Raising Visibility with Enewsletters
Raise Your Visibility with an Enewsletter
There are many ways to raise the visibility of your business or organization. One consideration is an online newsletter – or enewsletter – as it allows you to engage with your audiences and become a thought leader.
Through an enewsletter that you would send out on a regular basis – whether that’s weekly, monthly or quarterly is up to you – you can engage with clients and prospects, offer tips and resources from your industry, promote clients and showcase their news, and raise your own awareness.
Here are some suggestions for creating enewsletter content that will get noticed:
Choose topics that will be interesting to your audiences. If you know that a majority of your readers are business owners, for example, featuring news of your clients who are business owners could be useful to them. Offering tips and resources is also educational. If you are a nonprofit, share your stories of transformation and show how you give back to the community. We share stories of clients who we have helped in hopes it will educate and inspire others. It’s important to keep your audiences in mind at all times and to stay away from self-congratulation. Your enewsletter promotes you in a subtle way; let its main purpose be to promote your clients and educate your prospects for their greater good.
Write subject lines and headlines that capture readers’ attention. Without interesting subject lines and headlines, your enewsletter’s information isn’t likely to get read. Keep headlines short, clear and concise, but also make sure they are not so clever that they don’t make sense. To help you write headlines or brainstorm ideas, look at the covers of some of your favorite magazines, the headlines in newsletters you receive and enjoy or the headlines in the daily newspapers you read. Keep these examples in mind when writing your own newsletter. Notice what makes a headline engaging. We keep our headlines under five or six words for ease of comprehension.
Simplicity is key in keeping readers’ attention. It can be tempting to go on and on about topics you know a lot about, using everything from detailed quotes to bibliographies. This will lose your readers. We recommend you keep enewsletter items within a 100 to 150 word count. If you have the urge to write more, then blog on that topic. Blogs can be from 600 to 900 words. To help you keep things tight, use bulleted lists, and use photographs to help break up the text
Divide your content into readable sections. Your newsletter will be more appealing to readers if it has different sections for different kinds of content. You might consider sections that feature client news (such as a Client Corner) and sections that feature upcoming events you are offering as well as a section for tips and resources. Consider what sections will make sense for your readers, and keep these sections fairly consistent from issue to issue. People will rely on these sections for finding the content they are interested in. We organize our enewsletter by our service lines: Writing, Editing, Promoting and Teaching/Consulting.
Before sending, check your work — carefully. This is a critical step.Your newsletter is a representation of you and your professionalism and so should be polished and well-executed. Your readers expect you to pay the same attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation as editors from newspapers, magazines and other publications. Once your enewsletter seems complete, set it aside for 24 hours and look at it the next day with what we call “fresh eyes.” You are likely to then see mistakes you may have glossed over.
Enewsletters are an important part of your marketing and communications efforts. We highly recommend you put yours to the test.
