The art of e-Newsletter Design and Content Development

Creating a beautiful content rich e-newsletter for your suppliers, clients and other readers to browse over once a month surprisingly plays a vital role to the success of your business. An e-newsletter can be a simple unobtrusive method of exposing your business to hundreds of people in a way that is not only is enjoyable for the reader but also gives you credit for your professionalism and knowledge of the industry you work in. The key is structuring the newsletter correctly and developing content that is appropriate for your readers each and every month.Before you put pen to paper, it’s important to have a newsletter design that will compliment the content you’re putting into it. If you run an online store, you may want your newsletter to showcase products that are on special and other discounted items whereas if you are a service provider, it may be in your interests to post articles that identify that you are indeed a professional. Your newsletter design needs to support whatever content you’re putting into it so before you approach your designer, get a clear idea in your head about what you intend to post in each newsletter.Ensure that your newsletter designer clearly understands the importance of marketing your product or service to your target audience and does not go overboard with marketing or sales elements. Obviously it depends on what your approach is and what industry you work in, however a newsletter must be unobtrusive. It must not try and throw sales in its readers face at every chance it gets. Regardless of what your designer learnt at university, throwing marketing slogans and calls to action in peoples faces is not the best approach.Once we have a nicely structured newsletter design, we need to fill it with creative content that will entice the reader to visit your website or contact you for more information. If you’re selling products, it is suggested that you have a graphic designer design the entire newsletter for you. You want your newsletter to appear like a monthly brochure rather than just some text thrown together. If you’re a service provider, provide detailed tips, articles, analysis reports and other information that will compliment the type of work you do. Its important to note that the quality of your e-newsletter will reflect on your readers the quality of your product or service. If you throw articles together without proofing them or whip up a quick list of discounted items – nobody will be overly interested. A few key points to consider when developing content for your newsletter are as follows:- Keep your strategic audiences in mind, always.- A newletter must be sustainable - Be realistic about the amount of content you can consistently produce.- Begin with good basics and build on solid ground - The most basic newsletter should have a few lead stories, shorter news items, and a message from your leader. A more developed publication might include features, departments, columns, an editorial, cartoon, in-house news, news tidbits, regional round-ups, etc.- If you're doing an emailed newsletter, 'clean and simple' spells 'effective'. Keep it to plain text. Be concise, and put an 'in-this-issue' outline at the top. The footer should have complete 'subscribe' and 'unsubscribe' information. You should archive back issues, with an annotated index, on your website.- Your copy should sing rather than drone. It should ring when tapped. Write compact copy in the active voice. Edit for clarity, conciseness, jargon, length, correctness. The bottom line is your readership; give them top priority.- Watch to see how people scan your publication. Talk with a new sampling of readers after each issue. Do a formal readership survey on a regular basis. Track what's happening.As stated a number of times throughout this tip, your newsletter must be unobtrusive yet enticing at the same time. It should persuade your readers to visit your site, call you for details, purchase your product or tell a friend about your services without annoying or frustrating them. If you have a number of people unsubscribing from your newsletter, then you’re doing something wrong. Keep it simple, to the point and never go overboard. Remember, the e-newsletter isn’t so much the important part – it’s the click-throughs to your website that matter.