The economy is in bad shape and this affects small business owners like yourself. You want to continue doing business but you need to save and cut costs whenever possible. You want to use any extra money you have to reinvest in your business to make it grow and make even more money. But you don’t have the money or time to spend in expensive marketing endeavors or materials but you still want to promote your business. Marketing is essential to any business, big or small. Since you can’t pay the big marketing bucks or hire marketing specialists you need to do it on your own. A newsletter is a great marketing tool to keep your existing customers and potential new customers interested in your products and services, and there is a way to do it efficiently and cheaply.
In this tutorial, I will show you how easy and quickly it is to put together a simple two page newsletter using Microsoft Word 2003 that you can mail or email to your customers. In the example that I provide I create a newsletter for a fictitious company that provides tutoring services called Eureka To Go!. And to make your life even simpler I am attaching the template at the end of this tutorial so you can download it and format it as you need it.
Please note that there are many template options within Microsoft and also available online, but since you don’t really have a lot of time, I have done the research for you and come up a simple two page newsletter template that you can print or email. There are many, many newsletter templates available but they usually have more than two pages and I know I wouldn’t read a four page or a six page newsletter either in hard copy or online. I don’t have time for that and your customers don’t have the time either, so the newsletter in this tutorial is just two pages with most of the useful information included in the first page. Now one page maybe two I can handle and so do most people. The one thing that turns people off is information overload and too much to read, so we are going to make their lives easier but at the same time provide them with a nice newsletter with useful information about their favorite products and services. So here we go:
Step 1: Open Microsoft Word 2003, click new document, go down to Newsletter and select “School Newsletter (2-col., 2-pp.)” – I know it’s called School Newsletter but the template is the easiest I found to work it and now in the next steps we are going to format it for our fictitious company.
Step 2: For this step, you need to have a couple of things ready and saved in your computer. You should have your company logo image saved and about three images that you want to add to the newsletter. Also you need to have your content already saved and ready to be inserted. I recommend you keep your images in an image folder and your content in another folder so it is easy to find and insert into your newsletter.
Next, click on the top name box and enter the name of your company with the appropriate color and logo. Delete the extra content in the “Issue Box” and add the date and issue number for your newsletter. Click on the red title box and change it to the color that you use for your company. As you can see in our example, I changed the title to “Eureka to Go! Tutoring services” and the red font was changed to orange throughout the newsletter because that is the color scheme for our fictitious company. I also changed the page outline box to black. It should look like this.
Step 3: Now to change the images in the newsletter, the fastest way is to double click on the already existing image, and it takes you to the “Format” menu, click on the “change picture” located in the upper left hand side, and it will let you search for the folder where you have the images saved. So find the folder, select the image and click OK, and your image will appear in the newsletter. Repeat this step for all other other images. Now for the titles, click on the title boxes and change the title of the articles, then select the article content box, delete the dummy text and insert your article contents. Then finally select the content article box and click on “Justify” so that all the content is nicely centered. In our example, I deleted some extra boxes that I did not need and added new titles that were appropriate for the fictitious company. My final newsletter for this company looks like this. However yours will be formatted according to your company’s needs.
Please feel free to download the template that we just created and change it as need be. Finally, a couple of pointers for your mailings. You can take your newsletter and save it to a pdf file and email it to your customers or potential customers if you have an email list. You can also print it and mail it to your customers, but I only recommend this if you have a small list because you need to pay for postage, but on the bright side, people like to get newsletters in the mail – it’s like receiving a magazine or something that they can read for leisure. As opposed to receiving a brochure which most people identify as marketing or advertising. Just make sure you print it in color and do front and back, and provide your contact information. I hope these templates and advise can help you continue marketing your products and services while keeping costs down but quality high.
Newsletter Template (32)
