If you have a newsletter and are regularly mailing it to your customers, clients, patients, and prospects, congratulations! You’re among the small percentage of entrepreneurs and small business owners that ‘get it’ when it comes to the amazing power of building healthy, strong, committed, dependable, and profitable relationships with their customers.

However, there is one aspect of newsletter marketing that often gets overlooked as most people are just thrilled that their newsletter actually gets done at all! But this one shift can make a huge difference in how many people actually open and read your newsletter in the first place, which as you can imagine is paramount to having it generate more revenue!

Check out my latest episode of Newsletter Guru TV, it’s called “Dependability equals Profitability” and I shot this episode while walking my pal Toby at the lake. During the first few minutes Toby let me know that he had other plans for our walk!

Click here to watch this great episode.

Publishing a monthly customer newsletter is one of the smartest things you can do to grow your business. Nothing is more effective at producing more repeat and referral business. Yet, few people give real thought as to the importance of newsletter design, specifically the name of their newsletter.

The masthead is the major graphic element at the top of the front page of a newsletter and it includes the newsletter title, or name. The masthead should identify your company or graphically let readers know what the newsletter is about. A masthead may include your logo or a symbol that represents your kind of business. For example, a spine is a good symbol for a chiropractor. A professional speaker might be represented by a microphone.

In most cases, the name of your newsletter should not be the name of the company. It should, however, be a name that’s easy to remember, that rolls pleasantly from the tongue, and, along with your graphic of choice, easily conveys what the benefit of reading your newsletter is all about.

The other part of the masthead is the tagline which usually appears at the bottom of the masthead. Think of it as a subtitle. The newsletter title and the tagline should work together. They tell anyone who picks up your newsletter what it’s about. Remember the old expression, “too cute by a half.” What you think is cute and ‘clever’ may leave your readers utterly confused.

To learn more about newsletter design and newsletter marketing strategies, get a copy of my book, The Magic of Newsletter Marketing – The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life –  available at Amazon and at www.newsletterpublishingmagic.com.

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 I give you everything you need to produce a great monthly customer newsletter in about 23 minutes or less! Go to www.nohasslenewsletters.com.

It’s a proven fact that a monthly customer newsletter can help your businesses grow. Here are seven ways a newsletter will help you market and grow your business.

# 1: Newsletters Help Keep Customers

Your current customers hold the best prospect for future growth. Plus, the longer they are customers, the more they are likely to spend with you. A monthly company newsletter helps you stay top-of-mind with your current customers. When your newsletter arrives, your customers start to think about you. Issue after issue, your newsletter reinforces your relationship with your customers and gives you a way to tell them about products and services they may not know about.

# 2: Newsletters Help Get New Customers

You want your newsletter to help you get new customers. Informative articles give your newsletter what marketing pros call “pass-along value.” Your newsletter makes it easy to pass on the information. Because people read newsletters as a publication and not a marketing piece, a newsletter is a great way to tell potential customers about your business.

# 3: Newsletters Help Build Credibility

When people read your brochure, they treat it as a piece of marketing literature. But when they read your newsletter, they read it like a publication. Your newsletter also gives you the opportunity to tell people stories about what you do and how well your products work. You can illustrate the benefits of your product or service with statistics and customer testimonials.

# 4: Newsletters Help You Stand Out from Your Competition

Since you decide the direction and content of each newsletter, you can differentiate yourself from others—especially the larger businesses who typically do not produce customer newsletters.

# 5: Newsletters Enhance Your Reputation

Your customers may not be ready or need your product or service today, but when they are, they want an experienced professional. People want to do business with someone they trust, so when they are ready for what you offer, they’ll turn to you.

# 6: Newsletters Help You Build Your Brand

Branding is the art of making people aware of who you are, what you do, and how you’re different from and better than the competition. You want to have a little bell go off in people’s heads when they hear your name. You want them to say, “Oh yes, they’re the people who . . .” When your newsletter is delivered at the same time each month, it will build up a level of importance. It will help build your brand, which will help your business grow.

# 7: Newsletters Have a Longer Shelf Life than Other Types of Marketing

Newsletters are portable; they go everywhere. Newsletters that are informative, fun, and easy to read are not thrown away. People pass along newsletters to friends, business associates, or even their neighbor. This is a huge benefit of producing a newsletter.

If you listen to some experts in customer relationship marketing they’ll tell you that good ‘old-fashioned’ printed newsletters are “back!” When it comes to tried-and-true marketing tools, those that mean evergreen profits for companies each year, printed newsletters always work. In fact, I don’t believe that printed newsletters are really experiencing a comeback at all because printed newsletters never went away!

There are a few reasons that many entrepreneurs and small-business owners don’t even like to think about printed newsletters. The first is that they think design and layout will be too expensive. Second, they feel that there will be enormous distribution and mailing costs. But the two most popular reasons people give for not producing a monthly print newsletter is that it takes too long and they don’t know what to write about.

So why are printed newsletters still so eternally effective?

• Print is still the preferred way to read larger documents.
• Print doesn’t have to compete with as much “noise” as e-mail does.
• Physical mail can be scanned quickly and the junk thrown away.
• Your customers look forward to it
• They’re not seen as just another sales solicitation
• Newsletters are an effective way to introduce new products and services
• Print newsletters are a highly-effective ‘referral’ tool

Yet another reason that the printed newsletter works well is that it shows the customer that you are successful enough to invest a little bit of money in your business in the form of a print newsletter. It adds credibility to what you say.

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