What client and marketing newsletter format works - paper or email?

What client and marketing newsletter format...

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I'm interested in hearing what newsletters people find work for their accountancy business please?

This is our experience:

We are a smallish firm (four staff) and up until two years ago we used to subscribe to Mercia quarterly paper newsletters (and put a PDF copy on the website). We'd send these to all our clients and also send them to prospects.

We knew that at least a few clients liked them, but suspected that the majority just didn't read them. Costs were going up with postage, time enveloping them etc, so about two years ago we moved to a monthly email subscription service. We didn't like that service particularly so last year we started producing our own email newsletters on an approximate six week cycle.

We've taken lots of advice on what should work best, and the consensus is to keep it very short and sweet, maximum of three snappy articles. So we work on this basis, snappy headlines, well written and the newsletter taking less than a minute to read, and if interested there are links to more details on the articles.

What we are finding is that 75% of recipients don't even open the email, never mind read the contents! However they don't unsubscribe, possibly because they don't get down to the that part of the newsletter. As far as we can tell they don't confine the email to spam, it just sits in the inbox unread.

This set us thinking about what we do, and we come to the conclusion that people are pretty bombarded with emails and electronic newsletters. I open all my email newsletters but won't read beyond the first line of most newsletters. Some I get fed up with and hit the unsubscribe button.

SO what do you find works best?

Should we go back to paper newsletters, change the email newsletter format, or give up on newsletters all together in favour of something different?

Thanks for any advice.  

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By Hansa
14th May 2012 12:40

... by way of example

My motoring club sends both a magazine and emails.  I must admit I don't open the emails, but do skim read the magazine.

With the year on year increase in email (and corresponding reduction in post) I think a nicely produced hard copy newsletter might be more likely to be read.  Particularly if you can do a mail-merged letter to personalise it. 

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By Ken Howard
14th May 2012 14:16

Forget newsletters, send a personalised letter/email instead

We've been through the professionally produced newsletters, both in paper and via websites (mercia and websmiths) and found, like you, that most clients didn't read them.  I discussed them with many clients who said that most of the content wasn't relevant so they may have read the first few but then didn't bother.  On the other side of the coin, we had clients who read every last word and were pains in the [***] by asking irrelevant questions about irrelevant articles that would never affect them.  Also, when they include tax payment date reminders, you always get some who misunderstand the differences between PAYE and SA/CT and either pay the wrong amount on the wrong day or worse, phone or email and waste our time to put them right.

At the end of the day, if you have a diverse client base, you can't have a "one size fits all" newsletter.  Articles re Ltd co's will be irrelevant to sole traders/partnerships and vice versa, so if you've a client base 50:50 then half your clients won't be interested in each article!  Even then, if the article is about main rate CT or quarterly CT payments, it won't be relevant to the majority small companies, so an article about that may only be relevant to 1 or 2 clients!

We gave them up a couple of years ago and now do our best to write/email personally to all clients affected when something important changes.  

For example, back end of last year, when the ESC C16 withdrawal became fixed, we went through our client list and picked the clients most likely to be affected, i.e. those with reserves over £25k or who are realistically likely to aspire to reserves of over £25k - it turned out to be about 10, so 10 personalised emails (narrative mostly copied and pasted), with just personalised figures - result was exceptional client feedback.

More recently with the Budget, our take was that very little was to change for most of our clients, and what would change was extensively covered in the media, i.e. the usual allowance increases, VAT thresholds, etc., so we took the decision not to send everyone an email, but instead to interrogate our client list for clients affected by the main changes, i.e. clients with turnover close to the VAT re/dereg threshold and emailed them personally to tell them - what's the point in telling those who are way over or way under the threshold.  Likewise with the pasty tax - we entered into deep dialogue with our one client who may be affected - what's the point mentioning it to garages, IT consultants, etc?

When we started, we were quite frightened in case it caused too much work, but in fact, with a decent client database backed up by good long term client knowledge, we've been able to do sort and select very quickly and easily.  

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By Halex
14th May 2012 14:42

E-mail newsletters

I think the sheer volume of e-mail marketing means that most people disregard the majority of it. I am very irritated by the number of larger organisations that automatically enrol you when you make a purchase, even as a guest. Like many people I don't get round to unsubscribing, I often classify it as junk and future e-mails from the sender follow automatically.Who wants the read a daily/weekly newsletter? Unfortunately any newsletter however infrequent can be caught in the same way. 

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