Jump Start with a Marketing Plan – 29th July 2009
Every newsletter is published with the hope of generating a flood of responses. But before you can achieve your dreams, you must first set up your marketing goals.
These goals will give you the direction you need when choosing newsletter format, newsletter content, newsletter design, mailing lists and other elements. This chapter shows you how to set specific goals that can be achieved within the pages or screens of your newsletter. It also shows you how to streamline the promotional efforts of your newsletter with your other marketing projects.
Set Performance Goals
- In general, all marketing materials seek to:
- Increase awareness of the organisation
- Sell products, services, ideas and causes
- Maintain contact with clients, members, volunteers, employees or supporters
- Contact prospects
- Reinforce other advertising campaigns
Your newsletter’s goals may encompass the general ones listed above, but they also include specific goals unique to your newsletter. You may be trying to maintain or increase membership of your association. Perhaps you’re lobbying an issue to legislators or community leaders. If you provide a service, such as accounting, you may be trying to find clients fitting a certain profile.
If your newsletter is being used to promote your existing products and services. Include your existing support base in your promotional goals, so that jobs from current clients continue to come in while you’re converting other prospects.
Many publishers think only of existing supporters and exclude prospects. In fact, some organisations send newsletters only to their current donors and volunteers. But your news should also be sent to community members who are not already supporting the organisation.
Think about your specific goals. Why are you interested in publishing a newsletter? What do you expect it to do for you?
What Every Editor Must Know
A newsletter’s objective is stated in its mission statement or statement of purpose. The editor must know of the following:
- What direction(s) are we expanding into?
- What are our long term goals?
- How do we currently reach customers and clients?
- How do customers and clients want to be reached?
- Why do customers buy?
- What is the average time to make a sale?
- How well are we known in the market?
- What are we selling?
- How are we different from competitors?
The answer to these questions ultimately leads to the:
- Newsletter name
- Tagline
- Content
- Response mechanisms
- Layout decisions
- Distribution methods
It’s important that the goals of your newsletter be in line with your organisation’s current short-term and long-term plans.
Determining Your Promotional Level
Let’s look further at the specific ways your newsletter helps you achieve your promotional goals. The NEWS promotional levels help determines which newsletter elements to use to achieve your goals. For example, if you want to tell prospects about a new service, you’d do one or all of the following:
Name: place a teaser on the mailing panel
Enticement: show the product in a photograph along with a caption
Written Words: detail the features of the product in an article
Sell: include a unique Web site link for requesting information about the new product
Your choice depends on the promotional level of your newsletter. In general, most newsletters promote at all of the levels. One recipient may only look at the subject line or your e-mail and then delete it. Another reader may read it from cover to cover and then call you for more information.
Concentrate on the promotional levels you need to achieve the goals for your newsletter. If an image newsletter is right for you, you should pay special attention to image techniques. However, that doesn’t mean you should provide any specifics or ways to respond. A response mechanisms can be as basic as listing your phone number, Web site address and store hours or as elaborate as a postage-paid reply card offering a gift to respondents.
To determine which level to use, look closely at how the following factors relate to your organisation. The NEWS promotional levels are used in a variety of ways depending on:
- How well you’re known
- The complexity of what you’re promoting
- Why people enlist your services or support your cause
Let’s examine these factors.
How Well do Readers Know You?
Look at the average characteristics of your targeted readers. The mix of customers and prospects tells you how well you are known. Your existing customer should recognize your name, as should some of your prospects. But not everyone knows you. It depends on how long you’ve been around and how active you’ve been at promoting yourself in the past.
Well-established organisations worry little about name recognitions. Industry leaders like IBM can assume most of their prospects have heard of them. They are more concerned with image and distributing information.
Newcomers, however, face a different challenge. Not only do they have gain name recognition, they often must work within a small budget. Newcomers usually give the most attention to name recognition and image techniques, because their reader base consists primarily of prospects.
Reflect Your Marketing Strategy
Every printed piece produced by Animal Attractions targets people who treat their pets as family and spend as much on them as the average parent spends on a child. The “where pets are people too” slogan is reflected in the logo design, in the newsletter name and throughout the operation.
