How to Effectively Compose a Newsletter

How do you maintain an ongoing rapport with clients? It is a good idea to keep contact with them individually, but a newsletter can be sent to all buyers on a regular basis. The information in the newsletter will vary. You can inform clients of coming sales, company news, and tips and suggestions relating to your industry. Are you writing the newsletter with the reader in mind? Oftentimes, we disregard how information will be received when we are composing it. Many companies send newsletters to clients electronically. Reading off a computer screen is much different than reading from a tangible page. It is important to keep this in mind when composing your electronic newsletter.

Consider the following:

Make it easy to scan

Many online readers do not read every line of copy. There is a wealth of information on the Web; it is more difficult to captivate the attention of online readers. This means the structure of the copy must be conducive to making a quick glance.

Use short paragraphs when making the copy
Use bullet points to separate ideas
Include a lot of white space in between information
Use uppercase and bold lettering to differentiate headings and main ideas

Title

Spend some time on the title of your newsletter. You do not want the recipient to mistake it as spam; place the title of the newsletter in the subject field of the email. If you make the subject field uniform each time you send a newsletter, the client will come to recognize it more readily.

Table of contents

Ideally, you want the reader to be interested in every word of the newsletter, but time and interest may limit their reading. Create a table of contents for the reader. This way, it will be more likely for them to read parts of the newsletter which are most interesting to them and pertinent to your business relationship with them.

Unsubscribe

Some clients will not want to receive newsletters. You need to give them the option of unsubscribing to your newsletters to ensure they do not receive further issues. Many people have spam filters which flag the word ‘unsubscribe’ because many pieces of spam host this option. Consider wording the option without using ‘unsubscribe’ in order to initially avoid spam filters.

Edit and spell check

Always go back to edit your copy. Misspellings and obfuscated speech will not be appreciated by your audience. Your copy is an extension of your products and service. Poorly written newsletters will create a negative impression about your business.