1. Industry
Insider
Insider is a natural role
for your newsletter. The insider
always spots the trend—and cashes in on
it—before everyone else even knows it is
a trend. iVillage’s
Home plays the
industry
insider role for consumers who want to be in
the know about home and hearth. In
the May 10, 2005
issue of
Home, subscribers
get the low-down on
furniture:
“What furniture trends are hot this
spring? We recently traveled to the
International Home Furnishings Show in High
Point, North Carolina, to find out.
After pounding the pavement, snooping through
the showrooms and hobnobbing with
designers and furniture bigwigs, we came back
armed with an insider's
perspective. Want the scoop?”
2. Efficient
Assistant
It’s no secret
that we are inundated with information.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an
efficient assistant who arrives at the office
before dawn; sifts through a
mountain of newspapers, reports, press
releases, newsletters, and professional
journals; extracts the essentials; then
prepares a briefing that’s waiting with
your morning coffee?
eWeek’s eNews &
Views plays that role for
enterprise technology executives. Each week it
sifts through a mountain of
information and picks out a handful of
must-know stories and one or two opinion
pieces. What’s more, by providing content in a
variety of sizes—headline, short
summary, full article—it has prepared briefing
materials so busy executives can,
in a few seconds, focus on the content that’s
important to them. Here’s an example from the May 6,
2005 issue of
eNews &
Views:
A
message headline that
distills the story’s essence: “News:
Google App Speeds Up Web
Surfing”
A
short summary of the
story: “Now that it's mastered
loading search results in fractions of a
second, Google has opened up its massive
computing power to the masses with one
goal in mind: to speed up Web surfing.”
A
link to the full
article: “Learn how its Web
Accelerator does just
that”
3. Experienced
Consultant
Your newsletter can take on the role of
consultant. In this role, the
consultant offers wisdom gained from long
experience with the industry or with
clients similar to you. This newsletter offers
valuable information or advice,
without the hefty price-tag you’d pay a
consultant. This type of
newsletter—written in the first person—is the
most obvious way to establish a
bond with subscribers because the consultant
talks directly to them.
Business coach and motivator Robert
Middleton’s newsletter,
More Clients, is a
good example of a newsletter that
offers up a consultant’s expertise. It is
personal, conversational, informative,
and practical. In the May 10,
2005 issue of
More Clients,
Middleton weaves anecdotes and
experience to show subscribers how to get
winning testimonials from clients. He
writes “Remember the paving contractor I
mentioned a few issues ago?” then goes
on to share the advice he gave the contractor
for getting testimonials.
Middleton then explains how to apply his
advice to your business.
4.
Storyteller
Everyone likes
a good
story, and newsletters that tell good stories
create powerful bonds with
subscribers. What kind of stories do your
subscribers want? Very likely they
want the “back story” of a company’s success.
How did Widgets Unlimited double
widget sales? Like a good fable, the story
ends with a moral—lessons learned.
(The Tortoise and the Hare: “Slow but steady
wins the race.” Widgets Unlimited:
“Offer a life-time warranty.”)
Case studies are a key component of
many of Marketing Sherpa’s newsletters,
including their business-to-business and
business-to-consumer newsletters. Their case
studies tell marketing success
stories gleaned from interviews with
high-level marketing executives. The case
study defines the marketing problem, gives the
back story—what was tried and
what worked—and presents the lesson learned.
In
“How
AFLAC Raised
Its Consumer Brand Awareness From Almost Zero
to 92%,” Sherpa tells the
story of how a company with an obscure and
meaningless name became a brand
almost universally recognized.
- The back story:
think laterally, not literally.
Identify a “thread-gatherer,” a person who
recognizes a great idea: AFLAC
pronounced with a nasal inflection sounds like
a duck
quacking!
- The
lessons learned: “The most
illogical route is usually the most
successful.”
5. Subscriber
Stand-In
An
obvious role for a newsletter is stand-in for
the subscriber. The publisher
contacts the experts and asks the questions
subscribers would ask if they had
the opportunity and the access. In each issue of CRMGuru.com’s
CustomerThink
Advisor newsletter, founder Bob
Thompson “sits down with” and
“picks the brains” of one or more thought
leaders in the CRM sales and marketing
arena. The tone is conversational and
informal—the way you would talk if you
were meeting over a beer.
In
the April
5, 2005 issue of CustomerThink
Advisor, Thompson
moderates a teleconference with three Call
Center experts. The topic: Can a Call
Center also be a profit center? In his role as
subscriber stand-in, Thompson
asks the questions on his subscribers’ minds:
Is it really feasible? Is it
really happening? He elicits frank responses:
Companies are struggling with the
concept, but those who have revamped have seen
remarkable success.
