In my last post I took you through planning your newsletter - deciding how much time and money you want to invest, and what you’re hoping to get out of the whole thing. This time we consider what to write.

Promoting your special offers and practice news

It’s a good idea to include a section in your newsletter promoting your services. You might want to simply list your specialities and prices; or if you have a current special offer, you can include that. Give special offers an expiry date to encourage people to pick up the phone and book right now. Open days and other special events also fit here.

Some therapists include only this section in their newsletter, but I’d highly recommend including something educational as well. This gives people a good reason to read your newsletter, and to keep on receiving it.

Educating your clients

As I’ve mentioned before, you can use your newsletter to educate people about what you do, thereby increasing referrals and repeat business. To do this, you’ll need to include a piece in each newsletter on one aspect of your work. It works best if you write from the perspective of solving your clients’ problems, rather than blowing your own trumpet. For example, you could include an exercise to prevent back pain, share tips for healthy knees, or explain how to avoid headaches. Stress relief tips always go down well, and are easy to write. Tailor the content to suit the areas you work in.

Write it yourself, or reuse other content?

If you’re good at writing and have the time, then it makes perfect sense to create your own unique content. If not, then there are other options:

• Are there other therapists you could team up with? You might be able to take it in turns to write something, and share the costs of sending a joint newsletter.
• I’m thinking about setting up an e-group for therapists to share newsletter content. To join you’d need to contribute an article of your own every so often, and you’d get access to all the other articles contributed by other therapists. If you’re interested, send me an email, and if there’s enough interest I’ll set something up.
• You can republish content created by others; much as Angela does in her superb monthly roundup of health articles. Your clients will still appreciate the useful information you’re sending them even if you’re not writing it all yourself. Make sure you seek permission to republish articles so as not to violate copyright, and always quote the original source of the article.
• You can also buy pre-written articles which you can publish as is, or modify them before use. These are called private-label-rights (PLR) articles. You can search for PLR articles related to your field on Google. Client Education Newsletters for Massage are available through BodyworkBiz.

How much should you write?

How much to write depends on your format. Reading from a screen is hard on the eyes, so email newsletters should be kept brief (whilst still containing useful content). With paper, you can write a bit more, but considering how busy people are these days, I’d still try and keep things fairly short. Busy readers will also appreciate being able to quickly skim-read your newsletter to pick out the most relevant pieces to them. There’s an article on skim-reading on my web site (while it’s aimed at writing for your web site, the tips apply equally well to writing newsletters).

Summary

We’ve discussed the different types of content you can include in your newsletter, as well as options for creating it.

Next time, we’ll look at how to get people to sign up.

Happy Marketing!

Catherine Doyle

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Founder, Soothed - web design & online marketing for natural therapists
Editor, natural bloom - sharing the inside story on holistic health

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Tags: massage newsletter

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.