Good News, Bad News…

If you’re one of our clients who has been reading the newsletter on a regular basis, you may be wondering why you haven’t received one in the last few weeks. The good news is we have been too busy to get it done. The bad news is we have been too busy to get it done. The newsletter is generating so much business that we don’t have time to get it out. Sound familiar?

In the past twenty-five years, I can’t remember how many clients took our advice and decided to create a regular newsletter then quit within six months. We made it really easy for them. All they had to do was get us the content and we would write, design and distribute it. For the first few months everything would go seamlessly. The client would be thrilled with the feedback and increased business. Then they, too, got too busy to get us the content on time. They would be so late that they would skip a month. Before long, the newsletter was discontinued because it became a source of tension and stress.  Business slowed down. Now, I can empathize with all the clients who knew their newsletter was working but became too busy to continue producing it. The irony is that we are too busy doing our clients’ newsletters to write our own!

So what is the lesson you can take away from our own experience?

• Newsletters are part of our core business so we should know better than to stop doing them when they are working so well. Think about your own business. What marketing tools have you let lapse because you didn’t have the time or money to continue? We believe that out of sight isn’t out of mind, it’s out of business. Staying in front of your customers is the single most important thing you must do regardless of how much time or money with which you have to work.
• Successful newsletters show that you are an expert in your field and you are knowledgeable about your customers’ current and long term goals. In other words, it gives them a reason to trust you to be at the cutting edge of your profession.
• Newsletters work best if the content is both useful and interesting. It should never be an advertisement in a newsletter format. In fact, it doesn’t even have to sell your business directly. Bonnie Raitt says it best when she sings, “Let’s give them something to talk about…”
• The most successful businesses know when to outsource services that fall outside of their core competence. They understand that when it comes to advertising and marketing, subtle differences in design, layout, copy and distribution can make significant differences in response rates.
• There are lots of cost effective ways of keeping out in front of your competition including blast emails and targeted direct mail. Mix up promotional advertising with testimonial campaigns, case studies featuring current success stories, announcements of new clients and recently completed projects, and of course, really good newsletters.