Designing Your Newsletter

A newsletter is one of the best ways to keep your name in front of customers and create a working relationship with clients and employees. But what is the best way to do that?

Consider the newsletters you’ve received. Were the articles and information in the newsletter informative?  Did you get a better picture of the company, its products, and its people? What you saw, or wanted to see, in those newsletters is what you want in your own newsletter.

Will your newsletter be mailed, accessed online, or both?  How often will it be distributed: weekly, monthly, or quarterly? That will determine the level of time and effort needed to produce it.  You also need to determine the time and resources you have to produce a good quality newsletter.

As a benchmark, a monthly text only email may take no more than two hours a month to put together.  That may be fine for your time and budget, but if your newsletter looks like all the others in the inbox, what’s going to prevent your newsletter from ending up in the Spam bin or trash can? Plain text is fine, if someone is going to read it. But to get their attention, you need some “style” and graphics.

HTML newsletter designs are visually appealing but take longer to produce. PDF format is also a good choice. You can design in MS Publisher or even MS Word and then convert that to PDF. If you have a full version of Adobe, you can leave the hyperlinks you added in place. Otherwise, you can print to file and then re-insert the hyperlinks. If you don’t have the full version of Adobe you can buy a PDF printer driver. Just be sure that the printer driver allows for hyperlinks to be active.