10 steps to a successful customer newsletter

Companies usually plan a large part of their marketing budget to acquire new customers. Existing customers often offer much greater sales potential via cross-selling and upselling. Often, they just need a small push to buy a new or more powerful product. A customer newsletter with relevant content binds and activates existing customers in a friendly way. The prerequisite for this is a well-planned newsletter workflow, in-house research and streamlined work organization. Publicare has put together the best tips and methods from various disciplines for you:

1. Create an editorial plan

No magazine or trade journal is created just before the submission date. What appears to the reader as written yesterday is often the result of lengthy research and insider information that was known at an early stage. When creating the editorial plan for the customer newsletter, you are the editor-in-chief. Take advantage of in-house expertise, dates and release dates to write as many contributions as possible early and publish them on time.

A newsletter editorial plan helps to avoid hectic hauruck campaigns. Based on the deadline in the editorial plan, the latest start date for research and production can be found quickly.

The editorial plan also makes your newsletter more varied. This is because a clear grouping of send dates makes it easy to distribute the topics covered. If a topic is too extensive for a single article, you can divide it up and run as a series of articles parallel to new topics. A reason for those interested to read the next newsletter as well.

What to do if there is absolutely no relevant news to be found by the submission date? Resist the urge to fill the sour cucumber season with irrelevant items and keep it “slim” or postpone the next send date. In general, the motto “relevance over continuity” applies to email marketing campaigns. Your readers will thank you for it.

A service provider can also do the research for relevant topics. Monitoring and competition monitoring can also be outsourced.

2. Gather information from various areas of the company

Many companies transfer responsibility for customer communication to the PR or marketing department. Their proximity to advertising and experience in targeted media communication makes these departments appear predestined.

Unfortunately, marketing often only fishes in nearby ponds: in the news from the product marketing, channel marketing, partner marketing and, of course, company management departments. The result is the same stories that marketing also tells in press releases: What has changed in the Executive Board, which benefit campaign was initiated, where did the managing director give a speech.

Topics that meet the practical interests of customers remain unmentioned. Why not discuss the top topics in first-level support to strengthen customer loyalty? Or let product developers have their say with helpful workarounds?

When looking for relevant information, think outside the box and — more importantly — behind all department doors.

Which of these departments does your customer newsletter report regularly from?

• marketing and advertising
• public relations
• management
• Sales
• Product marketing and management
• Product development
• production
• materials management
• human resources
• bookkeeping
• Support
• Services
• training
• unfolding

3. Make formats varied

With “You shall not be bored,” Billy Wilder formulated a rule that ultimately applies to all media. Not boring means, for example, varying text types and message types. If you expand the news sources to include further departments, as explained in Section 2, a varied mix of content is self-evident. Some content is particularly suitable for a specific communication goal.

Classic newsletter content produced by marketing departments should impress and emphasize professionalism:

• personal details
• Company figures
• User stories
• New product reports
• Reports on new partnerships

Cross-selling and upselling potential — and thus significant additional revenue — is tapped by existing customers with:

• New training announcements
• Product add-ons
• Product upgrades
• Trade-in sales promotions (“old versus new”)
• Support offerings
• Product-related services

Content such as:

• Event information (internal and well-known trade fairs and conferences)
• Workarounds and troubleshooting tips
• New retailers
• New prices
• News from the development department

The customer newsletter should be dominated by short text formats. After all, customers have little time to read. Sometimes you can intersperse a bit longer lunch break reading.

4. Compile relevant content

Newsletter contributions that add value to the reader are read. At the same time, your company should also benefit from every contribution. Consider which information strengthens customer loyalty and which improves cross-selling and upselling. Are there new products or findings that make everyday life easier for customers and perhaps even increase efficiency or turnover? While building a new work is an important thing for the company itself, it is more of an interesting side note for the reader. However, if it is possible to convey to him that this results in significant advantages such as shorter production times or more favourable price structures, this information remains in his head.

Personalized newsletters are another way to increase relevance. Modern email marketing systems support the selective allocation of newsletter contributions to distribution segments. Some contributions are leaked to all customers. Other content, for example, is only intended for recipients with a technical background, while others are only delivered to buyers of certain products. The source of customer characteristics such as job and purchase history already exists in most companies: the CRM system and other databases.

