Keeping in Contact with your Clients Through the Use of Newsletters

By Ben Glass

Demographers, scientists who study population characteristics, warn that depending on where you are located, up to 35 percent of your customer or client base will die or disappear within the next 12 months.  Many will move away . . . some will die . . . and most will simply forget about you.  Worse than forgetting about you, your more aggressive competitors will steal away another 5-15% of people who you have done business with in the past.  Marketing experts estimate that up to 50% of your total “past client and contact list” could be disappearing each year. 

            If you think this seems ridiculous, stop and think about it for a moment.  Look at your old customer and client lists and ask yourself how many of them have ever come back to you again or even to refer someone to your business.  Most entrepreneurs have only a vague system for repeatedly marketing back to old customers and others who have contacted their business. When entrepreneurs do get around to thinking about a company newsletter, the first thing most do is to contact some newsletter company that is going to send them a “canned” newsletter that they will slap their company name onto.  This isn’t nearly good enough. Worse, sending a newsletter that is boring, as most “canned” newsletters are, actually turns people off.

             Newsletters aren’t as hard to do as you may think.  Back when I first started my own business, I knew that publishing a newsletter would be an important part of my marketing mix.  I really didn’t have any idea how to get that done, so I spoke to a local print shop and then began writing all my own articles.  I even took the time to research bulk mailing at the post office and learned how to get a discount when mailing the newsletters out.

            I was smart enough to know, even back then, that having a mailing list was going to be very important.  Today when I speak to young entrepreneurs about marketing, the very first thing I tell them to do, even if they have no money, is to start the mailing list.  Ever since the beginning of my business, I have kept our mailing list on a very simple program called MyMailList (www.MySoftware.com).  I think it cost about $45 when we got it and its sole function is to be the one place where we can dump every single name that we come in contact with. 

            Several years after we began, I discovered Newsletters, Ink (www.NewslettersInk.com).  For the first few years, most of the newsletters we published were written entirely by Newsletters, Ink.  We chose from an array of interesting articles written from my business’s perspective each month.  Today we publish a six-page newsletter six to eight times per year, filled with interesting articles written by me and the other attorneys in my office.

The Most Important Asset of Any Business

            The most important asset of any business, including yours, is not the fixtures, the computers or even the people. The most important asset is “the list.” It is that collection of names and addresses of everyone who has ever expressed any interest in hearing anything you have to say.   These are people who will give you permission to market to them.  In my law practice, the list is made up this way:

            1.  Every person who raises their hand to request any of our information

2.  Every potential client who comes from any other source, but who has contacted us

3.  Local attorneys who do not compete in our area of expertise (personal injury, medical malpractice, and ERISA disability)

            4.  All of our vendors

            5.  All of my local friends and relatives

            6.  Other professionals who would likely be in a position to refer clients to us

            We have one staff person who is in charge of maintaining the list.  (We keep this list outside of our regular case management software.)  We find MyMailList to be a simple program to use to maintain the list.  For each issue, we simply email the list to the mailing house. 

The Most Important Feature of Any Newsletter - Don’t Be Boring

            I’m sure you have seen the newsletter services who solicit your business.  The vast majority of these services are doing nothing more than slapping your name on a generic, pre-written newsletter and then telling you that “having your name in front of your past customers will help them to recall you when they once again want what you have to offer or its time to refer a new customer to you.”  I’ve looked at a lot of these services and subscribed to some in the distant past.  The problem with most, if not all, newsletters is that they are stupefyingly boring.  The best way to test is to call up some of these companies yourself and ask for samples.  Read the articles.  Are they interesting to you?  How about your spouse? Your teenage kids? Are all of the articles that are pre-written even applicable to your business?

            Here’s a mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make: They claim that their newsletters are directed to other businesses in an effort to get referrals. They may also claim that because they are directed toward “business to business” marketing, they need to be “different”.  I get one newsletter from a local business law firm that is so densely packed with legal jargon, case citations, and boilerplate contract language, that I glance at it when it arrives only for a quick laugh.  They are wasting their money big time.  You see, whether you are writing to the business down the street or the young lady who just raised her hand to ask for some of your information material, remember that you are writing to a human being.  We are all wired basically the same.  We will pick up and read something that is interesting and, if it’s really good, pass it along to one of our friends.  It does you no good to send a fancy four-color newsletter if it is not opened, read, and remembered. 

Where Am I Going to Find the Time to Write
 An Interesting Newsletter Myself?

            Today, I write 99% of what goes into our six-page newsletter.  It’s actually relatively easy once you get the hang of it, but the trick is that you don’t actually need to write all of it yourself to make it really interesting and to get readers to believe that you wrote all of it.

            In my office, Newsletters, Ink sends me sample articles to work with for each issue.   (On its website, Newsletters, Ink lists about 18 industries for which it develops and publishes newsletters.)  In my law practice, I represent plaintiffs, and the articles Newsletters Ink sends me have been written from a plaintiff’s perspective.  I could, if I chose to, simply pick from the many articles Newsletters, Ink sends and create my own custom newsletter.  I’ve done that many times in the past and from time to time today I supplement what I write with Newsletters, Ink’s prepared articles.   

            The great advantage of this method is that you can actually write only one or two little articles about something that has happened in your business or industry – or even in your family.  Perhaps you or your company received an important recognition in the community.   Perhaps there is something in your community that happened that would be noteworthy and now you are writing from a “problem solver’s” point of view.  The fact is, however, that when you write one or two personalized articles, the reader thinks that the entire issue is written by you.

How to Write the Whole Newsletter in Less Than Two Hours per Month

There was a time when I began to dread the arrival of the big package from Newsletters, Ink.  This meant that I was going to have to carve out some time from my busy schedule and sit down and, if I wanted it to look really personalized, start to write a bunch of articles from scratch.  As anyone knows, sitting down at a desk to write with a blank sheet of paper, under time pressure, is a monstrous task that as human beings we want to avoid as much as possible. 

The trick I now use that gets the newsletter to practically write itself is actually very simple.  I took a manila folder and wrote in big letters on the front of it “Future newsletter articles.”  That folder sits on a credenza in my office.  In between issues, anything that comes across my desk that might be an interesting topic for the newsletter gets dumped into the folder.  I don’t have to do any thinking, sorting, or writing at this time.  If I see an interesting case or an issue that is brewing locally, or I’ve thought about something that consumers misunderstand about the law or about dealing with insurance companies, I simply dump it into the manila folder. 

Now, you might think that even that is hard, because now you always have to be thinking about going out and finding articles to dump into your folder.  Actually, the opposite is true.  The human brain is an amazing thing.  Once you set up this physical system in your office, articles and ideas just pop up all the time.  You don’t have to try to remember them and you don’t have to write them down anywhere.  You just dump them into the manila folder. 

When it comes time to write the newsletter, you simply sit down with the folder and a hand-held recorder and “re-write” the articles. You hardly have to think about it or “create” anything at all! Viola! You now have a four- to six-page personalized newsletter to mail. E-mail your articles and your mailing list to Newsletters, Ink and it’s done (‘til next month, anyway).

About Ben Glass

Ben Glass is an information marketer and a practicing plaintiff’s personal injury and medical malpractice attorney in Fairfax, Virginia.  He is the author of The Ultimate Personal Injury and Practice Building Toolkit.  Visit www.GreatLegalMarketing.comto learn more about Ben’s information marketing business.  You can reach Ben at ben@GreatLegalMarketing.comor by fax at 703-783-0686.