10 Tips on Writing Effective Newsletters Articles

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Newsletters are perhaps the most effective way to communicate with your customers and prospective customers. It allows you as a business to position yourself as an expert in your industry as well as promote your products and services. Newsletters, if done correctly, can be a very powerful tool in your marketing communications tool box.

I have put together a list of 10 tips for writing effective newsletter articles. Albeit, there are more than 10 tips, but I have narrowed it down to the top 10 tips. While most of these tips refer to printed newsletters, they can easily be adapted to emailed or online newsletters just as easy.

1. Provide useful information: Provide you your audience with valuable and useful information. Teach them something new or give them some interesting bit of information on your industry or how to use your products and services. What you want to do is avoid a hard sell by filling your newsletter with advertisement and promotions. This is a guaranteed way to lose readers over time. One way to accomplish this is by placing yourself in your readers position. what would you like to learn about or know? what would hold your interest?
2. Inject personality into your writing style: As readers we are bombarded constantly with a barrage of marketing messages; most are mundane and lack any pizazz! When writing your newsletter articles, use your personality in a conversational tone, but be careful and avoid the use of slang unless your audience understands your slang vocabulary. Humor is always welcomed, but only in articles where it would be beneficial. Remember to be complete in your thoughts and writing by providing the following information in your article: who, what, where, when, why, and how.
3. Research: There’s nothing more embarrassing and a credibility killer than a well written article that provides no facts or incorrect facts. If you are writing on information that requires statistical information or factual support, be sure to research your information and site it in your work either directly in the article or as a footnote.
4. Avoid jargon: If you’re writing a newsletter on family felines (cats), and you happen to be veterinarian, you may be tempted to use medical terms or Latin terms relating to the little kitty’s. Unless your audience is a group of veterinarians, you want to break your language down to what the average reader will be able to understand. So, avoid industry specific jargon (technical speak) unless you are certain your audience will understand it.
5. Brevity is king: Certainly you have come across individuals who can talk your ear off. These individuals can certainly write as they speak, they just ramble on. You want to avoid this in your writing. Be brief and concise.
6. Use chunking: Chunking refers to arranging information into small “bite sized” bits of information. Often times it may be a bullet list, a side bar, or numbered list. This breaks up the copy and focuses the reader on the important, informational parts of your article.
7. Use imagery to illustrate your point: While some people will benefit from the written word, others use visuals as a guide to their reading. You want to use images to illustrate your article and to attract your readers attention. Samples of images could include photography (see my article on “How to Get Free Stock Photography Images for your Marketing Collateral”), graphs, illustrations, or charts.
8. Attract attention with your headline: Headlines are what attract your readers attention. Use a bad headline and you’ll probably never have your article read. But again, it may be so bad that your readers will be curious. Headlines that do well are ones that speak to self-interest and news items. Read my list of  “Four Qualities of A Good Headline”, to get an idea of what would work and what will not.
9. Abide by copyright issues: It’s often easy to find an article we like on the internet and just copy and paste it into our documents. However, these articles are the copyrighted by the writer whether they say copyright or not. The same goes for artwork and photography. Unless they writings or art say you may reproduce them, assume they are copyrighted material and either ask for written permission to use them or write your own original work and purchase the photos and art. If you don’t, you may find yourself in a legal situation you’d rather not be in.
10. Proof read!: Did I mention proof read? Spell check is great, but spell check does not catch syntax and homonyms. Proof read your work. You’ll be glad you did, not just because you’ll appear more intelligent and credible, but you’ll avoid the occasional smart a** who likes to point out your every mistake. You may want to have a peer proof your work since you wrote it and often times it’s more difficult to proof your own work since you are use to seeing it. If you don’t have someone to help you proof your work, start at the end of the article and read backwards. This will force you to pay attention to the words.

In the end, if you follow these ten simple tips, you’ll be on you your way to creating some outstanding articles and newsletters. In addition, if your consistent with your mailings, you’ll begin to see results from your hard work.