5. Newsroom instead of compulsory writing

Press releases and the relevant trade press now and then report on newsletters and blogs maintained by intrinsically motivated employees from production, product development or administration. Only rarely does anyone explain what financial outlay was necessary to motivate and train employees to write contributions. In addition, there is sometimes little willingness to write, due to the heavy workload or the job description of the employees. Quite apart from that, you can't expect the manual skills required for informative writing from every employee. Sooner or later, most content projects fail, in which employees are persuaded or even forced to write texts in addition to their regular work.

Creating the newsletter is a service function that should burden employees as little as possible. Good results can be achieved with a conservative but calculable solution: a team of internal or external editors who — similar to department heads in a newsroom — are responsible for individual areas of the company and keep track of all topics together.

What is a newsroom?

The first newsroom was created in Philadelphia in fall 1994. They broke down the fixed departmental boundaries and placed the editors-in-chief of all departments in a large office. In this way, synergies were achieved and departmental thinking was broken up. Of course, you don't need any spatial restructuring to create a successful customer newsletter. Rethinking and sometimes changing responsibilities is enough.

6. Fish in the internal flow of information

Information and stories outside of traditional marketing sources increase the success of the newsletter. But how do newsletter editors become aware of circulating specialist information? Our tip: In every company, there is a constant flow of information — explicitly, in documents, email distribution lists, social media and news feeds, and implicitly, in the form of fleeting conversations, thoughts and ideas. It can be fished efficiently in the flow of explicit information. When searching intranets, extranets, and meeting minutes, you'll always find something.

Asking every employee about implicit knowledge may be useful as a personnel policy tool; it is too inefficient for a regularly published newsletter. Instead, an experienced employee can be appointed as the person responsible. He acts as a point of contact for questions and as an angler for difficult to understand information.

7. Gather knowledge with the microphone

We have a practical tip for acquiring knowledge: consider the conversation with colleagues as an interview and record it. This means that the supplier of important content does not have to write summaries or even entire articles and the editor can concentrate completely on the conversation. In dialogue, it is often easier to identify the relevant core and common thread and to make a round story out of what has been told. An experienced interviewer also steers the conversation and prevents digressions. Through the interviewer's external perspective and specific questions, the interviewee often discovers aspects that he would not have become aware of when writing alone.

8. Avoid commercial talk

Advertising talk is even less in demand when dealing with existing customers than in acquiring new customers steeped in content marketing.

Existing customers know the products and services and don't have to be convinced verbally. Instead, factually explained facts include call-to-action, which enable the customer to take action.

9. Keep decision-making processes short

At the latest when it comes to assessing the relevance of reports, grassroots democracy and a culture of consensus must be over. Otherwise, there is a risk of endless discussions and overcrowded and therefore largely irrelevant customer newsletters. Because in large groups, there is always someone who regards every message as relevant for every sub-target group or who absolutely wants to disseminate every news from their department.

Of course, representatives from the marketing department and/or corporate management should be involved in the decision-making process — they can best assess corporate policy reasons for or against publishing a report.

10. Enforce submission deadlines

In the first section, we mentioned the guiding principle of “relevance before continuity” — and now we plead for strict compliance with deadlines? Is that not contradictory?

Relevance is also decisive here. It is correct to postpone or omit a sending date if there is no relevant newsletter content. However, deadlines are often postponed because there is a prospect of even more relevant content. A story that came in very recently or released late could make the customer newsletter even better.

The fact is, however, that sometimes entire quarters pass before the newsletter is finally ready. Out of well-meaning perfectionism or too much consideration, it is far too long and, with a bit of bad luck, is deleted from the cold contacts. In the case of multilingual newsletters, concessions also result in expensive denomination into several individual texts. Project managers should therefore communicate clearly and bindingly from the outset that the customer newsletter will only contain messages that are complete by the agreed submission date.

What's next?

The editorial plan has been drawn up, exciting topics have been found, researched and processed into great contributions. Now you can start sending, right?

In our article, we described the way to the right mix of content for a customer newsletter. However, before the content can be sent to all customers, a few more decisions and steps are necessary.

• Who releases the newsletter before it is sent?
• “Has the design for the newsletter been decided?
• Which ESP should the newsletter be sent via?
• Who is testing the newsletter?
• Is the list complete? Who is responsible for list management?
• How is success measured? Who does the reporting?
• When customers react, who is responsible for managing the response?”

In the graphic below, you can see the complete workflow required to create a multilingual customer newsletter.

We are happy to assist you in all phases of your newsletter creation. Contact us via our contact form and let's get in touch!