Many years ago, someone told me that email newsletters were dead and that they were not an effective way to promote a business. “They won’t be around for much longer,” he told me.

At the time, I thought he was wrong and I still do. An email newsletter, when done properly, can be a very effective and cost efficient way of keeping in touch with many people at once, to promote your business. In this blog I’ll give you an example of how best to do this.

Let me tell you about two email newsletters that have been going very successfully now for many years – and how they bring new business to the people who write them.

How do Email Newsletters work for our clients?

Sue Ferguson has been running Options HR for ten years. Back in August 2010 we started writing and publishing email newsletters for Sue. You can read the past issues here. Every two months, Sue and I agree a topic and we write about it. The subjects are either topical – recent changes to Employment Law and how they affect businesses – or something that her clients ask about. We’ve written newsletters on how to recruit staff, how to train them and improve their performance and, if all else fails, how to sack them. Each issue contains useful, practical advice that any small business owner can put into practice – and it’s all free.

Earlier this year we wrote a newsletter full of interviewing tips, based on a workshop Sue ran for one of her clients. Another client would contact her now and then, for small pieces of work regarding his staff and she hadn’t heard from him for a while. Having read the issue on interviewing, he called Sue. He’d shown the newsletter to some of his managers – people responsible for recruiting new members of staff. Most of them had no training in interviewing and didn’t know about many of the issues we wrote about. When it comes to interviewing, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily end up on the wrong side of the law. With this in mind, Sue’s client asked if she would put together an interviewing skills training course for the whole of his management team!

It can take time, but if you keep sending a newsletter on a regular basis, ‘quiet’ clients will come back and ask for more. Give it a go and see what happens!