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For many decades, the newsletter has been a powerful marketing tool. The first newsletters were distributed mainly by financial institutions offering advice on investing and money issues. Over the years, industries across the spectrum discovered the cost effective and powerful benefits of creating a newsletter to build relationships and their customer base.

There are many and varied benefits of a newsletter.

Awareness

Publishing a newsletter gives you the opportunity to increase awareness and understanding of your products and services. Customers and prospects may have a limited perspective of what your company can offer if they only view your advertisements or receive promotional email. Newsletter content builds a broader picture. To encourage readers to find out more, include links to your website for more detailed information.

Expertise

A newsletter can demonstrate your expertise and build confidence in your company as a potential supplier. Newsletter content that provides valuable information to customers and prospects helps to establish a company as an industry leader. To establish leadership, include articles that cover important issues in your market sector or share information on industry research. Provide details of any conferences where your company is making a presentation.

Promotion

You can use newsletters to promote products and services or launch new products. Including information on special offers helps reinforce the effect of your advertising and promotional campaigns. Running special offers exclusive to readers enhances the value of the newsletter. You can integrate newsletter content with other elements of a new product launch by including announcements and articles related to the product.

Contact

Issuing newsletters at regular intervals, monthly or quarterly, helps you maintain contact with customers and prospects between purchases or sales calls. If customers buy your products infrequently, you can maintain contact between purchases so you build a strong relationship before the next sales opportunity.

Coverage

Newsletters can help you increase the coverage of your target audience. By placing information about the newsletter on your website, you can capture contact details of new prospects by asking visitors to subscribe. Issuing newsletters by email to all of your customers and prospects is a low cost method of communication, leaving more in your market budget for advertising or other promotional activities.

Newsletters are not only a selling and information tool, they are a competition and anti-competition strategy. If you keep a customer interacting through a newsletter, you stand a better chance of retaining that customer. There are many uses for newsletters today, and they will most likely remain a favorite tool of marketers and other entities for some time to come.