Newsletters are the perfect way to keep in touch with a ‘niche’ market. In fact, that is their main function.
The term niche market, in its broadest sense, applies to free newsletters as well as subscription and marketing newsletters. Getting to know your readers will be much easier when you have defined your niche from the outset.
Sourcing or writing appropriate content is much easier when you have analyzed your niche and have a clear picture of your readership in mind.
Identifying Niche Markets
An employee newsletter, published with the aim of keeping everyone in a company fully informed, is obviously a ‘giveaway’ but its niche market is all the company’s workers. A service club newsletter (such as for Rotary, for example), might have similar aims. Its newsletter might be used to keep all the members informed about upcoming events, who is serving on the committee, etc. Again, it would probably be distributed free throughout the membership. Those members are the newsletter’s niche.
Marketing newsletters, by their very nature, have an easily definable niche—the target market. The same applies to subscription newsletters. The niche is those people who might subscribe because they have a particular interest in the newsletter’s focus.
Analyzing Your Niche
From the point of view of your newsletter’s content, it is always a worthwhile exercise to analyze, as far as you can, your niche market. This can open up your thinking to include articles and other items that previously you hadn’t considered. Remember, the first objective, the one that over-rides all other considerations, is that the newsletter gets read. If it fails to do this then it is a total failure in every other respect. Appropriate content is what ‘gets read’ and you need to explore all potential avenues to determine what is pertinent and what is not.
Naturally, you will already have, in your own mind, a ‘readership profile’; a mental picture of the sort of people your readers are. What follows, in alphabetical order, are some criteria you might want to consider to expand and refine your readership profiles. The relevance of individual items in the list will vary according to the target market and the newsletter focus. Some may not apply but all should be taken into account.
1. Age
This is an obvious one but the idea is to narrow things down to specifics, as far as possible. For example, a school newsletter aimed at parents means that almost all the readers would fit within a twenty year timeframe (20-40 year olds).
Therefore, age would probably not warrant special consideration since you would already be taking it into account. It would be part of your unwritten ‘readership profile’.
However, if your newsletter was directed at members of a computer club with a wide range of ages, it might well be worth considering. You might try to determine the proportion of members within pre-determined timeframes (under 20s, 20-40s etc).
The results could affect the whole tenor of the newsletter if you found that more members than you realized were, say, under twenty years of age. It could prompt you to focus far more on computer games than previously was the case.
2. Background
People adopt certain attitudes, including religious views, according to their heritage and background. It can be very important, indeed sometimes vital, to pay due regard to these attitudes.
3. Dependence or Independence
This can loom very large in the minds of those for whom it is an issue. Married couples tend to have a very different perspective on things than single people. Parental status belongs here too. Similarly, disabled people have a view of the world that is unique to their situation. The answers to questions regarding your readers’ degrees of dependence or independence can help you understand their situations better and the types of material to include in their newsletters.
4. Education
This will certainly help you decide the best writing style to adopt. It might also cause you to impose restrictions with regard to vocabulary range and complexity. More educated readers tend to be more tolerant of controversial issues as well and are likely, for instance, to be more interested in current affairs.
5. Gender
The proportion of males to females in your target readership is useful information, if it is not obvious already. It will help you to achieve a gender balance in your articles that otherwise might not be so apparent.
6. Income
This can sometimes mean much more than spending power. Although ‘disposable income’ can be a powerful factor in determining newsletter content, social attitudes can be strongly affected, too. If your readers have varying levels of income and wealth, it is often a good idea to partition them into income ranges, work out the proportions, and provide content in similar proportions.
7. Leisure
Allowing your newsletter content to be slanted by what readers are most likely to be doing in their spare time has obvious advantages. People are sometimes much more passionate about their leisure activities than work and if you bear this in mind you can make your newsletter much more compelling.
8. Location
Is your newsletter directed at apartment dwellers or are they mostly house owners? There is more to location than the region they live in. Their geographical location though, can be important. It affects, for example, their lifestyles, their attitudes to weather and climate and the effect they have on them. Even some of their social attitudes can be colored by where they live.
9. Occupation
Breaking down occupations into groupings can be helpful and the more you can refine the data the better. Medical doctors, for example, can be specialists, in general practice, interns, hospital staff etc. The more you know about this very important area of your readers’ lives, the better you can determine the type of articles that they just cannot resist reading.
10. Politics
Often advised as an area to steer clear of, this is a very important determinant of people’s social attitudes. If this knowledge goes no further than showing which areas to avoid it would be useful.
11. Other Factors
There are other things that cannot so easily be categorized as the items listed above but they will usually be obvious and part of your mental ‘reader profile’. For example, a newsletter for members of an association that gives support for victims of violent crime may require a specific viewpoint that can only come from close involvement with the group.
Final
These are just a few ideas on getting to know your readers as a guide to improving newsletter content. Another consideration worth mentioning at this point is whether you should include, or plan to include, advertisements in your newsletter.
If so, the information discussed above could prove invaluable. It can point you in the direction of potential advertisers as well as being precisely the sort of data that some advertisers will want to consider in their appraisal.