Put as simply as possible, targeted marketing means directing your promotional efforts at a specific group of potential prospects. In general, the easier it is to define the group concerned, the easier it will be to match their needs and wants with suitable products or services, as well as other things of interest to them.
In the case of email marketing, the group must, of course, have access to email. This then gives you two options. You can either try to win their confidence by adopting the stance of a friend who is emailing advice and offers with a ‘goodness of heart’ motive, or you can adopt the slightly more formal approach of an email newsletter (often nowadays referred to as an ezine). Which of the two you choose should be a matter of understanding your own personality and, dare I say it, recognizing the limitations of your own ‘person to person comfort zone’.
Email ‘Letter’ Or Email Newsletter
Choosing to communicate with your target group by means of an email ‘letter’ (in other words, on a person to person basis) is fraught with problems. In the first place, you are not, strictly speaking, a friend. Even if you address them by first name, which you should always do, they know perfectly well that the same email is being sent to hundreds, or even thousands, of others. Therein too lies one of the problems: the more successful you are the bigger your list, yet the hollower you sound to someone who knows he or she is just one of many. To make this kind of contact work you need to have a real talent for it. You need to be able to project a likeable personality through a particular style of writing that they quickly come to recognize as yours.
Communicating by newsletter, on the other hand, has far fewer drawbacks. It’s a more ‘up front’ approach without any undertones of duplicity. It can follow a much more recognizable format too where the reader knows what to expect in advance and appreciates the fact that what they are getting is more of an ‘information sheet’ than a private letter. In fact, regardless of the means of distribution (i.e. whether by email or not) newsletters are created solely for communicating with groups. That is what they are best at.
Effective Group Communication
Take the word ‘group’ out of the heading above and the subject of this section might be about any one of a whole range of competing media. For example, the telephone might be thought of as one of the most effective communication tools of all time. Then again a good argument could be put for television. Or newspapers. Or radio, or… , well, you get the idea. The point is that every form of media has its strengths and, accordingly, its proponents. But by including the word ‘group’, the field is narrowed dramatically and only one stands out way above its competitors: the newsletter. Newsletters, whether sent by email or post, or any other distribution method, are absolutely the number one tool for communicating with groups.
It doesn’t matter who comprises a group. They might be formal members of an organization large or small, or they might be seemingly disparate people who just happen to have a common interest. The key word is ‘common’. A group consists of people who have something in common. They may be customers, prospects, employees, club members, family members, etc; in fact there are an infinite number of possible groupings.
How Public Is Public?
You may be forgiven for asking why, if this is the case, newsletters are so often suggested as being ideal for public relations. Surely the term ‘public’ implies the general populace, doesn’t it? Well, er… no, actually. Put simply, what is meant by ‘public relations’, or, as it is better known, PR, is how an entity’s public, i.e. its target market or group with a common affinity, relates to your organization and your organization to it. For example, if you publish a school newsletter under the auspices of the P&C Association of the local school, your public would include all parents of children at the school, the schoolchildren themselves, the school’s teachers, neighbors of the school, other community groups you look to for assistance such as Rotary, local media, companies in your area, and so on. All these groups will have contact with, or be affected by, the activities of your association.
Largely as a result of this misunderstanding, the term public relations has often been misused. Over the years it has become incorrectly associated with propaganda (particularly for government groups) and confused with advertising. It is, admittedly, difficult to define because it encompasses such a broad range of techniques. The best all-round definition I know is ‘promoting goodwill’ for a company, government body, individual, or the like; in other words, the practice of working to present a favorable image. And certainly this is the area where newsletters, whether they are newsletter or of the ‘hard copy’ variety, excel.
What To Include
You don’t need to be an expert on how to write a newsletter to work out what needs to be included for your newsletter to be most effective. It is important to first evaluate your organization’s current image. This can be achieved by asking the following questions:
- What do people think of us?
- What would we like them to think?
- How do we get them to think well of us?
Don’t assume you know all the answers. Conduct some research and find out what people really think of your organization. Talk to representatives of your ‘public’ and ask them to assist you by giving an honest assessment of how they see the organization. You can’t improve your image if you don’t know what it is!
The Balancing Act
Finally, put together your newsletter’s content and present it in as balanced a form as possible. The issue of balance is crucial. It isn’t necessary to labor over it, though. The very act of striving for balance should, in most cases, ensure that you have it. After all, it’s not an exact science! Just try to make sure you include enough humor to offset any technical or complex material. Balance your ‘must-include’ items with fun or trivial items. Include something graphical (such as a cartoon, crossword or diagram) on pages with a lot of tight text.
