Publishing a company newsletter is one of the smartest marketing strategies any company can use. But there is a secret to writing newsletters that actually get read. Did you ever wonder why newsletters work so well?

Newsletters are not perceived in the same manner as a postcard, a flyer or other forms of direct mail marketing. When people receive these or anything else that has a sales and marketing feel to it, their guard goes up and they think, “Uh-oh. What are they trying to sell me?”

Newsletters tend to be informational, making them more welcomed when they are received. As such they have higher readership than other forms of advertising. People also tend to be more receptive to what you have to say in your newsletter because newsletters aren’t meant to be sales tools. Rather, they are designed to be a resource.

In one of his No B.S. Marketing Letters, Dan Kennedy put it this way, “People are conditioned to be less resistant to reading information, such as articles, than they are advertising.” Since people are conditioned to be less resistant to reading information, which is exactly what a newsletter should be, most people read a newsletter with their guards down.

A customer newsletter is the strongest marketing and business building tool available—bar none.

Newsletters open doors. That is the magic of why newsletters are such an effective marketing tool—people don’t realize they’re actually reading something that’s going to cause them to buy . . . if the newsletter is done correctly. That’s the big caveat here. And that’s what this book will help you to do. It’s the wand that will open doors and bring you customers.

I opened this post by stating that publishing a company newsletter is one of the smartest marketing strategies any company can use. But the secret to writing newsletters that actually get read is using the proper balance of content. Your newsletter must contain what I often refer to fun, entertaining, and informative content. You can learn more about this by visiting www.NoHassleNewsletters.com.  

The secret to successful newsletter publishing is writing your newsletter correctly. When I speak live I often refer to this as ‘clean writing.’

Clean writing is writing that doesn’t call attention to itself. Clean writing is free of grammatical and spelling errors. Here are some tips on how to write clean copy. If you produce a customer or company newsletter I suggest following these five tips.

1. Write more than one draft. Professional writers almost always write more than one draft. Next, sleep on it, then when you come back to a piece, it’s easier to spot errors and rough phrases. It’s easier to see how to improve your work.

2. Use your spell check, but don’t make this your only spelling and grammar check. Spell-check programs are great, and you can even use them to improve your writing over time. But they can miss important things. Spell checking programs are excellent at finding words that are spelled incorrectly. But they can’t tell if a correctly spelled word is the word you meant or if it’s the right word for the situation.

3. Here’s a tip for Microsoft Word users. There’s a feature built into the grammar checking function that can help you improve your writing. Select the option that gives you readability statistics when you check spelling and grammar. Then every spell-check will give you two helpful statistics. 1) The Flesch Reading Ease Score gives you a measure of how easy your piece is to read. You want to make this number as high as possible. 2) The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measures readability in a different way. It computes the lowest grade level that can read your piece and easily understand it. You want to get this below 10 and usually above 6 for newsletter copy. Fortunately, one of the best ways to judge the quality and readability of your writing is also one of the easiest.

4. Read your writing out loud. This is a critically important strategy. Don’t read your newsletter articles on your monitor. Instead, print them out and then read it. Even better, have someone else read your piece out loud to you. Reading aloud calls attention to every rough spot and unnatural phrasing. You’ll instantly discover that the way you talk out loud is not necessarily how you write, and your copy will swiftly improve. I suggest doing this for everything you write.

5. Get someone else to edit and proofread your articles. When we look at our own writing, we usually see what we intended to write. We’re likely to skip over phrasing problems and not spot errors in word usage, spelling, and typos. There’s an expression in the information marketing world: “Good is good enough, get it out there.” I believe that. I don’t necessarily strive for perfection. I strive for doing the best job I can.

To be honest with you, I use an outside proofing company. I can send them anything. I can send them PDFs, Word documents, whatever. For a very, very reasonable fee, two English majors read over it then send it back with their comments and suggestions. It’s very cheap. I think it’s either $9 or $11 for a page, which is 500 words, very cheap. One of the hardest things in the world is to proofread your own stuff.

Again, the secret to successful newsletter publishing is writing your newsletter correctly. The reason for this is fairly simple; the newsletters that get read are the ones that produce results.