Best practices to ensure your company newsletter looks professional, gets results
by David Kandler
Editor’s Note: The author of this article, David Kandler, is founder, owner and president of CompanyNewsletters.com, an Internet firm that produces newsletters for companies throughout the United States. Learn more about how his firm can help your company produce printed and electronic newsletters.
Here’s an excellent example of an eye-catching professional newsletter design that CompanyNewsletters.com created for a hospice. This layout features photos that were edited (cropped, lighting adjusted, etc.) for maximum impact, articles that were written objectively, and article text that is consistent in size and typeface from article to article.
Through its design and content, a newsletter needs to capture the attention of potential readers and keep it. Whether it’s an internal newsletter or customer publication, printed or electronic, there are several best practices you can follow to make sure your newsletter looks professional, has an impact on readers and achieves positive results for your company.
♦ Give your newsletter a professional design and layout.
Your newsletter represents your company and a more professional design will send a message to potential readers that this publication contains important information that should be read.
Even if you don’t have the budget to hire a firm like CompanyNewsletters.com to write, design and produce your newsletter, there are certain things you can do to make sure it doesn’t look amateurish:
- Keep a consistent article typeface size and style for all your article text, and for printed newsletters, don’t make the body text of one article larger than the others just so it fills pages in your layout.
- Also, make your photos look their best by cropping the “dead space” out of your photos so the main subject(s) are featured prominently, are large in the frame and take up the majority of the photo. Likewise, you can use photo editing software to lighten photos that are too dark. Learn more about how to edit your photos like professional publications do.
♦ Choose and write articles for maximum impact, and in a similar style and tone as professional publications use.
Be sure to choose substantive article topics that have a purpose, and don’t fill your newsletter with “fluff” content and fillers. Also, write your articles in a more objective, 3rd-person tone, so they do not come across as company “propaganda.” Your headlines should also be descriptive, rather than a basic title, and written in such a way that they will pique the interest of your readers. For more details on how to do these things as well as other writing tips, see our article: How to write company newsletter articles like a pro, avoid the most common mistakes.
♦ Use front-page articles to draw in readers.
It may be true that you can’t judge a book by its cover. But prospective readers do judge a newsletter by its cover, or in the case of email newsletters, by the content featured at the top of the email. If the front page of the beginning of your newsletter doesn’t contain interesting, useful articles, most people will glance at it briefly, quickly decide that it’s not worth their time to read it, and set it aside, toss it in the garbage or delete it without even reading one story.
Just like in widely read publications such as daily newspapers or magazines, your front page or the beginning of your e-newsletter should feature the issue’s best articles that will draw in readers.
And avoid the urge to automatically put the articles written by your company’s president or top executives on the front page.
For instance, some companies like to put regular features such as “A Message From the President” or “A Letter From the VP of Sales,” on the front page, issue after issue.
However, these types of articles probably won’t draw in readers unless the executive has some really monumental news to announce.
It’s OK to use these types of articles, just put them in the proper place in your layout. If the president or sales manager has a message that’s less than earth-shattering, put the piece on an inside page, or in the case of an e-newsletter, further down on the page, and use a more attention-grabbing article at the beginning.
♦ Use photos and graphics generously.
Graphics include photos, artwork, charts, maps and even pull quotes, also known as “call out” boxes that are large and colorful.
Graphics are important for three reasons.
- First of all, studies have shown that people are more likely to read an article if it contains a graphic such as a photo. That’s because graphics, along with headlines, are the first things that readers’ eyes are drawn to when they turn to a new page or scroll down in an e-newsletter.
- Secondly, graphics within a story are important because they provide much-needed visual breaks from solid blocks of text. A page or screen containing nothing but row after row of endless text does not look inviting to read. However, a story that contains strategically placed graphics that break up the text into smaller, less-imposing portions looks more visually pleasing and will attract more readers.
- The third reason graphics are important is because they often provide clarity and/or context to the article text. Photos are usually the best and most common type of graphic to use with most newsletter articles, and the old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is usually true.
