How to start a Newsletter
Company newsletters are an excellent portal to connect with your client base. Monthly, quarterly or on any delivery schedule, satisfy your audience with a newsletter that will be read and saved far longer than any email.
Starting a newsletter is easy, keeping it populated with engaging content is the challenge, (I’ll address that further down). I recommend purchasing a subscription to a newsletter template, we use Marketing Ideas for Printers. It provides a clean, easy to read and edit platform that exports to any print file format. “Google” newsletter templates, and a plethora of available templates will appear.
“You always get what you pay for!”
I never recommend free templates.
We like Marketing Ideas for Printers, they provide print related content with enriching insights, and thought provoking articles. We can easily add our original copy and images to replace the stock data. I believe a quality newsletter template should have no more than half stock content.
Areas we control in our newsletter:
- Cover: original art creates the theme of the newsletter
- Employee Spotlight: place a face with a name and increase customer assurance
- Holiday: an interesting insight into holidays: officeholidays.com
- Community: give back to your community, it demonstrates good will
- Center Spread: featured product/service in the newsletter
- Full-page: single page product/service feature
- 5 Fun Facts: interesting facts from the publication
- Customer Spotlight: nothing says “we appreciate your business” like seeing your business in print
CONTENT
Content is the key ingredient to a successful newsletter. Good copy will get read, impressive imagery starts the reading. Every marketing department needs a qualified copywriter; this person creates the copy, checks the spelling and grammar
and writes articles that are easy to read and informative. I write in Microsoft Word and use Ginger as an additional spelling and grammar checker. We also employ a part-time English professor to proof our newsletters.
Copy can come from previously posted blogs, press-releases and your company website, other sources can provide quality content for holidays and spotlights.
Always accredit the source for data used
from 3rd party websites.
LAYOUT, PRINT, BINDING & FULFILLMENT
- We have a print designer: Tish McClanahan is proficient in design, layout, and typography, specifically for printed publications. Understanding print design is not typical for most graphic artists, it’s a unique branch of graphic design.
- Once your newsletter is proof approved, it’s ready for print. The number of newsletters printed determines how to print; 1000 or less copies are most cost effectively printed on a digital printer, 1000 or more are best printed on a sheet-fed press.
- Binding options include stitching, paste bound, tri-fold, tape-bound or perfect-bound. This is dictated by the number of pages and the quality of the newsletter. We recently switched to paste-bound for our newsletter, and our postal carrier loves us for it.
- Newsletter fulfillment places your work in the hands of your readers. If you click on the paste-bound link above, you will read why postal workers loathe staples in newsletters, magazines and booklets. Our fulfillment services are designed to cater to your readers and the postal workers.
“Print never died, the Internet did not kill it. Print will never go away!”
Quality content on an engaging platform will keep your readers asking for more.
Call us for a quote on your next newsletter, booklet, magazine or any commercially printed project. We strive to be competitive and always provide the best customer service.
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