The 8 biggest newsletter

marketing mistakes
By: Roger C. Parker
Newsletter publishing has always made a lot of sense. It makes sense for
firms to target their advertising dollars to clients and prospects that have
expressed interest in their products and services.
However, for many, newsletter marketing has been more a source of frustra-
tion than sales. This is due to eight closely inter-related newsletter-
marketing mistakes.

By examining what hasn’t worked in the past, we can come up with a new
concept of newsletter marketing that is already working better for others.

Mistake 1. Too much time between issues

The biggest problem of conventional newsletter marketing is the amount of
time that goes by between issues.
Consistency is the essence of success. Your goal is to maintain your firm’s
constant visibility. You have to constantly publish, in order to be there when
your market is ready to buy. Otherwise, “out of sight, out of mind.”
Think of the oscilloscope on E.R., monitoring a patient’s heartbeat in Inten-
sive Care. Every time the patient’s heart beats, the trace reaches a peak and
the oscilloscope “beeps.” But—almost immediately—the trace begins to dis-
appear.

A similar thing happens when you send out a newsletter. Your awareness
peaks in the days immediately following arrival of your message. Your firm
will be the one thought of should a purchase opportunity turn up. But, as
more and more time passes, your visibility diminishes until you’re forgotten.
The more time that goes by between issues, the less chance you’ll make a
sale. The more time that goes by between issues, the greater the chance that
your competitors will steal your customers.
Newsletter that come out every other month, or—worse, quarterly—just
don’t make it in today’s overcrowded and over-communicated marketplace
where your competition is trying to make your customers forget you.
 10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design ©3004 Roger C. Parker

Mistake 2. Too many pages in each issue

Excessive length—i.e. too many pages—is the primary reason that most
newsletters cannot be published frequently enough to maintain constant
visibility.

The more pages in a newsletter, the more decisions that have to be made,
and the more words that have to be written. More pages also means more
time producing and formatting each issue, plus higher printing costs.
Readers and publishers both benefit from short, frequent newsletters. In to-
day’s busy environment, readers are in a hurry. They don’t have time for
lengthy preambles. They want to cut directly to the chase. Readers appreci-
ate newsletters that respect their time and that contain as much information
as possible in a short, easy-to-read format.
Writers benefit, too. Long newsletters, however, encourage “loose writing.”
Not only do short newsletters require fewer words, they are easier to plan
and easier to write. By limiting publishers to a finite number of words, short
newsletters force writers to ruthlessly organize, edit, and re-edit their words.
As a result, short newsletters encourage clear, concise writing habits that
communicate a lot of information in the fewest number of words.

Mistake 3. Failure to employ multiple distribution options

Traditionally, marketing newsletters have been printed in large quantities
and mailed to customers and prospects. This option is becoming more and
more archaic, as the costs and delays associated with both printing and
mailing have gotten out of hand.
Given the realities of today’s paper and postage costs, it is-for all practical
purposes- impossible for all but the largest firms to maintain constant cus-
tomer contact using printed and mailed newsletters.
As a result, many firms have turned to e-mail newsletters—or e-zines—deliv-
ered either as e-mail attachments or downloaded from a firm’s web site.
E-mail newsletters are efficient to distribute, but frequently handicapped by
design and formatting limitations. As a result, most e-mail newsletters suffer
from a distressing “sameness.” Readability is hampered, for example, by the
inability to control line spacing or hyphenate lines.
New technologies, however, permit the distribution of attractively format-
ted newsletters that are easy to read and project a competent, professional
image, whether they’re sent via e-mail, downloaded from a web site, or
printed for face-to-face meetings using everyday office desktop printers.

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 10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design ©3004 Roger C. Parker

Mistake 4. Lack of educational content

Conventional newsletters often suffer from myopia. Instead of focusing on
their market’s information needs, the newsletters focus on the firm’s mar-
keting messages. As a result of this inward orientation, the newsletters fail—
because who wants to read someone else’s advertising?
The alternative to “advertising in an editorial format” is to identify and pro-
vide information your market really wants. This transforms your newsletter
from an irrelevant interruption to an “invited guest.”
Education enhances your firm’s credibility and creates a “halo” effect that
benefits every product and service your firm offers. Your firm becomes a
trusted, valuable resource, rather than a “vendor.”
As a result, when talking to prospects for the first time, you’re pre-sold and
trusted before you even open your mouth. In addition, clients and prospects
are likely to pass-along resource-filled newsletters to their co-workers and
friends.

Mistake 5. Short-term focus

Educational newsletters have long lives. Each one adds to the equity you
have invested in your firm.
Newsletters describing new products or services quickly become “old news.”
There’s no incentive for clients and prospects to print them out or save them.
But, newsletters describing how to make intelligent buying decisions or in-
formed user tips are as useful a year from now as they are today. As a result,
topics can be recycled for use in articles, columns, brochures, point-of-sale-
materials, web site text, brochures, teleconference scripts, etc.

