How to write a newsletter – Part 2

In my last post, I started a short series about how to write a good newsletter. This first post concentrated on newsletters that offer discounts and are most appropriate for companies which run an online store.

This newsletter is going to focus on another type of newsletter, the ones that focus on news.

News newsletters can be very effective. They tend to focus on news that is of genuine interest to the audience.

No newsletter should focus on news of the company itself. I can’t name a single newsletter that I have ever read that focussed on news on the company itself that was of genuine interest to me. The reason is: nobody cares. The only people who care about what is happening at the company are the people who work there. Obviously, what is happening at the company is of interest to people. However, nobody cares that much, that they would like to read about it in a weekly/monthly or quarterly newsletter. If you have company news you wish to share, I suggest you stick it onto the company blog or news section of the website. But not in a newsletter.

There is one exception and that is company internal newsletters. Obviously, the people at the company are interested in what is happening at the company. If you operate a mid or larger sized company, this newsletter might indeed be well read and effective.

When I analyzed the news newsletters that I like (and subscribe to), I found that the best ones met the following criteria:

1) It appears daily (meaning news is really new).

2) It covers one specific niche 100%. I am guaranteed not to miss anything essential. And even should one bit of news get missed, they are very likely to mention it the next day.

3) I can scan the newsletter very quickly for bits of news relevant to me.

4) ALL the information that is relevant to the news is contained in the newsletter. Outbound links just give me more information, but I don’t need to follow them to see the story. It is very annoying when you need to click backwards and forwards between the browser/email or the different browser windows.

5) The best newsletter go beyond this and introduce a personal view on top of the facts, that make for genuinely interesting and entertaining reading.

The best news newsletter that I have ever read is written by PE Hub and is called the PE Hub Wire (fka PE Week Wire). Screen shots are included below:

This specific newsletter consists of two parts: a) a personal comment section at the top in blue and b) the news. The blue opinion piece are very frequently very insightful and worth the time. The news is not only broken into specific sections, but within each article, key companies and individuals are highlighted. This allows the reader to scan this newsletter very quickly. You don’t neeed to to READ the Newsletter to KNOW what is in it.

Pe Hub Wire appears daily. It covers nearly all important events in the North American private equity scene. Nothing that is truly important gets missed.

To date, I haven’t seen a better news newsletter. Highly recommended.

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How to write a good newsletter – Part 1

Why are there so many poor newsletters? The other day, I had a look at how many of the newsletters that I receive I actually like. I grouped them into three groups:

a) the ones that I really like – 23%

b) the ones I feel indiffierent about – 23%

c) the ones that I think are downright useless – 54%

I then unsubscribed from half of the newsletters that I was receiving.

What makes a good newsletter? I had a look at the ones that I liked and didn’t like. In short, I found only three newsletter formats that worked and one that was really a waste of time. The three formats that worked were:

1) You care about X, here are some special time limited deals

2) You care about news on X, here is ALL that you need to know in one view

3) You care about X, here are some X that you may have never heard about and that might interest you

There are some great newsletter that manage to combine several of these three aspects.

The worst newsletters are the bland corporate ones: ‘We thought you would like to know what has just happened at our company’. Ah. NO.

These kind of announcements should be somewhere on the news section of the corporate website, so that people who care about recent developments can get an impression, but they don’t belong in a newsletter. It is likely the only person who cares about your company is you. People who read newsletters care about the things that they care about, not your company (unless you are Apple of course).

In a small series of posts, I will have a look at the most interesting newsletters that I can find.

Let’s start with the limited deal format.

One of the best newsletter I have ever had the pleasure of subscribing to is sent out by WineDirect.co.uk

WineDirect is a UK based online wine shop. below, I have copied in a screen shot of their weekly newsletter:

WineDirect combines several elements in their newsletter that work very well. First, they introduce you to a different winemaker every week. There is a pretty in depth description of the work of the wine maker that is genuinely interesting. Second, it lists several of the wines by that wine maker. These wines are available at a discount for one week. Each wine is described in detail with tasting notes, tasting scores, and the price (both original and discounted) which give me an immediate idea whether one of these wines might be of interest to me. Clicking on one of the hyperlinks takes you to the online page of the specific wine. Third, nothing else clutters this newsletter. It is all about the weekly special deals.

Overall, this is an exceptionally well made newsletter. I read it with interest every week. There are three reasons that I found why I read it:

1) It is genuinely interesting for somebody with an interest in wine

2) There may be some special deals in here that I might be really interested in

3) It doesn’t ‘push’, it isn’t loud. It is trying to be genuinely helpful.

Great stuff.

Part 2 of this series can be found here.

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HitCompanies

The blogging abstinence is over. After having focussed for the last few months on launching the first web app of my company aiHit, I am now able to focus on some blogging again.

Some background

aiHit, the company that I co-founded, has recently put live a web app called HitCompanies.

HitCompanies is a database of the world’s companies.

This database of companies is automatically assembled from the Web by our intelligent Web crawlers. This involves a substantial amount of artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.

It is our vision that at some point, all companies in the world will have a presence on HitCompanies. So, if you want to find companies by what they do, so you can do business with them, you will be able to find them here, quickly and easily.

The current IT beta of HitCompanies contains some 400k IT companies and we intend to roll out across an increasing number of industry sectors over the coming months. The landing page of HitCompanies looks as follows:

We are assembling structured profiles of companies in HitCompanies. An example screen shot is shown below. Again, all this information is collected and structured automatically by our bots.

Over the coming months, there will be many changes on HitCompanies, as we grow, expand and improve the app. News on developments of HitCompanies can be found on our corporate homepage’s news section: aiHit News.

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