Newsletters 101

Design Considerations | Printing Cost Considerations
Promotional Newsletters | Non-Profit Organization Newsletters
Other Newsletters

Newsletters are the staple of Desktop Publishing success. They come in many forms, but the common denominator is information. Getting information to people who want or need it is the bottom line. How you fund them and whether they are for promotion, information dispersal or revenue generation is where the differences are made.

All newsletters need to convey information of interest to the reader in some form. Regardless of the objective--promotion, education or anything else--the design of the newsletter and printing costs should always be considered carefully.

Design Considerations

In some cases, the design consideration will result in the decision that design is not a paramount issue, but it should always be considered. The chief element to keep in mind is the functionality of the information feed.

Functionality of the information feed is the actual ease of understanding of the material being presented. Sometimes a straight ahead article is all you need to deliver information, but everyone has heard the cliche "A picture is worth a thousand words." Sometimes, a graph will do it better, or having a picture will break the tedium of a page full of dense words. Other times, lists and side bar boxes which contain related information should be used. All these things go into the design.

If your target audience is hungry or highly motivated, you could just dump plain, small size text onto a page in any format, and they will read it. But the conveying of information is usually more subtle and needs more care than that.

The distinguishing factor is whether or not you wish to sell an idea (or product or message) or simply provide information of interest and value to the reader. The more "sell" involved, the more important design becomes.

One way to look at this is comparing it to dating. When you meet someone for the first time, you want to look your best and may spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for that event. After several dates, you relax your standard somewhat in order for your partner to see you in less-than-perfect form. Once married, the necessity of appearance drops significantly. So the less sold your audience is, the more dressed up your material will need to be.

You'll notice, good advertisements include catch phrases and attention getting devices. Once reader attention is captured, the sell will follow. But then, one look at the Wall Street Journal, and you will see that the manner in which information is presented is unimportant to motivated readers. (Not to mention that any daily which contains so much information has virtually no time for superfluous design.) On the other end of the spectrum is USA Today whose target audience is not as intensely interested in the information to apply the necessary brain-power to digest it. TOP END

Printing Cost Considerations

The way printing prices work, you can usually double the run for half the price of any given amount. For instance, if 100 units cost $100 the unit price will be $1 each. But if you double the run to 200 units, the cost will probably only go up to $150 and the per unit price drops to 75¢. This isn't an exact principle, but it is true in a general sense because most of the cost of printing is in the set up of the job.

The actual materials cost (ink and paper) is almost nothing compared to the cost of shooting plates, setting up the press and paying the press operator. It takes just as much set up time to print 1 copy as it does to set up to run 50,000 copies. Once a press is rigged, depending on its capabilities, it will churn out thousands of copies in a very short time. You can count on being able to do thousands of impressions in the same time as 100. In marketing this is called economies of scale.

Newsletters are predominantly distributed to readers who are already predetermined to be interested or have proven interest by subscription. The result is a visually undistinctive quality to all newsletters. The difference is in the content of the articles, not the look. Closer examination of newsletters reveals the different types that abound. TOP END

Promotional Newsletters

Promotional Newsletters have more to do with advertising than with anything else. These are usually produced out of some invisible national office and directed at specific industries like health or insurance.

A production company produces a polished, professional and complete newsletter full of relatively generic tips and information making sure to avoid topics which may be region-specific. They leave the return address, or "produced by" section blank because they sell the finished piece to various local companies across the nation. They find buyers who then put their name on the piece and mail it to their customers as a "gimmie" or support service. The illusion created is that the local company whose name is on the piece is the company who produced it.

This is really advertising for the local company; an after-sale reinforcement to the customer that the company is knowledgeable, willing to share information and caring when it comes to customer issues. The local company does none of the work but pays for everything. Since the actual production firm is careful to sell only one package in each region, most people will never know that the XYZ Insurance Company bulletin is identical to hundreds of others across the country.

