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Compton Communications"An Internet Communications Agency"
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Articles
How often should you publish your Enewsletter?Posted Wednesday, February 23, 2005 Every consultant that works on newsletters gets the same question. I once spent 20 minutes in a marketing meeting debating what was the optimum frequency. Marketing managers, newsletter editors and readers are all concerned with the frequency issue. Too frequent and the reader opts out. Not frequent enough and there is too much to cover. My standard answer is “that depends.” You might phone your mother once a month, but you probably phone your spouse every night when on a business trip. Enewsletter frequency depends on two factors, sustainability and relationship. Sustainability is the amount of news, articles and events that you have available to present to readers. For example, if your company only has a news release every two months and new product release every six months, it may be difficult to support a monthly news publication like a monthly enewsletter. If your company currently prints a paper newsletter each monthly, issue resolved. But relationship may be the most important factor. Michael J. Katz in “Enewsletters that Work” notes that “relationship happens in real time, and for your newsletter to be fresh, it needs to be written that way as well. Storing up articles in order to make publication deadlines is not the answer. Topics should reflect your business activities and information of interest to your enewsletter readers. Newsletters and Enewsletters in the marketing arena are primarily designed to maintain and enhance relationship. If you sell software, an enewsletter should let customers know when updates or enhancement are available. In today’s security-conscious world, the enewsletter should also inform users about critical updates and patches to software. Sustainability is also tied to news sources. If your enewsletter is to have a special style or niche such as covering a certain industry issue, you may be able to use more general news sources to add to your content. Be aware however, that supplying general news may dilute your newsletter and the value of the relationship. Be selective in the use of other news sources or general articles. My own experience is that a monthly newsletter or enewsletter works well for most customer relationship marketing. Part of deciding on frequency is to know what you intend to put into the newsletter and how often that information may be available. Product launches, tradeshows, employee recognition, reseller summaries are updates that may only be available quarterly or annually. Newsletter editors also depend on a good supply of feature materials that have to be produced on a schedule for publication. When I produced a biweekly enewsletter, I had an editorial calendar built on a variety of topics the company wanted to cover in the industry. I also relied on freelance writers to produce the features on schedule. Employee derived articles required more rewrites and were seldom completed on schedule. Freelancers were much more reliable. I also counsel against publishing news releases via enewsletters. Have publication schedules depend on news releases will often frustrate. And you will likely need to have the news release on the Web site or generally released before it can be included in the newsletter or enewsletter. Got an anecdote on producing your enewsletter -- Send it to Email to Enewsletters or info@comptond.com Do in deciding frequency for the newsletter let the reader relationship drive the train and then worry about the content needed to sustain the effort. |