The secret to writing newsletter content

If you knew what people wanted to read about in your company newsletter, would it help you in your marketing?

You bet it would. If you knew what they wanted to read, you'd put in the newsletter, wouldn't you?

Well, we've been compiling newsletter content for years, for ourselves and many clients, and like any good marketing company, we measure what works and what doesn't.

Experience teaches and believe me, we know what doesn't work. But, we also know something that consistently does work, and we're going to share it with you.

We've tested all sorts of content; industry news, technical tips, free software, product news and so on. These all work to some extent and often a story of this type is very successful, but the one type of story that gets good click-throughs every single time is one that has a HUMAN ANGLE.

Here's a few examples of the stories we're talking about

• Company profiles - details about a client's business
• A success you or a client has recently had.
• Personnel stories - new employees, exploits of employees inside and outside the business.
• Stories involving celebrity
• Award or prize winning
• Charity participation

We'll save you the amateur psychology, but the fact is people like reading about people. Why else would tabloids sell in their millions and viewing figures for reality TV shows be off the scale?

So the secret to a successful newsletter story is to base it on a human element? Well, yes and no. If your story contains the human interest and nothing more, you'll get good reading stats, but what have you achieved from a business point of view? Nothing much.

What you absolutely must do in the story is to include references to something relevant within your company that the reader may be interested in shifting their attention to.

For example, let's say your story is about Fred from business development running the Edinburgh Marathon in 12 hours, make sure you include in the story that Fred recently sold buckets of your latest product and include a link to that story and to the product.

Try it, you'll get high click-throughs to the the human interest story, which will then generate click-throughs to company marketing content you might not have got otherwise.