Designing Effective Newsletters
Copyright © Valerie Giles
Graphic Designer and Internet Entrepreneur
A great promotional aid is that of
Newsletters. Many businesses use newsletters to promote
their services and products as well as their brochures
and business cards.
Newsletters are a subtle form of advertising, not the
blatant "in your face" type of advertising that turns so
many people off. So are business cards.
A group of professionals that has
mastered the newsletter approach, in my opinion, are
financial planners. Many financial planners send out
regularly spaced newsletters to their clients or
prospects throughout the year. It keeps their logos,
name and face in front of the client regularly as do
their business
cards.
One of my largest clients, The Mortgage Brokers of
British Columbia, transformed their quarterly newsletters into a
quarterly magazine, with my help. It is a very successful publication. CLICK
HERE to view it.
And in fact, if a newsletter is done well, it will be seen as an
additional service from the sender, rather than an
advertisement. When the market is slow and investments
sluggish, a strategic newsletter / logo supporting the
clients decision to stay the course and follow the
financial planner's advice, will be seen as an added
service and the client will be thankful that he or she
has chosen such a dedicated professional–one who
continually keeps them abreast of the market's many
moods.
On the other side, a newsletter that
has a high advertising content in it, will not be read
with as much respect. Make sure you balance the content
of your newsletter. Our design services can help you
keep that balance.
You can keep costs down by using a
newsletter service that is available to professionals in
your area. The costs will be spread among all of you.
This allows more color and a higher quality. Pick a
service that gives prominent positioning to your
personal and your office's information. There should be
one or more areas on the pages devoted to you alone.
If you want to output your very own
newsletter, costs can be kept down if you print it in
the two colours of ink of your logo.
First, print a number of shells for several issues in
the secondary colour, and use the second colour to imprint
the number of copies that you need for a single issue.
Printing costs less this way, although it can be
restrictive as the layout must remain the same until all
the preprinted shells are used.
Many people prefer to receive their
newsletters electronically via e-mail. Print fewer
copies for those that like that version, and then output
a pdf format newsletter for your e-mail preferred
clients. Again, the costs will be reduced here.
Remember to keep your layouts simple
and easy to read, and use appropriate colour to enhance
your message, not detract from it. Pictures, logos and
graphics will add visual impact, whereas too much copy
and text will detract from your communications. Our
graphic designs always balance the copy and the visuals.
To produce a newsletter that gets
noticed, requires an understanding of good design
principles. We are skilled in these areas.
You will find that whether your
newsletters are external–for clients and customers or
internal–to promote your company message in house to
your staff members, newsletters are an invaluable tool
for many
businesses.
Contact us
NOW for a complimentary consultation.
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