Email newsletter 14 May 2019 | Volume 1, Number 1
“Make sure you don’t lose the customers you’ve spent so much energy to acquire.”	Staying in touch with customers Often, businesses spend as much time and effort gathering new customers as they do on anything else. It’s also one of the costliest functions of doing business. So, it’s important to make sure you don’t lose the customers you’ve spent so much energy to acquire. The alternative is to continue with the time-consuming process of finding new customers from an ever-shrinking pool of prospects. And as it costs much less to keep existing customers instead of constantly replacing them, it just makes good business sense to do what it takes to keep them coming back. Regular communication with your customers lets them know how much you value them and their business. Show them that you care by offering valuable information such as tips on how to use your products and services more effectively, event announcements, information on upcoming new products and expanded services, and special discounts on existing ones. Email newsletters – quick, easy Using an email newsletter can be an effective, low-cost method for staying in touch with your customers. It helps reduce churn and can easily generate more business from customers you’ve already spent a great deal of effort to win. As there are no postage and printing costs involved, it’s also very gentle to your bottom line. Another benefit is the almost instantaneous delivery that email affords. You don’t have to worry whether the Post Office will get the newsletter to your customers in time for them to take advantage of a special offer. Microsoft Office Word makes it simple to create and send email newsletters. Customers will appreciate the regular communication and you could be rewarded with more business from your existing customer base. Create a customised template
Keep these things for a newsletter 01. Use big headlines 02. Make your articles short and to the point. 03. All information should be of value to the customer
“Make sure you don’t lose the customers you’ve spent so much energy to acquire.”
Add your company logo, change the colours to reflect the ones your business uses, and put in your business address, phone numbers and website address – in other words, develop a basic template reflecting your company’s look that will stay the same for each issue.
“It’s a good idea to use Web Layout view (on the View menu, click Web Layout) when creating your newsletter. That’s the look your customers will be seeing when they receive your email.”
“When choosing the fonts that you’ll be using for headlines and body text, a good rule is to never use more than two or three fonts in a newsletter. More cause confusion and make your efforts look less professional.”
Here’s an easy way to use text you’ve already formatted as the basis for a new paragraph, character or list style: Select the text. On the Format menu, click Styles and Formatting, then click New Style. You’ll see all your style characteristics displayed. Name your new style, tick the Add to Template box, then click OK.	Fonts When choosing the fonts that you’ll be using for headlines and body text, a good rule is to never use more than two or three fonts in a newsletter. More cause confusion and make your efforts look less professional. Be creative with the ones you do choose, though. Use different sizes and colours, and use bold and italics to add variety without confusing the look of the newsletter. You can add these custom styles to your template’s style palette so that they’re instantly available. Finally, delete any features that you won’t be using. Once you’ve finished with these general changes, save the result as a Word template. Add articles and graphics One distinct difference between a printed newsletter and an email version is the amount of text to include. Unless you know that all your readers will be interested in a longer version, you should keep the amount of information to about 1,000 words or less. Anything more becomes tiresome to read online, and you may lose their interest before they read the items you really want them to see. What to include Some items to think about including might be introductions to new employees, recent awards presented to your company, specials and discounts on products or services, announcements of new products, and information on new ways to take advantage of your products or services. Don’t include items that might be of interest to only a few customers – you want to capture and hold the interest of as many readers as possible. Add graphics
Add graphics or pictures with captions to help break up the text and create some visual interest. But make sure that whatever you add relates to the adjacent text. A picture of the company dog might be cute, but if the story surrounding it is about a new product, the picture will only serve to confuse your readers.
COMPANY ADDRESS
Street address: Address 2: Phone number: Fax number: Email address:	Contact information Make sure that you include contact information in more than one place. It should not only be part of your master template – you should include “For more information…” contacts in every article where it’s appropriate. Proofread When you’ve completed your newsletter, it’s time for one of the most important steps of all: proofreading. Take several passes through the material, looking for different things each time.