Find Your Newsletter Voice

We are extremely excited to kick-off a new series called Successful Newsletters. In the series, we talk with real business owners about their experiences with newsletters.  You’ll get to hear first hand what’s worked and what they recommend avoiding.  This will prove to be a very helpful resource for anyone who wants to get their message out.

Our first guest author, Whitney Smith is an amazing ceramic artist based out of Oakland, California, you can find her work HERE (great gift idea!).  Whitney has been writing newsletters for almost 5 years now and has some valuable tips on how to avoid creating a boring email and find your voice.

Find Your Newsletter Voice

By: Whitney Smith

I’ve been sending newsletters to my customers for almost 5 years, and I shudder when I think of my early newsletter efforts.  I was collecting all of these emails from clients and potential customers, therefore, it was my duty to do some email marketing with a newsletter.  Dutifully, I sent them out, month after month, and they were dry, informational missives even I thought were boring.

There are plenty of articles on the Internet explaining how to organize your newsletter, and I have read a lot of them to nail down the mechanics of my newsletter: getting the most important information across first, keeping your company image consistent, creating a subject line that your clients will be interested in, putting in relevant links to boost traffic.  But for me, the biggest struggle was finding my newsletter “voice.” I felt I came across as this kind of friendly, yet businesslike robot in my newsletter.  I provided useful information, but there was no heart, no inspiration.  And I’m an artist, heart and inspiration is how I make my living! And here I was, sending this thing out into the world every month that didn’t reflect who I thought I was at all.

Finding my voice in the newsletter meant I had to first think about what I thought a newsletter was.  I realized I was confusing “newsletter” with “newspaper.”  In a newspaper, journalists report the facts.  There is no room for opinion, or silliness, or random tangents.  But a newsletter is not a newspaper. A newsletter is simply an outgrowth of any business, and for it to be successful with customers, it needs to reflect the company ethos.  After all, even if the customer has not bought anything yet, has already bought into your business enough to hand over their email.  Newsletters are a chance to show them who you really are.

In the interest of improving my boring newsletter,  I had to take a leap.  Rather than trying to imitate a kind of friendly, yet businesslike robot, I had to be the real me.  The real me has a sense of humor, likes to tell stories, share pictures, and wax on about new stuff I’m making and excited about.  Also, the real me likes to sell my work, a lot of it, so I always include direct shopping links.  Once I got over my fear of being myself in my newsletter, I thought they were much stronger, much more interesting, and something people may actually look forward to receiving. While my newsletters may no longer follow a checklist of requirements to make the perfect newsletter, I think they have heart, which is more important to me.  Check out my latest one and see what you think.

I didn’t think I could be the real me in a newsletter, because I was afraid of turning people off or worse, being judged and dismissed.  Then I realized that being judged for being boring is far, far worse than being judged for being myself.

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