktop publishing versus graphic design

What is Desktop Publishing?

Desktop Publishing (DTP) is the placing and positioning of text and graphics on the page to produce paper publications such as newsletters, magazines, brochures, books, etc.  It can be adapted to create other paper publicity such as leaflets, flyers, postcards, networking material, business stationery, adverts, cards, posters, signs and other visual communication.

How is it different from graphic design?

Graphic design uses art and creative forces to combine shapes, colours, text, pictures, imagination, fashion and other images to produce new graphics and art, such as graphics, logos, illustration, concepts and design. It conjures up something new specifically for the client. The design is then used to create paper or web marketing material.

Whereas DTP takes the designed graphics, logos, illustrations and concepts to combine it with text, layout and other materials onto the page.  Desktop publishers excel in arranging the material available in the most efficient, effective and attractive method ready for the printing process.  It is mainly paper based, but other media can be used and explored, such as plastics, clothing or whatever.

So in a nutshell, graphic design creates design, desktop publishing takes that design and puts it into a paper format!

How to encourage your target market

I’ve been talking to my daughter Josie about marketing and how products are sold to customers. She is very astute and keeps on referring back to my business. Her main question is: ‘Who, exactly, are your customers, Mum?’ and I’m afraid I had to hesitate! All the marketing advice out there says work out who your customers are and then build your business around them. I suppose I have to find potential customers to match each of my products (at least I’ve pruned those down in recent years) – not exactly the right way to go about it.

I can say I am looking for organisations who want to have information, publicity and promotional material in paper form using graphic design, eg membership organisations who would like to have a well designed newsletter or magazine to promote themselves to their existing and prospective audience, or small businesses who would like to have some paper marketing material to promote their services or products in a colourful and eye-catching form to their target market – but how do you say that in only a few words?

Josie and I have been Christmas shopping and one place she took me was the Build a Bear shop in the Oracle in Reading. A fascinating place as regards marketing goes – and I got Josie to try and analyse them for me. She was aware of the range of different bear skins to choose from, the fun idea of stuffing them yourself, going to a computer to name your bear and get a certificate for its ‘birthday’, and then choosing your outfit for your bear. She recognised the fact that the rich range of outfits would encourage bear-owners to come back ‘for more’, the upselling of other products in the form of accessories for your bear or finding a ‘companion’ for it, and the layout of the shop encouraged young prospects to enjoy their time there with bright colours, ample space and fun activities during their stay. When she asked me where were the same ideas in my business I realised I had a lot of thinking to do!

Obviously I can’t be the same as a bear shop, but I can make the process of visiting my website a more enjoyable experience. Why not offer an insight into graphic design, the different styles of paper marketing material, the potential of each commodity in relation to small businesses or organisations? I need to encourage my visitors to my website to ‘do’ something rather than just ‘surf’ and disappear, through offering freebie information packs and a well-written newsletter explaining and reminding its readers about my services. Undergoing research to find out more to impart to my readership, and to enhance my own experience and design work, will, of course, benefit everyone. What a positive way to look forward to the New Year!