Newsletters go hand in hand with marketing and have always made a lot of sense.

However, in our experience, e-Newsletters have been a source of frustration, so we have looked at some of the things that haven't worked in the past and come up with a series of articles to make your newsletter more successful.

Consistency is the essence of success
One of the biggest issues is the time that goes by between issues. Your ain is to maintain your company's constant visibilty. You need to publish on a regular basis so you are "in the frame" when your audience is ready to buy. If you don't it maybe a case of "out of sight. out of mind" and you need to avoid this.

When you send out the e-Newsletter your wareness peaks, you can see this from your stats, and you can see a rapid tail off in readership / visibility within days after the send. I know this from publishing "What's New in Publishing" the awareness only lasts for three days, hence the e-Newsletter is a weekly publication.

E-Newsletters that are monthly, or worse quarterly, do not have much traction in the marketplace and your message / brand is not recognised.

Too many pages / articles in an issue
We tend to keep the maximum number of articles in e-Newsletters to less than 8. If you have more articles increase the frequency of your newsletter.

Also the more articles you have in your newsletter increases the number of decisions your audience has to make and also increases the amount of content you have to write - so keep it to a sensible number and be consistent. For this e-Newsletter I work to a format of five articles.

Shorter newsletters fit into todays fast pace of business life, readers are in a hurry and they want to cut directly to the chase.

Keep your newsletters short and punchy and if you have a lot of articles increase the frequency to gain greater visibility.