You may think your company doesn’t need a newsletter but think again. Newsletters are a great vehicle to deliver information to existing or prospective customers. Not only can you alert the market to your products and services, you can make a more personal connection with the reader by including interesting or heart warming stories about your staff or business. Most of your competitors don’t know how powerful a well-produced newsletter can be, so you have an opportunity to steal a march on them!

Below are just some of the reasons why you need a newsletter. Newsletters are;

• Relatively cheap to produce
• Great engagement devices that get people involved and interested
• One of the best ways to express your business identity and values
• Remarkably flexible – you can use them to convey information, promote your own offerings, share customer testimonials, provide interesting or amusing content ect.
• Relationship builders that help retain good customers, as well as attract good prospects

So how do I produce one?
Ok, so you realise that a newsletter is a great idea and now you want to produce one. But how do you go about it? The following section describes the most important parts of a newsletter and explains how you can do it yourself.

1. Masthead and nameplate
The masthead is the area that appears at the top of the newsletter. The design of the masthead needs to remain consistent throughout all your newsletters otherwise people will not recognise it is your newsletter. The nameplate is a full width display of the newsletters name, issue number and date. Make sure you use appropriate font and the colours reflect your organization.

2. Articles
Each page should have a lead story. You should give this story the most visible headline and more space than any other story– between a third and two thirds of space on the page

The lead story needs to be extremely useful and interesting to the reader. For example, you could write a story saying how selling energy rated windows will increase your customers profits or a recent industry report has reported a surge in demand for composite doors.

When you decide what articles to include in your newsletter, make sure you cover a variety of topics. You want to have something of interest to everyone but make sure it is good journalism, not just disguised sales pitches.

Get to the point
Write short, to the point articles – between 100 and 300 words – and make sure they contain solid nuggets of useable information. Also make sure you tell stories. Tell who did what, when and why they did it and insert a relevant photo of the person.

Grabbing and holding the readers attention
Design is as important as writing in making an appealing newsletter. Lay out articles in such a way that they capture the reader’s attention and invite them to read on. Break them up with new paragraphs at least every five or seven column centimeters. Interrupt long flows of text with headers, tables bullets or an illustration. Add a sidebar (a very short piece or how-to tip that relates to the main article) to increase appeal to the reader.

3. Headers
Headers (also called headlines) should be set in the larger and bolder type than the body of the article. Don’t make a header too wordy, but ensure that it contains enough description to invite the viewer to read on.

You can use special headline typefaces for your headers or use bold type from the same typeface family used in the body of the article. You don’t want to use too many type styles in a single publication. As a general rule of thumb, stick to using one type style for most or all of your text. However, headlines are the exception. You can use a variety of colours shapes and sizes in the headlines to keep them interesting and break up the articles.

4. Type
The body of an article should use a clean, conservative typeface set large enough so it can be easily read – usually size 10, 11, or 12. Avoid all fonts designed to look like handwriting, comic book scripts or old typewriters, unless you have a really good reason to use them.

5. Columns
Use columns whenever you have a large amount of type. The eye may waver and jump from line to line when it has to follow lines of type that go across a full page. If you break up the same article into two or three columns, the line is shorter, so the eye focuses for a shorter amount of time and doesn’t get side tracked.

6. Flow and readability
Make sure your newsletter flows. If you have to continue articles on another page, don’t make finding the continuation difficult for readers. If possible, keep article together to make reading less frustrating.

7. Size
You can publish newsletters on virtually any size of paper. The main factors are the amount of content you have and budget (think smaller if you are on a limited budget). Newsletters can range from both sides of an A4 to a 4, 6 or 8 page A4 newsletter.  A larger format A3 newsletter is still occassionally used to create impact, but can look a little clumsey.

8. Photos and artwork
As with brochures, you can use photos and artwork to make a newsletter article more interesting and to create an appropriate mood or feeling. Text wrap – when a text wraps around a box containing artwork instead of stopping above the box and continuing below it – can also be an effective strategy in a newsletter.

Get these factors right and you will be well on your way to writing a newsletter that will hook the interest of new and prospective customers. Alternatively, Insight Data’s creative design and copywriting team will put together a powerful newsletter, print it and mail it to your prospect clients selected from the Insight database. For more information contact us on info@insightdata.co.uk, by telephone on 01934 808293 or visit www.insightdata.co.uk