It usually takes an hour or two to put together a good company newsletter, not including the time required to build a template and review each newsletter before it goes out. Is the time spent on newsletters worth it? While many may view newsletters as non-essential communications exercises, a company newsletter often is an invaluable internal and external communications tool because of how different it is from other forms of business communication.
Unlike a plain company-wide or client-specific email, newsletters feature an attractive, branded appearance that reuses existing company content to put a company’s recent achievements or news in the best light possible. They also offer insights into how enthusiastic your audience is about your company’s news and keep your brand engaged with your clients on a regular basis.
Most every company—from a freelance photographer to a large environmental consulting firm or retail giant—can benefit from sending out a company newsletter at least four times per year.
Here are six reasons why company newsletters are worth the effort.
Emphasize What’s Important
If you work for a company that has 10 or more employees, think of all the company-wide emails you get each week. If your company is using email in place of pulling people away from their desks and into meetings, that’s a good thing. But it can be hard keeping the information in all those emails straight.
Newsletters offer companies a way to emphasize which company news is the most important through repetition. Employees see the news item first in the company-wide email and again in the newsletter, which puts an emphasis on information that may be critical to a company’s continued success.
Make Your Perspective Heard
When news about your company—good or bad—starts getting around with external audiences like clients, suppliers or distributors, it can be hard corralling misinformation. Instead of trying to reach out to each entity individually or sending a bland email to those audiences, a newsletter allows a company to tell their side of the news in a single email for all audiences. They’re a great way to put a positive spin on a not-so-positive topic or keep expectations in check when there’s good news to report.
Keep Everyone on the Same Page
If your company serves many customers or has many employees who work with customers directly, getting accurate information to all those entities can be challenging. If you rely on your employees to communicate company news with customers individually, that’s two or more people news must travel through to get to the customer’s decision-making unit. A lot can get miscommunicated in that span. Also, it may be tempting to craft separate emails to internal and external audiences when there’s bad news. That’s a bad idea. If one of your employees accidentally shares the intra-company version of the news, information chaos may ensue.
By having a newsletter, a company has a place to craft a single, coherent message about a company’s recent news—good or bad. It puts all your audiences on the same page about news and gives your employees—especially sales personnel—something to point customers to instead of depending on them to relay news one customer or vendor at a time.
Look the Part
If you’re the new company on the block in your market, a well-crafted newsletter can be a powerful way to build your brand’s reputation. Preparing and sending out a company newsletter shows your clients and vendors—and even your competitors—that you’re serious about being in business and are every bit as professional and capable as your most seasoned competition. It’s important that the clients you worked hard to win over are kept up to date with how your company is growing and succeeding.
Track Engagement
If you rely on sending out emails to keep clients up to date on your company’s news, how do you know which news items your clients are most interested in? Using a email marketing platform like MailChimp, Constant Contact or similar for company newsletters allows you to track which clients are looking at your company’s news and which news summaries they’re clicking on to get the full story on your company’s blog or website.
Marino Communications 