In this issue

Last month I explained the benefits of a regular email newsletter or e-zine to back up your other marketing and sales efforts.  An email correspondence will

• Remind prospective customers that you exist
• Establish you as an authority on the subject
• Reinforce the original sales message
• Keep customers up to date with new developments in your field - which maybe you can help them exploit.

But to be successful you need to keep the quality up and the usibility high - good sign-up and removal facilities, a crisp usable design and so on.

You should all do it - but...

Many if not all design companies should have this as part of their marketing mix, however:

• The technology can be daunting
• Content is work - you need to devote a significant slice of time each month.

So I have a plan.

My big idea this month is that we should form a consortium of designers to create a newsletter / e-zine which would then be distributed to each designer's customers.  This way the effort and cost of development would be shared.

The newsletter

Although the content is a group effort, each newsletter would be branded with the designers look. 

• The design will be customised (within fairly broad limitations).
• It could have a message from the designer as part of the content. 
• It would come from the designer, i.e. if the recipient hit reply they would be sending a mail to the designer. 
• If a recipient decides to remove themselves from the list, the acknowledgement page should look like a part of the designer's web site. 

In other words to the recipient the newsletter is totally a product of the designer.

The content

The more designers we can recruit the more the work of content development can be shared.  However if we got 12 companies involved for example then we would call on each designer for one article a year. 

Some of us are better at this sort of thing than others, and it is important that the style is reasonably consistent from one issue to another, so I propose a writer is employed to edit the content. 

Subjects

We can all use our imagination to come up with subjects:

• New developments in printing
• New developments in packaging
• Comparison of exhibition stand products
• and of course - developments on the web

Although we all present ourselves as generalists, in fact most designers have a specialty: corporate branding; packaging; exhibitions; web and so on.  So it will obviously work better if we have one company that can cover each area.  Ideally each topic would be 'owned' by a company who would be responsible for authoritative content on that issue. 

The circulation

Each designer will be able to upload their own circulation list.  Of course two designers may be targeting the same individual, and we can't have the same newsletter in different guises going to the same person.  We would de-dupe them and only send one newsletter to each person.  When it comes to conflicts the policy would be first come first served.  

Monitoring responses

We can monitor opening rates but for a number of reasons this is not very reliable.  We can certainly record clickthroughs to the designer's web site. 

What would this all cost

If we went ahead with this we (Textor) would want to recover any development costs over time, and if we had an editor there would be a cost associated with that.

I don't know what people would consider reasonable but I suspect that we should target something in the region of £75-£150 per month per designer depending on numbers.  Maybe a £100-200 setup fee. 

Plus of course an article once or twice per year.

Getting started.

Anyone interested in taking this further please email be at bob@textor.com.  If I get enough people we can maybe get together at some suitable venue and thrash out the details.