Marketing Profs

Whether distributed via email or printed and snail-mailed, newsletters are a cost-effective way for businesses or other organizations to keep in touch with employees, customers, prospects or members.

The trick, however, is to come up with a strategy to keep readers engaged and the publication's production and editorial adjustments in line with current budgets.

Here are five tactics that you can use to make your newsletter more engaging for your intended recipients. And while these strategies also work well for printed newsletters, we're going to focus on electronic newsletters because they offer the most opportunity for generating fast feedback from readers.

1. Boost interactivity through surveys

Raising interactivity is a winning bet if your goal is to engage your readers and generate a reason for them to anticipate the next issue. This step is also the most obvious answer to "How do I know what my readers want to read about?"

It's one of the great fallacies of the publishing business that editors or publishers know more about what their readers need to know... than the readers themselves. In truth, anything that's created in a vacuum by a roomful of editors and reporters is probably going to (ahem) suck in terms of achieving the goal of delivering engaging stories.

Newsletter editors have a responsibility to get out there and see what feature in the last issue got readers talking, what kinds of topics readers look forward to seeing in the publication and how they feel about being able to communicate those desires.

2. Poll your readers to uncover the best delivery method for their needs

Similarly, efforts to make sure that your newsletter gets read are often subverted because the readers do not receive the newsletter in a format they feel is appropriate. In terms of e-newsletters, for example, one recipient's email client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Entourage or Mail) may be set to not receive HTML files, while another's may be set to send all HTML-based email to the junk-mail folder.

The point is, you need to know the methods by which you will have the best chance of getting your e-newsletter before the most number of recipient eyes. If that means sending out a text version as well as an HTML version, so be it. But you won't know the answer to that question until you ask the question.