The rules for writing readable newsletters are similar to those for readable web-pages. And the
first question of a good communicator must never be, "What do I want to tell my subscribers?", but
"What does my subscriber want or need to know?" And the second question is, "Who is my target audience?"
Newsletter guru Elaine Floyd gives
Do's and Don't for Newsletters in her book
Marketing With Newsletter:
People like:
Interesting subjects
Short articles
Good visuals
Easy-to-skim designs
Bulleted lists
Content telling them how to do something
Clear organization
Calendars
Offers, benefits
People don't like:
Intimidating pages (too much content)
Disorganized information
Long continuing articles
Overly frequent mailings
Irrelevant content
Impersonal tone
Chaotic page design
Too many pages
A Christian angle
Cybermissions experts John Edmiston and Terri Main add recommendations for a good Christian newsletter:
Write to people - not just about issues
Be personal, more like a letter to a friend
Don't be 'slick'
Make the spiritual implications plain and vivid
Tell short powerful stories
Offer first class information
Use plenty of white space
Give practical tips and hints
No group photos - use head and shoulder or action shots
A good main header, plenty of sub-headers and tight paragraphs
One or two good "call-outs" per page (those boxes with quotes in them)
Most of this advice applies to email newsletters as well as print.
Target audience
The overwhelming majority of Christian email newsletters (as with websites) are written
for Christians. In fact, the imbalance is even worse, because
only a very few evangelistic sites also produce an email newsletter which is specifically
written for a non-Christian readership.
An outstanding example of a newsletter associated with an evangelistic website,
which is written for non-Christians:
Women Today Magazine.
Subscribe to it, and analyze the sensitive ways it has been written for its defined audience.
[See also our case study on this site.] If you have an
evangelistic site, a newsletter can be a vital add-on. Newsletters which are targeting non-Christians
should avoid idiom and Christian jargon.
Other questions and points
Do you want to use the free advert-supported newsletter services (e.g. Yahoo and Topica)?
Do you want to pay to have an advert-free newsletter?
Do you want to offer fully-formatted HTML, or plain text, or both? (Consider carefully: some servers will block HTML newsletters, and they can take a long time to load.)
A disturbing percentage of email newsletters never reach their recipients because
of email filtering. Learn how to avoid using keywords which will will set spam filtering
in operation. Run your newsletter text through a
spam-checker
and get the spam rating score down to near zero, before sending it out.
Consider publishing your newsletter as an online page, as well as by email. This
then gives you the opportunity to offer it by
RSS feed.
Never, ever, add people to your newsletter list unless they have asked to be. And always use
'double opt-in' confirmations so that people cannot be added maliciously (and also so that you are
not wasting bandwidth sending emails to non-existent advertising addresses).
FREE AND SIMPLE: Syndicate this page's content into your site
• Insert this page's text directly into your own website.
then copy/paste (CTRL+C/CTRL+V) this Javascript code into your own page:
help | example.
(Please DO NOT copy the actual text of this page onto your own site:
reasons.)
Other options for re-use.
• Or please link to this page • Add a Bulletin subscribe form to your site.