Because everything but the company name is identical on every piece, high quantities are printed which drives the per unit price down to a point that a local company can afford to pay for a complete newsletter much more easily than producing their own.

In the case of the national, generic newsletter, the local company will purchase only the exact number of pieces they need. Let's say they buy 2,000 out of a national run of 100,000. It would only take companies in 50 different regions to account for the whole run. Each local company buys 1/50th of the run. Instead of 50 separate companies paying for their own individual run of 2,000, there is only one big run of 100,000.

There is plenty of room in the print savings due to economies of scale for the national company to add in print markups and production costs to each of the local company's purchase price for them to make a profit. The local firms still pay much less than if they had to print the unit themselves, and this does not even take into account the cost and time of producing the newsletter in the first place. The national firm's pre-press production is divided between the number of companies who purchase some quantity of pieces. Each local company pays a fraction of the production cost but gets the full benefit.

The sacrifice is the generic nature to the newsletter and lack of control over content or appearance. But they really only want something the looks good and keeps their name in front of their customers. TOP END

Non-Profit Organization Newsletters

Another form of newsletter is based much more on the side of the target audience. There are many non-profit organizations in every city which are funded through a combination of government grants and personal donations. Regardless of their area of focus, they will be highly motivated to get vital information about their services to people who will benefit from them. Also, they will have plenty of information they wish to get to the people they already serve. In addition, organizational newsletters are used for fund raising purposes.

In this case, a generic newsletter will not work unless the local organization carries services based on a national organization. The national center will most likely provide a newsletter intact on which the local chapter will imprint their tag. This works the same way as the promo scenario above, but with better results because the national and local organizations are coordinated and the interests of the readers are served with greater attention to their needs. The same quantity production and print savings apply and can be divided between are the local chapters.

Local chapters who find the restrictions of nationally produced newsletters to great and independent organizations who have no national unit may decide to produce their own newsletters. Most of the time, they find resources within the organization to produce them. Occasionally, they use outside services to prepare and reproduce their newsletters. It all depends on their target audience, the purpose of the newsletter, internal resources and funding.

If the information is being distributed to readers who benefit from the services, the production quality of the newsletter is least important. Readers are motivated and usually receive the piece for free, so, except for the functionality of the information feed, the way it looks is of little consequence. This type of newsletter will be created by a volunteer who may be a budding desktop publisher or is just interested in design and knows how to work a computer. In-office duplicators are used for duplication. The U.S. Post Office will still be the primary source of distribution.

Locally produced, non-profit organization newsletters are also used to give information to fund providers, in which case the production quality will need to go up a bit--but not too much! Fund providers want to now their donations are put to good use, but don't want to think too much is being spent on production costs. It's the same dilemma of fund raising materials. They have to compete with materials generated by national ad campaigns with huge budgets, but not look too polished or potential providers will think a) too much is spent on fund raising, or b) the organization obviously does not need them if they can afford a high-gloss, fancy campaign. TOP

Other Newsletters

Any club, fraternity, sorority, civic organization or business can probably benefit from a newsletter. If an aggressive ad campaign is developed, a newsletter can actually be a revenue generating venture. A decision will need to be made as to what the purpose of the organization is, however. Producing a newsletter is many times not the principle reason for existence of an organization, so ad sales are usually used only to offset production costs.

Also, anytime advertisers get into the picture, their needs and attitudes start to become important and can jeopardize or overshadow the needs of the readers. Any newsletter or other publication which is run without advertisements is inherently more responsive to reader needs.

Newsletters are made to be distributed internally to members or employees or externally to existing or potential customers or members. The same principle of the "sell" applies here as it does above. The more "outside" your audience, the better looking the newsletter should be. You never want to convey to potential customers anything less than success.

The trick of an external newsletter, or any aspect of business for that matter, is creating the highest appearance of success for the least amount of money. The less you spend, the more you have to keep.

Stay tuned to MacPerspective for tricks of the newsletter trade. TOP

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