If you produce an external newsletter, you already know how it helps you achieve your communication and marketing goals. Your newsletter fosters a sense of stability and commitment among your current and prospective customers, while providing them with timely and helpful information.
Of course, the long-term success of your publication (and company) usually depends on your ability to establish and maintain your presence through other marketing and communications means. Your newsletter represents an important supporting element of your overall sales and marketing strategy.
Tying in your newsletter with other collateral materials serves several other often-overlooked sales and marketing functions. This practice:
• Increases name and product recognition;
• Enhances your image as a professional organization;
• Keeps your organization at the forefront of clients’ and customers’ consciousness; and
• Promotes long-term loyalty.
By using a strong media mix, you’ll appeal to a broader range of potential new customers. You can choose from a wide variety of supplementary materials. Some will complement your newsletter’s role as a sales tool, while others will prove equally effective on their own.
All should help bolster your company’s image and achieve your marketing goals.
Brochures
Brochures that showcase a particular product or service are powerful marketing tools that will increase the value and recognition of the product, while reinforcing the value of your company and its capabilities. Depending on your industry, a brochure can also help you create or maintain consistency with the messages you’re sending to clients and customers in your newsletter.
For example, a car dealership can benefit greatly by producing a newsletter to highlight the benefits of buying its cars, and how the dealership can work with customers before, during and after the sale. Supplementary brochures could then provide details on specific product information and model specifications. Such an approach will help cultivate a more personal ongoing relationship between the dealership and buyers.
Seminars
In-house seminars can serve as a low-cost mechanism for delivering important information to clients and prospects. Start by determining (via your customer service or sales staff) areas of particular interest and/or concern to existing or potential customers or clients that would make interesting and informative seminar topics. Next, evaluate your in-house resources. This includes the staff member(s) best suited to lead the seminar and any other materials that will provide seminar attendees with the best understanding. You might consider inviting guest presenters from a non-competitive vendor.
After establishing these criteria, determine how much time you’ll need (usually a half-day or one work day) and solicit attendees from six weeks to two months in advance, perhaps via a notice in your newsletter.
It’s crucial to remember that, while a seminar can act as an invaluable tool for establishing yourself as an expert (and perhaps generating new business), it only benefits you as much as the knowledge you provide benefits attendees. In other words, don’t hold a seminar just for the sake of doing so — make sure it will be worth your attendee’s time.
Website
Your website gives potential clients a first look at your company and its products or services. Your site also gives many clients or customers their first impression of your company. As more and more companies create and grow their Web sites, their competitors — which may include you — need to make sure their own sites are current with regard to both content and design, informative to the client or customer, and that the look is in keeping with the personality of the company.
A website is also an ideal tie-in tool for your newsletter. By putting your newsletter on your website, you’ll give the newsletter a geographically boundless base of readers. Thus, you’ll increase your newsletter’s strength as a marketing tool.
And the reverse also applies: to get more traffic on your website, put your URL on your newsletter. This will compel your readers to check out your site and learn more about your company’s history, products and services.
Company Pocket Folder
This tool can often put your company above the competition by providing a detailed description of your products and services. You could include detailed paragraphs or pages for prospects, and more personalized information for existing clients who might not be aware of some of your capabilities. Taking the time to showcase your
products in this manner will also show clients and customers that your company takes great pride in its services and products. And by including a copy of the most recent issue of your newsletter in the folder, you also increase your clients’ interest in receiving more timely information about your company.
Business Reply Cards (BRCs)
BRCs usually serve as response mechanisms. From a marketing standpoint, reply cards serve another important function: if they’re strategically designed, BRCs can serve as a graphic reinforcement of your company’s message or product — again, increasing name recognition. They’ll also help you capture reader input and other valuable information that will help you improve your newsletter and mailing list.
In today’s highly competitive marketplace you must look beyond traditional marketing methods and provide customers with a variety of marketing materials to maximize your success and response level. Carefully executed newsletters, brochures, seminars, pocket folders, website and BRCs will generate business, and help you maintain your presence in an ever-changing business world.
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