Newsletter dilemma

[crystaltash]

Hey geeks! I'm in a bit of a dilemma with regards to my newsletters that I send to clients. I've been posting them out for over a year now but as my client base is growing (yay!) it's getting a bit out of hand with the costing issues. I am taking email addresses for everyone now, but I'm still posting out about 140 hard copies every month. The whole thing costs about £100 a month what with the printing and postage. I can't afford this much longer as I've taken on a part timer and have a few more outgoings than when I started. I have done several promotions to try and get clients to give me their email addresses, but I only got a few.
Should I tell customers that from now on I'll only be emailing the newsletter? Or maybe post one every two months? I just don't know how to handle this. Any advice would be great geeks. I really need to watch my spending and at the moment, the newsletter is the only thing that I can cut.
Thanks guys

xxx

 

[Ruth Mills]

I'd definitely recommend moving your newsletter to email - maybe you could create a nice PDF document for your newsletter that you could attach to your email - that way you could have images as well as text; if you have a website, then consider putting the newsletter on that for people to download too.

Definitely worth the money saving - as well as the environmental benefits of saving all those trees lol...

 

[Ruth Mills]

Maybe you could consider an incentive to get people to join your email list too - like entering them into a draw to win a gift voucher redeemable against treatments in the salon or something like that?

 

[Beautification]

I was going to say what ruth already said,lol Tell them it's to help the environment.

 

[Martin Duffy]

I simply told my clients that it was becoming prohibitively expensive to send out paper copies due to rising postage costs & that they would be moving to e-mail form. For those who don't have e-mail I always have a few paper ones & a laminated salon copy in reception. I haven't sent a paper newsletter for a year & a half now!

If you have Publisher you can make an e-mail newsletter on there with text & pictures, as well as links to the appropriate pages on your website, and there's an option to send the finished publication as an e-mail rather than an attachment, which means the client doesn't have to open it as an attachment (many are wary of this nowdays!). If you like I can send you a copy of my newsletter for the New Year to see how I do mine? If so, just PM me your e-mail & I'll send it to you.