Most newsletters aren’t started because companies have a lot of great content just lying around and need a way to deliver it to their customers and prospects. Most newsletters are started because companies want to communicate with their customers and prospects. Usually it’s an easy decision: OK, we’ll start a newsletter. Done.
Now, what are you going to put in it?
You need some good content. But what is good content? Where does it come from? What makes some content good and other content bad? What you want is a newsletter filled with useful, interesting, well-written material your readers will read and remember and thank you for. But how do you come up with that content?
The best way to start is the same way you’d strike up a conversation with someone you’ve just met at a party. You shake hands and try out conversational topics based on connections – what the two of you have in common.
Your company has two major connections to its clients. One is obvious – the products or services you sell them. The other is not so obvious. It’s the relationship between your company and your customers – the contacts and communication that flow back and forth. These contacts come from a variety of sources within the company – there are marketing contacts, sales contacts, service and support contacts. The result is a diamond:
The diamond is where you’ll find good content for your newsletter. Good content will always draw as short a connection as possible between the Customer and one of the other three points on the diamond
- Product, Relationship, or Company. Good content for your newsletter lies within the diamond: A customer "how-to" success story would fall into the upper left, the area that connects Product to Customer. The announcement of a new sales office would be in the lower right, farther away from the Customer. Notice some things:
Customer is at the top. You may have started your newsletter for marketing reasons, but it’s not about you. The newsletter has to be all about the customer. That doesn’t mean the subject of every article has be a customer. It means that the content of your newsletter is a mirror, and your customers must be able to see themselves reflected in it. If they can’t they won’t read it. (This may mean you need to segment the audience for your newsletter to make it as relevant as possible – publish one version for corporate customers, another for small businesses, for example.)
Product is a major focus of your connection to your customers. It's what you have in common -- you make it, they buy it. It represents shared experience. But be careful. Relationship may be just as important a factor to satisfied customers as the product is -- and just as important for a newsletter to use as subject matter.
Product and Relationship are closer to the Customer than the Company is. Unless your newsletter is aimed at investors, your readers are going to be more interested in news about the product and the relationship than news about the company. Which article do you think would be better read, “Smith Named CFO of WidgetCorp." or "New Order-Tracking System at WidgetCorp. Helps Customers Cut Inventory Costs"?
Remember, too: this is the newsletter diamond. If you call what you’re sending out a "newsletter" you’re making two promises to your readers right off the bat:
First, that the publication will be a "letter," a brief, personalized communication that covers a variety of topics within the limits of as many words as will fit on a couple of sheets of paper. Long is wrong because it wastes readers’ time.
And second, that the content will be "news," information the readers will find novel and relevant. Your marketing materials are unlikely to be news to your customers, and if you use your newsletter merely to recycle your marketing messages you’re breaking your promise and your readers will stop reading.
Don't compulsively dump every marketing message into every piece of communication. Your communication with your customer becomes all theme and no variations, all about you and not about the customer. It's boring, and pretty soon it's just background noise nobody hears anymore. Good content matches message to medium, and both of those to the audience. A newsletter article can embody a marketing message, imply it, illustrate it. It shouldn't state it. Newsletters are "news you can use," not advertising you don't need.
Cover All Four Points of the Diamond
How do you tell the difference? Use the diamond to test your content ideas. What’s wrong with an article headlined "Barbeque Safely This Summer"? Almost everything. Unless your company makes barbeques or fire extinguishers the topic is probably way outside the diamond – it has nothing to do with the connections between you and your readers and so it sounds like filler. Then how about "Widget User Tom Smith Dives for Sunken Treasure"? It’s got a customer angle, and that shows you’re thinking, but where’s the connection to Product, Relationship or Company? Sorry.
Use the diamond, too, to test the balance of your newsletter content. Just like planning a menu to include all the major food groups, you should plan your newsletter issues to include all the major content groups: articles that touch on topics related to Customer, Product, Relationship and Company.
And finally, use the diamond to check the viewpoint of your articles. Does "WidgetCorp Builds 5-Acre Warehouse in Iowa" belong your newsletter? It sounds like good news, but it depends on who the news is good for. If the headline that best sums up the story is "Iowa Warehouse Will Save WidgetCorp Millions" then the article doesn’t belong. But if you can print "Iowa Warehouse Will Speed Deliveries to Midwestern Customers" then you’ve got a strong customer connection -- and good content for your newsletter.
David DeJean is a marketing communications specialist who works with corporate clients to plan, develop and produce white papers, technical pieces, magazine articles, Web sites, and, yes, newsletters. Email him at ddejean@dejean.com.
