The Thoughts And Ideas Of The Efficiency Coach

I’ve been having a lot of fun (and frustration!) in launching our new website. Blood, sweat and nearly tears went into the website refresh. I’m very excited as my new website has the capability to sign people up to a monthly newsletter and fortnightly efficiency tip. As I start to write my first newsletter for this business, I’ve been researching how to use a newsletter to efficiently market your business. Here are my findings…

Let’s firstly consider why you would want to send out a newsletter. There are two main purposes to sending out a newsletter on behalf of your business… Firstly, to establish yourself as a trustworthy expert in your readers opinion, and secondly to keep your business and yourself top of your reader’s mind. Therefore, when a reader of yours wants to hire the services of something you offer, they are more likely to get in touch with you.

1. Make it short and snappy

In today’s information rich world, people don’t have time to read a long lengthy newsletter. Keep your newsletter’s length to a maximum of a screen depth. If you want to write a long article, provide an extract and link to where your article is held on your web. The width of your newsletter should not be bigger than the default ‘reading’ panel in Outlook or Lotus notes.

2. Start at the beginning

Before you start writing a regular newsletter, identify why you are going to write it and your target market for the newsletter. Then identify topics that your target market would be interested in reading about. So for example, if your target market is pig and dairy farmers, you may want to write about trends of prices for pork and dairy at the farm gate, how to increase your herd’s milk yield… you get the idea…

3. Give yourself or your business a starring role

Well, you are generally not writing a newsletter to promote someone else’s business? To firmly establish you and your business as an expert is the eyes of your readership make sure at least 25% of the newsletter space is about you… what’s you’ve done… your products and services… client testimonials… recent client case studies…awards. When you are talking about a subject aim to highlight recent successes you have had with clients (or customers).

4. Make it personal

As the saying goes, people buy from people. Have your picture, or one of your team’s in the newsletter. Drop in a few personal anecdotes about what you have been doing or are looking forward to doing

5. Put a time-limited special offer in

As per my previous post on, what you need to know to improve the efficiency of your marketing materials, people are more likely to take you up on an offer – e.g. 10% off all coaching packages, if you make it only for a few days or weeks, and state that it is exclusively for readers of your newsletter.

6. Consider the legalities

In the US it is illegal to sign someone up for a newsletter without their consent. In the UK we are not subject to the same laws – however, I believe that it is polite to get someone’s consent, for example, someone that you have met at a networking event, before you subscribe them up to your business’s newsletter.

7. Switch it off!

Do tell people how to unsubscribe on your newsletter. Set up a new e-mail address, i.e. unsubscribe@yourdomain.com for people to send an e-mail if they want to unsubscribe. Many people don’t like having to publically e-mail you to ask to be unsubscribed.

8. See things differently

The compatibility of e-mail clients and over zealous spam filters is a problem for newsletter writers. Specifically ask your mailing list to ‘white-list’ the e-mail account that your newsletter comes from. Give your readers the option of reading a plain text version, or viewing it in a web browser. After all for good business efficiency you want your readers to actually receive and be able to read your newsletter.

9. Don’t send it on a friday

Many people get to the end of the week and then sent out their business newsletter. If you think about yourself on a friday – how much time or motivation do you have to read newsletters? I would suggest very little – you are certainly not going to be motivated to do anything after reading the newsletter. I recommend that you send out your newsletter on a monday or tuesday when people are generally planning their weekly tasks.

10. Do spend money on an e-mail marketing client

If you are sending out a newsletter your recipients do not want their e-mail address visible to the whole of the mailing list. If you start regularly sending out e-mails to a large volume of people, your ISP may label your newsletter as spam… not good… A good e-mail client will prevent all these problems and automate some of the common tasks, e.g. sign-up, unsubscribe requests

11. And finally…

Don’t forget to include a call to action from your readership in your newsletter…

If you have enjoyed reading this blog post, you will love the convenience of fortnightly efficiency tips and a monthly newsletter crammed full with more efficiency tips and techniques delivered straight to your e-mail box. If so, go to our website home page and sign up for our newsletter.

As a thank you, for everyone that subscribes we are sending a copy of our free e-book, How to achieve more with LinkedIn.

For the first 100 subscribers to the newsletter we are also sending a copy of our free e-book, how to achieve more with twitter. But, you will need to hurry up as we are rapidly signing people up…

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