The balance we are concerned with here is in terms of newsletter content. There are other issues to do with the look of your newsletter that you might want to consider, such as balancing large areas of print with a reasonable proportion of white space. Whatever you do though, avoid using numerous typefaces in the one publication. This is a common mistake among ‘newbies’.
Promoting Goodwill
Of the three questions above, the latter is the most important and therefore the one that needs most careful thought. Practically every day I see examples of newsletters that don’t pay enough heed to question 3. They read like flyers and get clicked to the trash without hesitation by most readers. A sure-fire way of losing readers is to miss the opportunity to disseminate information and promote goodwill and, instead, try to sell a product or service. A sales spiel in a newsletter (even a marketing newsletter) under the guise of editorial, will invariably have the opposite effect to that which is intended. A newsletter is not a brochure or a catalog.
The Prime Objective
For many managers and entrepreneurs this begs the question “if I can’t use our own newsletter to sell our product (or service) then what is the point of it?” They sideline newsletters altogether when they don’t get a satisfactory answer. Practical and busy people do not want to be involved in something the benefits of which are vague or difficult to quantify. If they can’t measure a practical result they start to doubt that the effort is worthwhile. Unfortunately, this thinking results from a basic misunderstanding of the role of PR in the marketing mix—to create an atmosphere of trust and goodwill. These are crucial elements in the sales process; they must exist for a sale to take place. This is precisely why newsletters are just as important a tool for organizations that sell things as they are for special interest groups, non-profits etc.
Trust
Trust comes from people knowing who they are dealing with. A regular newsletter sends a message to readers that they are dealing with a valid concern, probably with an established clientele, and in business for the long haul. Likewise, once they perceive you (or the person or organization represented by the newsletter) as an expert in your particular field they will trust your advice.
Goodwill
Goodwill is a result of doing good things and telling people about them. A newsletter is the perfect communication vehicle for this. They may be things that involve time and effort, or even money, like supporting charities or other good causes. Even the very act of publishing a newsletter can itself be a ‘good thing’ if done properly. Helping people by announcing upcoming events, reporting past events, offering free advice (such as running an ‘Ask the Expert’ column) can all be seen as offering a valuable community service that engenders goodwill.
Why Readers Read Newsletters
Once you come to terms with the fact that one of the primary purposes of a good newsletter is to promote trust and goodwill, and that, for entrepreneurial concerns, this has a positive effect on the company bottom line, you probably need to be reminded that readers read it for entirely different reasons. They want to be informed, amused and even entertained. News is an essential component of a newsletter and, since the focus of most newsletters is fairly tight, so too should be the type of news featured. A fund-raising organization’s newsletter, for example, could report how funds are used, including perhaps some personal interest stories about individuals affected by the group’s efforts, personnel involved, future plans and goals etc. Similarly, a club newsletter might have the usual types of club news (committee meetings etc) plus details of tournaments planned (if its a sports club), reminders about club rules and so on. An employee newsletter or HR newsletter would have news about retiring personnel, new people joining, company news including policy explanations, success stories like contracts won etc.
One question that is sometimes asked is “what about marketing newsletters? If I can’t sell my products or services, what do I include?” The answer is that you can, of course, promote these things in your newsletter but avoid the temptation of using editorial content to do so. It is far better to publish ‘reviews’ of your products or services in such a way that the publication itself appears to retain its independence. As regards content in general, report on your general field of expertise. In other words a hairdresser might include news about a new product range she is trialing as well as featuring supporting items on hair care, the latest hair fashions etc. A Real Estate newsletter could have news about current market trends in her area plus things like ‘How to add value to your home’, ‘The pros and cons of solar heating’ etc.
Hard News Or Soft News
Worth noting also is the value of being able to balance hard news (up-to-the-minute facts) with soft news (unusual, little-known, quirky or amusing facts such as magazines use). Plenty of soft news items, suitable for many types of newsletter, are available at LetterWell and more are being added all the time.
With hard news, try to follow the journalist’s code: what happened, where, why, how and when did it happen and who did it happen to? Many community events could be described as soft news and they can be particularly valuable in almost all locally and regionally distributed newsletters, especially when coverage can be seen as a service to the community.
In Summary
To sum up then, the primary goals of a newsletter, regardless of the type of organization publishing it, should be to:
- Promote trust and goodwill towards the principal organization on the part of the target group.
- Disseminate information to the target group about the principal organization.
This is best achieved by using a good balance of:
- Hard news.
- Soft news.
- Supporting material.