Does Your Newsletter SUCK?
September 28th, 2007 by Dominic Canterbury
A good newsletter can be a powerful marketing tool. But if you’re like most businesses, your newsletter sucks and you don’t even know it.
Here are some sure-fire ways to know if yours is one of the sucky ones:
- It’s filled with canned information from one of those newsletter services: Even if the articles are great, the reader isn’t going to assume that you even read them, let alone understood them.
- It’s purpose is “Just to remind people we’re there”: That’s just spam, people.
- You send out information that has nothing to do with your business: I’m sorry, but if you’re not in the food service industry, sending recipes is pointless. Same goes for Farmers Market calendars. If they wanted that they’d get it on the dang internet.
- You wrote it but all you do is talk about all the reasons people should hire you: That’s just a sales pitch, and PEOPLE HATE SALES PITCHES.
If any one of these applies to you, your newsletter truly SUCKS!
Here’s the comprehensive list of ways to make it not suck:
- Make it useful: Presumably you’re an expert in the thing you’re trying to promote, so prove it. Give your insights, advice, insider knowledge, tips, ideas, etc. Make the readers’ lives better through the gift of your expertise.
That’s it. Do that and you will suck no more.
Even good newsletters don\’t always get read: there is only so much time. But a newsletter that comes from a reliable source and has a relevant topic highlighted might even get saved to read later. And if there isn\’t too much of a time crunch it may even get read later.
I have kept my office website in spite of its shortcomings precisely because I get so much positive feedback from patients and others about the monthly newsletters. Many of the articles are brilliant. There\’s a link on my site to the current newsletter, what do you think? Email me.
I agree with most of what you say here, except one thing: I’m not in the food industry (I’m a designer/branding specialist), but recipes are part of my business, and something that I’m known for. I think that there’s a lot to be said, especially in the case of sole practitioners who are selling their personality as much as their expertise, for adding a human element to an e-mail that’s going to land in peoples’ inboxes once a month. Most of the folks I talk to about my newsletter seem to appreciate the fact that, while I share some relevant “businessy” information, I also share a bit of myself.
[…] In response to the post, Does Your Newsletter SUCK?, Dennis Didlay and Dani Nordin brought up some excellent points about the nature of sucky versus great marketing. I think though, that it all centers around one of the great marketing fallacies afflicting businesses large and small. And what might that be? It’s the belief that the more people like your marketing materials (newsletters, ads, taglines, etc), the more they’ll want to give you money. […]