Remember the ol’ 80/20 Rule that says 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its customers? Well since this is true for most companies, I find it odd that many entrepreneurs focus on and spend the majority of their marketing time and resources always trying to acquire new customers, much of the time to the neglect of their current customers (the ones generating the profit!).

That makes no sense. It’s much easier and quicker to sell more to your current customers than it is to acquire and sell to new ones. Look, you already have established relationships with your current customers because they’ve already purchased from you! This is a huge marketing advantage.

Communicating with your current customers with a monthly newsletter helps you stay top-of-mind. Your newsletter arrives and instantly your customers are thinking about you and after receiving your newsletter on a consistent basis, your customers actually begin to look forward to receiving it—it’s a welcomed friend—and they are curious to see what tips you are sharing with them this issue. Issue after issue, your newsletter reinforces your relationship with your customers. It makes your fence stronger. It also gives you a way to tell current customers about products and services you provide that they may not know about.

Learn more about newsletter design in my book, The Magic of Newsletter Marketing – The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life available at Amazon and my Web site.

If you’d like to discover the best ‘Done-for-You’ newsletter program ever, check out my No Hassle Newsletter program. With No Hassle Newsletters you can complete your monthly newsletter in about 23 minutes or less! Go to www.nohasslenewsletters.com.

Publishing a customer newsletter is one of the smartest ways to grow a business. Yet, few give real thought as to the importance of newsletter design. Newsletter writing is critically important yet without proper design, your newsletter may not get read! In this article I’m going to discuss the largest and perhaps most important part of design.

The masthead is the major graphic element at the top of the front page of the newsletter and includes the newsletter title. The masthead should identify your company. It may say that you (your company name) “presents” the newsletter title. It may include your logo or a symbol that represents your kind of business. A spine is a good symbol for a chiropractor. A professional speaker might be represented by a microphone.

In most cases, the newsletter title you develop should not be the name of the company. It should, however, be a name that sticks in the mind, that rolls pleasantly from the tongue, and, along with your graphic of choice, easily conveys what the newsletter is about.

The tagline is at the bottom of the masthead. You can think of it as a subtitle. The newsletter title and the tagline should work together. They should tell anyone who picks up your newsletter what it’s about. It should give them a clue about the benefits of reading your newsletter. One last point. Remember the old expression, “too cute by a half.” What you think is cute and ‘clever’ may leave your readers utterly confused. Learn more about newsletter design in my book, The Magic of Newsletter Marketing – The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life available at Amazon and my Web site.

If you’d like to discover the best ‘Done-for-You’ newsletter program ever, check out my No Hassle Newsletter program. With No Hassle Newsletters you can complete your monthly newsletter in about 23 minutes or less! Go to www.nohasslenewsletters.com.

Getting your customers and prospects to actually read your newsletter requires you to follow a few important design steps. That’s right, there’s more to publishing a great newsletter than simply good writing.

If you want people to look at something in your newsletter, you should present it in a way that attracts the eye. You can see examples of each of these in our samples at the end of this chapter. You should also try looking at other print publications.

Color and contrast draw the eye. A colored element on a black and white page attracts the eye. So does a thick, black border around a text box. It isn’t absolutely necessary to produce your newsletter in color. With the proper use of shading, reverse text (white text on black background), borders and bold fonts, you can design a black and white professional newsletter.

Headlines draw the eye. Decades of newspaper reading have taught us to look for headlines. We look for them to get an idea of what to read. We scan the subheads to pick up on the key points.

Position draws the eye. Without anything else to draw it, the eye comes to rest about two thirds of the way up the page and slightly to the left of center. That’s a good place to put something interesting.

Pictures and graphics draw the eye. We love pictures. They may not be worth a thousand words, but pictures and graphics draw our attention. That may be why the captions on photographs are among the most-read parts of any publication.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, there’s more to producing an effective newsletter than simply good newsletter writing. Your newsletter design must be pleasing to the eye. You can learn more about effective newsletter design in my book, The Magic of Newsletter Marketing – The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life or by visiting No Hassle Newsletters.