In a recent meeting, one of our new clients said, “You know why we came to you, don’t you? We kept getting your newsletter every month, and it was filled with interesting articles. So, when we had this project, yours was the first name we thought of.”

A year after launching our company’s first e-newsletter, we’re happy to say we’ve received a variation of the above comments a number of times. The IMA e-mail newsletter was a commitment of time, money and creativity. But it has more than paid for itself on all three counts, and has become one of our most effective marketing initiatives.
 
Can an e-mail newsletter work for your company? Our experience, and the experience of an eclectic array of IMA customers – from performing arts companies to manufacturers, from unions to health-related non-profits – suggests that it can. "Our newsletter gives the Sussman Lifestyle Group expert status in the industry," said Charles Monteverdi, whose company manufactures steambaths and saunas for commercial and residential use. “There is no doubt that it helps us compete.”

Of course, before you embark on an e-mail newsletter initiative, you’d do well to go to school on those before you. So we would like to offer these lessons learned:
 
1. Make it more than a company brochure. If you expect people to read your newsletter each month, you have to make it worthwhile. Your open rates will suffer if your receivers don’t find anything new and interesting in it. So go light on the self-promotion, and heavy on valuable analysis, research, trends, and tips.

2. Plan it well in advance. The commitment to publish a timely, quality e-newsletter requires planning. Create an article schedule months in advance. Prepare and set aside “evergreen” articles that you can use in a pinch. And enlist a number of people in your company to write articles on their perspective of the industry you are in.

3. Collect e-mail addresses assiduously. Four years into the new millennium, we are still shocked to find how few companies attach e-mail addresses to all of their company contacts – customers, prospects, vendors, partners, etc. Those e-mail addresses provide you with the least expensive, most trackable, most timely and most powerful way to communicate with an audience.

4. Use a quality tool. We, and many of our clients, have adopted the IMN e-newsletter tool. It has great advantages over less-expensive solutions in content management, list management, and tracking and reporting. If you’re putting in the effort, you owe it to yourself and your customers to deliver the kind of quality product that IMN produces.

Follow these suggestions, and your experience with e-newsletters is likely to be as positive as ours has been.