The newsletter content continues this theme. A past article, “A Day in a Dog’s Life at Animal Attractions,” used a timeline structure to explain how dogs spend the day when they are dropped off to be groomed, (After all, any parent with children in day care knows what it’s like to worry about them.)
Raining Cats & Dogs
The company’s fine-tuned marketing efforts have paid off. The business made a profit within a few months of opening its doors and had continued to grow over the last three years.
The newsletter keeps new clients coming in. “It’s being passed along to friends and relatives.” says owner Regina Huggins. “We keep these pass-along readers in mind and include a location map and squeeze in contact information whenever possible.”
In addition, brochures are inserted into each newsletter that lists the complete grooming services.
What You’re Promoting
The more complex the product, the more information people need before they can buy. As a general rule, newsletters offering content are good for any organisation that has to educate buyers and supporters in order to promote its products and services. Enticement newsletters are ideal for simple products and service. But sometimes, there’ more to the puzzle. Other pieces include competition and the rate of change within your organisation.
Enticement newsletters are valuable for products and services with little competition. Often, winning a supporter is just a matter of letting prospects know you have the product or service they need.
Writing and content-rich newsletters are ideal for industries with rapid changes and scarce information. By providing prospects with needed information, organisations can differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Image-building enticement newsletters are often shorter and easier to write. Because they don’t have to provide as much information as content-heavy newsletters, they contain less text and more graphics. You can usually publish an enticement newsletter at a lower cost.
Some products and services can be sold through enticement alone, while others have to go through the longer process of explaining specific information to prospects.
How Long It Takes to Close a Sale
The complexity and price of your products usually determines the average time it takes to convert a prospect to a customer. Usually, the more expensive and complex the product and long term the relationship, the longer it takes your prospect to make a purchasing decision.
For expensive products, most people need more time. They want to see the product demonstrated, spend time on your Website, take a brochure home and study it, see a review and read about it in the newsletter. Over 900% of industrial buyers prefer seeing some type of printed literature before they purchase.
Some services and causes also have sales cycles. For example, a voter making a decision on a candidate needs time and information. People not only want to know where the candidates stand on all of the major issues, they also want to know about the candidate’s background.
On the other hand, retail shoppers are making a decision that will cost them between £20 and £100. Usually, the decision is made in a matter of second- based on a desire for the product.
This brings us to the purchasing decision itself. The better you know your prospects, they more you can influence their decision to buy, join, donate or vote.
Why People Buy From You
In order to provide information that promotes your products, you have to know what has made people support you in the past. You also have to know their common questions or problems and why some won’t buy from or support you.
The answers to these questions aren’t always simple. It’s also not necessarily the same for every prospect. Even so, you can spot some trends, and this information will help you develop effective visuals and article content.
A retailer sends sales postcards and e-mails event notices to current customers and advertises sales and special events in the newspaper. Why does this work? A quick guess is that the events and products advertised were of interest to their customers and prospects. Once the prospects knew that the store carried interesting items, they came in to get more information.
Many professionals’ services such as doctors, lawyers and accountants get business through referrals. Prospects like getting a recommendation from someone else, because it makes it a ‘safe’ choice. It also saves them the time they might have to spend to find a good service. People giving money to charities want to know more about the people their money will help. They also want to know that their donations will be spent effectively.
New Look Website for The Printing House Website – 15th July 2009
We’ve been working hard over recent months to try create a new look and new content for our flagship brand The Printing House Website – bsed in Crewe, Cheshire, one of the UK’s leading colour printers. When you find some time, please take a look and feed back to us. Some of the new content includes A Guide to Preparing Print Ready Artwork and information about our Large Format and banner printing service.
We’re a bit sad and are so excited by our new site that we’ve now rebranded Print Buying Direct, Golf Club Centenary Books and School Prospectus Made Easy – let us have some feedback, hopefully you agree they look much cleaner now.
Keep watching all our sites as we are continually adding new content.
To be continued…
See part one of this blog on digital printing here. Also – what does the future hold for printing – part 1
All about the new Printing House Website
Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.
Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!
Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.
See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing
Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website
Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.
TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.
Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.
One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design or Leaflet Printing Check out our Banner Stands (pop up banners) only £99. Design service available.