For instance in an internal newsletter, it’s one thing for employees to read an article about a company’s new sales manager, whom most have never met, and who employees working at other locations have never seen. But when they also see a photo of that person along with the article, it makes the story much more personal, impactful and memorable.
Stock photos are fine when there are no other photo options for an article, but custom photos showing your company’s employees, facilities and products are far more impactful and memorable than generic ones.
Likewise in a customer newsletter, it’s good for your customers to read an article about a new state-of-the art production machine that your company has just installed. But it’s even more impressive if they can see a photo of the new impressive-looking machine cranking out your company’s flagship product.
One last note: As an editor, don’t be tempted to use generic stock photos in the layout when you or a coworker can instead take a custom photo to show someone or illustrate something mentioned in an article. Stock photos are fine when there are no other photo options for an article, but custom photos showing your company’s employees, facilities and products are far more impactful and memorable than generic ones.
♦ Proofread, proofread, proofread.
You probably wouldn’t dream of sending out a resume to prospective employers that looks unprofessional, is full of typos and contains grammatical errors. That’s because your resume directly represents your professionalism to prospective employers.
In that same way, a customer newsletter represents the professionalism of your company to prospective and current customers. And an internal newsletter reflects your company and its commitment to employee communications to your coworkers.
For those reasons, you’ll want to make sure your newsletter looks impressive, has polished writing and is free of typos and grammatical errors. Proofreading, revising and rewriting are the most tedious, mundane parts of putting together a newsletter — but they are absolutely necessary. It usually helps to have multiple people proofread your newsletter before it is published.
♦ Publish your newsletter on a regular basis, and don’t underestimate the time required to create each issue in house.
To have your newsletter taken seriously by readers, you need to publish regularly and demonstrate your company’s commitment to staying in touch with, informing and educating employees and/or customers.
It’s vital you keep your commitment to readers. If you tell them they’ll receive your newsletter every quarter, make sure you live up to that promise, or your company loses credibility with readers.
Quite often, I receive customer newsletters in the mail in which the company proudly announces that this is the first issue of its new quarterly publication, and that I should be sure to watch for new issues every three months. About 5 months later, I’ll receive the long-overdue second issue. After that, the newsletter invariably dies and I never receive another issue again.
The reason this happens is that editors of company newsletters are typically given this responsibility in addition to their regular job duties. For instance, a sales person who is a good writer may be put in charge of producing a customer newsletter. A human resources specialist may be assigned the task of creating an internal newsletter for employees.
Never having served as a newsletter editor before, these employees – and their bosses – generally don’t realize how much time is required to produce a quality newsletter.
As a guideline, it usually takes a non-professional writer at least six hours to write, proofread and revise the editorial content for each published page of an 8.5-by-11 inch newsletter (or each 700 words of content for an e-newsletter). That means a four-page newsletter requires about 24 hours of editorial time. If the editor is also handling the newsletter’s design and layout, you can add at least another four hours to the estimate.
And if the person doing the design and layout is also learning to use new software to produce the layout or edit the photos, then more hours yet will be required.
If the company underestimates the time required of its employees to produce the newsletter, the publication will suffer and/or it won’t be published as frequently as was intended.
The solutions: A company should make sure that its newsletter editor has enough time freed up to produce a quality newsletter on time. If that’s not possible, the company should assign other employees to help the editor with the writing, proofreading, etc.
And if all employees are too busy to set aside enough time to help produce a newsletter, the company should consider hiring an outside firm, like CompanyNewsletters.com, to produce all or parts of the newsletter.
If you follow all the best practices above, your company newsletter will look professional, it will most likely be better than your competitors’ newsletters, and it will have a much higher chance to achieve the positive results that your company expects.
Read more newsletter ideas, tips and “how to” articles from CompanyNewsletters.com.
To learn more about the author’s firm and how it can produce printed or online newsletters for your company, see https://CompanyNewsletters.com or call 952/892-6943.