Simon Payn's Effective Customer Newsletters

Email Newsletters for Real Estate Agents, Mortgage Brokers and Insurance Agents and Brokers

Here's a (mercifully infrequent) new product announcement.

I've recently launched an email newsletter (ezine) service in addition to my printed newsletter service.

It's aimed at real estate agents, mortgage brokers and insurance agents.

I've partnered with Vertical Response to get the benefit of their excellent email delivery product and customer service.

To find out more, click on one of these links: real estate newsletters, mortgage newsletters, insurance newsletters.

Small Gift, Big Benefit

'Tis the season for giving.

My dry cleaner hasn't forgotten that. When I brought in my shirts and pants today, the owner handed me a lint remover and thanked me for being a customer this year.

Every business should do something like this, because:

• It recognizes the relationship between the business and its clients, cementing that relationship with a gift
• It illustrates gratitude on the part of the business - clients like to feel that the business appreciates them spending money there
• It gives the business owner the opportunity to personally think the customer for their business

The gift is not an expensive one (that doesn't matter). I bet it pays for itself multiple times over the next year in increased customer loyalty.

If you have a newsletter, as you reminding your clients that you have a gift waiting for them?

(I was also given a second gift - a clinical strength deodorant. Maybe that one wasn't such a great idea.)

Two Great Sources of Images for Your Newsletter

I've mentioned before that you can find great images on Flickr and stock.xchng. Just make sure you check whether the photographer is giving you permission to use the image. Sometimes you just need to send a message asking for permission - I find that most happily give it.

(Creative Commons licenses, used frequently on Flickr, are the easiest way to make sure you have permission to use an image.)

Here's a quick way to search for images on Flickr. With Compfight, you put in a search term and the screen fills with thumbnail images to choose from. It's quite fast.

Here's a screen-shot after a search for "Toronto".

Kudos to Mike Sansone at ConverStations for discovering this for me.

Find Newsletter Writing Daunting? How to Banish the Fear of the Blank Page

I had lunch the other week with a new entrepreneur. She thought a newsletter would help one of her clients in the not-for-profit sector to communicate with its donors.

A good idea.

But she was daunted by the prospect of having to create one - designing it, finding pictures, writing headlines, making sure everything lined up and looked pretty. And that's not to mention the actual writing of the articles.

So, understandably, she'd procrastinated.

This is what I told her:

It's not about the form, it's what you say that counts.

The best newsletters are authentic communications between a business owner (or charity director) and readers.

They're about sharing information and, most importantly, sharing the passion that brought the two of them together in the first place.

If she could write a heartfelt letter from the charity's directors, telling donors about how their support had changed the lives of the children who benefited, and if they could illustrate that with stories from the children themselves, then she would have a newsletter.

Today I received a draft of the newsletter, written on 2 pages of letter-sized paper in Arial font.

It was a triumph. It succeeded in sharing the charity directors' passion and enthusiasm for their work. It was an authentic, honest communication.

It was a successful newsletter.

Do you agree? Does a newsletter need to look like a newsletter?