Mistake 6. Failure to engage

Clients and prospects are always asking: “What’s in it for me?” Unless every
element of your newsletter is optimized for answering this question, your
newsletter will fail to engage—or involve—your reader, it will remain un-
read until discarded in a wastebasket or deleted in an e-mail inbox.
Newsletter titles often fail to engage their readers. Often, newsletters con-
tain titles like: Roger C. Parker Newsletter. Now, outside of my wife and
mother, why would anyone want to read the equivalent of The Roger C.
Parker Newsletter?

Better alternatives, that target my market’s self-interest, might be:

y Newsletter Marketing Tips
y Marketing with Newsletters

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 10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design ©3004 Roger C. Parker

y Effective Copy and Design

These telegraph the newsletter’s intentions and offer a benefit for reading.
Brag and boast headlines are a waste. Headlines must be written to appeal
to the reader’s self-interest.

y Roger C. Parker Introduces New Seminar Topic. No benefit there!

y But, the same article could have been powerfully introduced with an en-
gaging headline like: 10 Ways to Increase Web Site Sales.
Newsletter headline writers should take note of the titles of best-selling
non-fiction books. These often describe both a problem and the number of
steps, or number of days, needed to solve the problem. The 7 Habits of Ef-
fective People, 30 Days to a Trimmer You! and Write a Book in 28 Days!
make even the most complex topic appear doable.

Mistake 7. Hard to read

Readers—being pressed for time—are always just a page-turn, or a click
away from abandoning your newsletter. Every element of your newsletter’s
design has to project an optimistic, professional, “easy to read” image. Typi-
cal design problem areas include:
Clutter: pages filled with distracting decorative design elements, like bor-
ders, boxes, and shaded backgrounds, interfere with your message.

Headlines: set entirely in upper case letters, (i.e. all capitals), or underlined
are hard to read because there is no recognizable shapes to the words.
Lack of subheads: articles without subheads look longer and hard to read.
Encourage readership by breaking long articles into a series of shorter, bite-
sized chunks.
Text: when set in sans serif typefaces like Arial or Verdana, is often set too
small or too large for the column width.
Text wraps: these occur when photographs break into adjacent paragraphs,
reducing line lengths and creating excessive hyphenation.

Mistake 8. Isolation
A final reason newsletter marketing often fails is that they appear in a vac-
uum, unrelated to a firm’s other marketing activities.
Success comes from synergy, the 1 plus 1 equals 3 effect that occurs when
newsletter complement, rather than compete with, a firm’s other marketing
activities. Examples of synergy include:

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10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design ©3004 Roger C. Parker

y Web sites: web sites should display current and past newsletter issues
and solicit registration sign-ups.
y Teleconferences: newsletter can pave the way for upcoming teleconfer-
ences, which can treat subjects with greater depth.

y Articles and columns: newsletter topics can be recycled as articles in

trade publications or local media.
y Ads, business cards, and postcards: these represent ideal ways to pro-
mote your newsletter and encourage subscription sign-ups.
y Presentations: ideas first introduced in newsletters can be used as the ba-
sis for presentations at local networking events.

y Fusion marketing: newsletter can be distributed by marketing partners

whose clients and prospects resemble you.
y Books: twelve short educational newsletters provide a framework for
writing a book that can further enhance your credibility and visibility.

Conclusion
If your newsletter is not performing the way it should, the problem may be
that your newsletters are too long, which means that too much time goes by
between issues.
Switching from a promotional—or “advertising”—approach to a reader-
oriented, educational approach can spell the difference between newsletters
that clients and prospects look forward to, or one that goes by unnoticed.
Even better, distributing both print and electronic versions of your newslet-
ters, and creating a partnership between your newsletters and your other
marketing tools, can be the boost you need to profit from today’s competi-
tive marketplace.

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10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design ©3004 Roger C. Parker

For more information

Contact Roger C. Parker for help with:

y Communication audits
y Copywriting and marketing strategy

y Publication templates
y Web site critiques
y Training
A $32 Million Dollar Author, Roger has written 35 books with worldwide
sales exceeding 1.6 million copies. These include Looking Good in Print: A
Guide to Basic Design for Desktop Publishing and The Streetwise Guide to
Relationship Marketing on the Internet.
Clients include Apple Computer, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, John R. Deere,
Photo Marketing Association, Shearman & Sterling, Microsoft, and Yamaha.

Roger has helped numerous start-ups immediately achieve recognition, put-

ting them on the path to buy-outs as large as $87,000,000.
For more information, contact Roger by phone at 603-742-9673 or via e-mail
at [email protected].

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10 Commandments of Guerrilla Marketing Design ©3004 Roger C. Parker

Resources

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Save time preparing articles, brochures, newsletters, teleconferences, and
web site incentives. www.contentbydesign.com

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Find out how to display readable, printable, and scrollable multipage docu-
ments in the context of web site pages, no downloading required. View
technique at www.gmarketing-design.com. Request free sample report from
[email protected].

Purchase includes a free copy of Brain-

power Software’s Mapit!, mindmapping
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Page 7 of 7 © 2004 Roger C. Parker www.OnePageNewsletter.com