Length

Short and concise is the aim with most ENs. Lengthy articles are generally not advisable, although one main item each time is usually acceptable. A good length for an EN is probably around 1,000 to 1,500 words (two or three ‘pages’ of text): this is straightforward to read and sufficiently short to retain most people’s interest. It is also important to keep your EN relatively small in terms of file size so that it does not take too long to download – and some people think they should be kept below 24kb in size to avoid some ISPs (AOL in particular) converting them into attachments which may then be discarded by some recipients.

One way of keeping your EN short is to provide links to items elsewhere rather than printing them in full in the EN itself. For example you may provide a link to your website where more in-depth information can be located, or you may provide a link to an advertiser or to an events organiser.

Topics

Although you could have several different topics in an EN, it is probably more effective to focus on one main ‘theme’ in each issue.

Content

In order to generate content for an EN you can follow the general guidelines given in Chapter 6. There are many different kinds of content that can be included in ENs; some good ones are:

• up-to-date news
• tips and ideas
• contact details for useful products, services, people and organisations.

 

If you are running a commercial organisation, you can use your EN to generate more business. This tends to work well when you don’t simply use the EN as a promotional tool, but mainly include articles and tips that are useful to your readers. And the more focussed your items are, and the more they are used to produce specific results – such as informing people about the benefits of a particular product or service – the more effective they are likely to be. Using an EN in this way is often more effective than conventional advertising and is an excellent way of keeping your name and activities in front of your potential customers or clients.

Finally, if you allow your own personality and style to come through in your EN, it is likely to be attractive to readers as it becomes more of a person-to-person interaction, rather than a detached information document.

Archiving Content

When you produce a regular EN, it is useful to arrange for an archive so that readers can refer to earlier items, and new subscribers can search for items published before they ‘joined’. This can be done by filing them on your website, and also having an index by which they can be located.

Charging

Whether to charge for an EN is an issue that faces many publishers. On the whole, people are not willing to pay for a ‘standard’ EN, and asking for a payment is likely to deter the majority of your potential readers. It is, however, possible to charge for advertising within your EN, or for web-links from it, or for sponsorship of a particular issue, or – if your EN is sufficiently specialised and valued by your readers – to charge for the newsletter itself. And if you have subscribers who are happy for their details to be passed on to third parties, you may also be able to sell your mailing list to advertisers.

Format

Because formatting may be changed when sending from one computer to another, as the settings on the recipient’s browser may be different, as may the operating system on the computer (e.g. Windows or Mac), it can be a good idea to put in a carriage return at the end of each line, rather than simply allowing the computer to automatically ‘wrap round’ lines – this should ensure that the recipient receives the text in the format in which you sent it.

This also means that your right-hand margins will not be ‘justified’, but this, in any case, is better for most newsletters as it gives a more informal and personalised feel. It is also useful to look at your EN on different browsers (see Glossary, Appendix 3) and monitors to check how it comes across – this is particularly important with ones that are produced as web pages. You can download the major browsers free from their companies’ websites and then use them to check how your EN looks when different people receive it.

When considering format you should also think about the form in which to produce your EN:

• The simplest form is to have it as the body of an email – this is simple, although design features will be very minimal; it does have the advantage of not including an attachment, so that readers who dislike having to open attachments are more encouraged to look at what you have sent them. Email newsletters are fast to download and quick to produce.
• The next two options for ENs are files produced either as RTF (Rich Text Format) or HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language). RTF is a simple format, which is used to produce text without elaborate graphics. HTML is more sophisticated and is used to produce web pages. With HTML it is possible to have an index of items at the top of the newsletter with the facility for readers to click on any one of them and be taken straight to that particular item – an invaluable feature in a newsletter of any substantial length. Of course, to use some of these features it is necessary to be connected to the Internet, which not everybody wishes to do just to read a newsletter. In case you have some subscribers who do not have the facility to read HTML pages, it may be worth offering them RTF as an alternative. To produce your newsletter on a word processor in either RTF or HTML, just go to ‘File’, then ‘Save As’ and select which of the two formats you want.
• The next choice is to produce your EN only on your website, so that people have to view it there – this means they have to take the initiative in order to view it and also have to be online to do so; however you may get more readers in this way through people coming across your newsletter when searching the web.
• Finally, you can produce your EN as a PDF, which is probably an over-complex way of producing and sending what is actually a simple kind of publication. Also, with PDFs people need special software in order to read them and remember too, that if you have large PDF files, or other large attachments, they may take a good deal of time to download and some ISPs limit the size of attachments that may be sent and therefore will not forward these to people.