A New Year is a great opportunity for businesses to tell their clients that they are thinking of them… but what about the rest of the year?

Well how about making a New Year resolution to send a regular newsletter?

It is one of the most effective ways of staying in touch with your customers, building strong and sustainable relationships with them, getting them to buy from you, and generating lasting loyalty so that they keep coming back. Without this regular form of personal communication, you could risk losing them altogether.

Unlike the hard sell of advertising and direct marketing, a printed newsletter is a publication for your customers to read at leisure and respond to without pressure. It has a greater shelf life than the dozens of flyers and leaflets they receive every day.

You need to:

• Deliver useful information in a simple format readers can recognise issue after issue.
• Convey information and offers of genuine interest and value to recipients.
• Communicate in warm, casual language that matches the tone of your business and brand.
• Present short items rather than long articles few recipients will read.
• Give recipients time-specific reasons to visit your business or website.
• Maintain a consistent schedule that matches your customers’ interest in hearing from your business.
• Include promo codes, coupons or offers that allow you to track newsletter response rates.

If you do it properly, your clients will soon view you as a specialist in your field whom they can trust and recommend to others. Over time your newsletter helps develop a kind of community between you and your customers where you are able to demonstrate your expertise and showcase your successes, reinforcing your position in the marketplace, your brand and its values and most importantly your customers’ trust in what you can achieve for them. It also allows you to highlight your customers’ successes and provide positive exposure for them too.

From your newsletter, a whole host of other communications can flow; you can supplement it with an e-newsletter, you can direct customers to your website and blog from it, tweet about the content, link it to your Facebook page and other social media, encouraging direct feedback from all those you share it with. It keeps the conversation flowing just a little longer and reminds your customers that you are out there.

You may already be producing a printed newsletter but not getting the results you need. Perhaps now is the time for a redesign to improve its quality and look, rejuvenate interest from existing customers and generate new ones. Or you may not have the time to produce one at all, which is where we can help. Our design and copywriting skills ensure the newsletters we produce on behalf of our clients get results. Take a look at what one of our clients has to say about our service on the back of this letter…

All you need do is supply the raw copy and images and we’ll do the rest.