The Nuts and Bolts of Producing Your Own Newsletter

To send out a quality newsletter that reflects the high professional standards you bring to your work as a financial professional requires multiple tasks and types of expertise. If you decide to produce a newsletter on your own, consider this list of the basic steps.

Ideas, writing, and editing. The first step is to choose four or five topics about trends, strategies, or products that are timely and appropriate. For maximum effect, newsletter articles should be targeted to specific audiences. The articles you write for readers who are retired or approaching retirement age might be significantly different from the articles for younger readers.

Once the topics are in place, you need to locate statistics or facts to back them up and draw the reader to the subject. A good fact or statistic should "pop out" and make a reader want to know more. Newspaper archives, government websites, independent research, economic studies and papers, and interviews are all good sources for facts and figures.

After the stories are written, it's critical to have an editor look for spelling and grammatical errors and to provide feedback on the readability of the articles and the impression they convey. It's also critical to have the articles fact-checked by a qualified professional. A newsletter should never contain a factual error.

Design. Once the articles are written and edited, it's time to put them on a page. A good graphics software program can help build pages, place art and photographs, and lay out the text. However, simply buying a graphics program may not be enough. Graphic designers need education and experience to position art, design pages, and combine elements in a way that makes the entire newsletter work together. They also must know the technical specifications to prepare the newsletter for printing; these may vary depending upon the specific printing method.

Compliance. Financial professionals are required to submit their marketing pieces to their corporate compliance and/or legal departments to ensure that the language and images aren't misleading or promissory. It takes experience to write an article with supporting charts and tables that meets rigorous compliance guidelines. If a story is off-base and requires too many compliance changes, it may lose its focus and meaning. Some broker-dealers require that client literature must have a clean review letter from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Articles on most products must have appropriate disclosures.

Print. The cost to print a newsletter will vary depending on the process used, the number printed, and the quality of the paper and printing. Should you do it yourself or send the job to a professional? Expect to pay about $1.00 per page for professional four-color printing, perhaps less if you qualify for a volume discount. Also consider the envelope and reply card. Will they match your newsletter and enhance the overall look and feel of the piece that reaches your clients? Or will the job look thrown together and amateurish?

List management. Maintaining a customer mailing list is much simpler with the computer software available today. Nevertheless, a significant amount of time and energy may be required to keep a list up-to-date. Making address corrections, adding new clients and prospects, and purging old accounts can help control costs by preventing newsletters from going to the wrong people.

Addressing. There are a number of ways to address envelopes, and each sends a different message. Handwriting is a nice touch but time-consuming. So is feeding envelopes through your computer's printer. Mailing labels can be effective, but will yours be adequate for the postal service and compatible with its machinery? The method you choose to address envelopes can influence how quickly they reach their destination, as well as the customer's first impression.

Postage and mailing. Understanding and meeting postal requirements for large mailings can require a significant investment of time and money. Just getting the whole mailing out the door can be overwhelming. If you intend to use reply cards, plan to deal with another layer of regulations regarding size, shape, and postage.

As you can see, it takes a lot of time, effort, and expertise to create your own newsletter. Before taking on a major project like this, it may be helpful to do a cost-benefit analysis. A professional newsletter publisher has the experience and resources to do all of this work to high-quality standards — often at a fraction of your cost in valuable time that could be better spent working with clients.

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