Everyone encourages you to create an email newsletter to build a list, keep in touch with your prospects, establish trust and to eventually sell your products. But creating an email newsletter is not as simple at it seems. Unlike the print newsletter, you may have created in the past to communicate with your key stakeholders, email newsletters have more roles to fill to succeed.

Before you can start to write your newsletter, it is important to review your goals. 

• Are you using the newsletter at the beginning of your customer relationship to establish trust?
• Is your key purpose to get the reader to see you as an expert with the best solutions to their problems?
• Are you communicating with prospects who are in the middle of your sales funnel, who need just a few more touches before they will consider buying from you?
• Are you a non-profit trying to get potential donors enthusiastic about your agency's mission and activities, so they will eventually make a contribution?

Once you have established why you are creating a newsletter, you have to determine the mechanics:

• How you will deliver your newsletter to readers? 
• Will you automate the process by using an autoresponder?
• What format will you use: HTML, text, PDF?
• How frequently will you publish?
• What will you call your newsletter?
• Will it be one column or two?
• What content will you use?
• Will you promote products and services?
• Will you allow others to advertise in your newsletter?

You also need to consider what landing page on your website you will drive the email newsletter recipient to? Some email marketers suggest that it helps to be able to segment your different audiences. Or you might include different items in your newsletter designed to appeal to readers in different buying stages. Each item should contain a link to a different landing page where the recipient get more more information about the topic.

Hopefully, you're beginning to see this as a process. Your goal should be to move the newsletter reader through the stages to reach the desired goal. One goal should be to educate your prospects about your company (not a hard sale), your products and services while showing them how what you are offering solves a problem that brought them to your website or list in the first place.

Want more help in creating your email newsletter, read what Alexandria Brown, "The Ezine Queen" has to say about creating an email newsletter or an ezine. Brown is the author of the award-winning "Boost Business With Your Own Ezine."

by Marcia Ming - May 15, 2008

Back to Top