Customer Newsletters

One of the biggest opportunities that companies often miss out on is leveraging your customer communications to build customer loyalty and increase incremental revenue. It's a huge opportunity that I hope more companies will start doing over the next five years. As the cost of acquiring new customers via traditional marking efforts continues to rise, marketers need to take a much closer look at customer newsletters and other opportunities to build increase customer loyalty.

I have had about six years experience working on internal newsletters and then another two more years with customer newsletters. Creating a newsletter is much more than just developing and executing a monthly newsletter. Here are some thoughts to consider:
* Are your customer newsletters valuable to your customers? By this I mean, are they relevant, consistent, relevant, and action-oriented? It doesn't matter how good your newsletter looks, if your customers don't see value in it, and they don't open it, then so what?
* Have you done research with your customers so you know who they are and what they want in a newsletter? If you don't know anything about your customers and what they want to read, why are you producing a newsletter?
* Have you involved stakeholders from all key divisions in developing your newsletter strategy (this includes sales, support, finance, and anyone else that regularly works with customers)?
* Have you put the right person in charge of your newsletter? Too often, this is a job that is given to the new marketing person usually just out of college. It's up to you, how important is it to you to nurture and cultivate your key customers?
* Do you have a good customer list? Ok, this could be a whole discussion by its own but you need a good customer list that includes your current customers and if you don't have one, you should work on it and to build a subscription program so customers can opt-in to your newsletter.
* Is the person or team in charge of your newsletter working with your marketing and branding teams to ensure consistent communication between your newsletter and other corporate projects?
* Are you linked in with the right product managers, product managers and other key players to make sure you are getting the key messages that should be communicated?
* Do you have a long-term strategy and plan for your newsletter and other customer communications?
* Do you have a great email system to send your customer communication that tracks clicks, shows trending, and tracks your customer's response to your emails? A great one that we use is FutureNow. An amazing email program can make a big difference in your customer communication and even campaign success.
* Last but not least, are you leveraging modern technologies when communicating to your customers? Please don't send pdf or text newsletters to your customers, when the rest of the world has been sending html for at least a good five years now.

Hopefully this gets some ideas flowing and you realize what a big impact your customer newsletter can have if you do it right!