Tips for Writing and Implementing Newsletters or Ezines

Writing an online newsletter or ezine may seem like a daunting task at the beginning. After all, it must be hard to come up with new and entertaining content every week or once or twice a month to keep your readers engaged, right?

Wrong!

You'd be surprised just how easy it really is to provide an online newsletter or ezine to your customer or client base, not to mention how it can boost sales, brand you as an expert in your field, and engender customer loyalty.

Below, you will find five tips to help you develop and write a company newsletter or ezine, and how you can effectively use that newsletter to help you increase sales, increase your customer base, and help build trust.

Tip #1 - Decide what your newsletter will be about.

The first thing you want in your newsletter is always a short description of your company and to identify who you are, information about your company, and how to contact your company. After all, what good is a newsletter or ezine if no one knows who it's from?

After that, you should select the style and information in your newsletter or ezine. A newsletter or ezine should provide your clients, customer base and potential customers with tidbits of useful and free information. You want to 'give them something' for nothing, and then you will perform a call to action to get them to want more and pay for it!

If you provide a professional service, you can give hints and tips in your newsletter. If the newsletter is weekly, one of your feature stories can be "Top Tip of the Week". For example, if you are a plumbing company, you can provide a newsletter that discusses how to do minor repairs to plumbing, such as "How to Unstop a Toilet" or "How to Check for Leaks". The tip of the day is a good way to give information useful to the potential customer, but then you can do a call to action.

Using the same plumbing example, you can give the tips for checking for leaks, and then give a link to your website in case the customer finds a leak during their check and needs to hire a plumber to repair it.

If you have a product sales site, consumer product reviews and testimonials are another great thing to include in your newsletter. In fact, you could even compare your product to a competitor's product and show why the customer should choose yours instead.

Tip #2 - Top Ten Lists get reader's interest.

For some reason, it has been proven that people like Top Ten Lists. So if you run an online website, you can do a new top ten list in every newsletter you provide about a different aspect of your topic. For a professional editing company, you can do a Top Ten Grammar Mistakes list, and then the call to action could be, "If you find any of these mistakes in your writing, contact our agency to help you!" For a sales site, you can do top ten lists for various product types, like "Top Ten Best Sportswear Product This Week".

Tip #3 - Checklists that help customers determine a need.

If you provide a service or a product that can help a customer or repair something, a quick checklist that a customer can use to determine if they have a need for your service or product can be a powerful motivator for converting sales.

Tip #4 - Personal stories help your customers see your product or service in action.

Testimonials are great, but if you can get a customer to give you a short personal story of how your product or service improved their life, changed something, provided for a need, etc, and can share that story, this is an excellent way to humanize your product and service.

You can even offer this as a two part story - at the beginning of your newsletter, you present the personal story by introducing the customer's problem, tell the reader you will continue the story at the end of the newsletter, or call to action to have the customer click on a link to read the solution you or your product provided to the problem. If you start the story in the beginning of the newsletter, but finish it at the end of the newsletter, you are enticing the reader of the newsletter to at the very least scan through everything in the middle. If provide a link to your website, you entice the reader to come and visit, to take action, and once on your website, you can use other tools to convert a sale.

Tip #5 - Something entertaining that the reader might like, even if it's not entirely related to your website.

Consumers like short jokes (that are not offensive), quick quotes, informational blurbs, and other fun stuff. Adding a couple of these things to your newsletter or ezine can help keep your reader entertained and have them continue reading the rest of the content.

Readers also seem to be drawn to statistics and facts, so if you can find some pertinent to your products or services, especially ones that can help you establish a call to action for your customer, then by all means include them.

Internet users also like to be interactive, so you might consider doing a poll that requires the reader to visit your website, and then you can promise the results to the poll in an upcoming newsletter - which will cause the reader to look forward to the next installment.

Newsletters don't have to be long, and in fact, short and to the point, informational, and entertaining are much preferred to sending your customer a novel. Choose three to five 'sections' for your newsletter or ezine, and keep each section under two paragraphs.

Remember, a call to action is something that requires your newsletter or ezine reader to DO something, such as click on a link, send an email, vote in a poll, submit a comment or suggestion for improvement, make them feel that they are an important part of your business. Doing these things not only gets the reader involved in your newsletter, but brings them back to your site over and over again, so that the next time they find themselves in need of your particular service or product, they will remember your company.