Content has to be powerful

Newsletter is totally dependent on its content and its relevance. Know what you wish to say, followed by the art of saying it. Know what you wish to convey in a specific month of the year. Suppose you are a restaurant owner and you wish to promote your mocktails during summer, then convey the same in that month’s newsletter. Pick up a topic each month and relate it to your product or service.

Know your audience

Define you target audience before starting with your newsletter. Know demography, psychographic construct of you audience. Knowing more about them will help you to develop content of the newsletter while keeping tone, manner, and mood of the newsletter apt. Suppose you are selling an anti-ageing crème to the middle aged women, you should know how to approach them, what should be your style of communication and the like. You can’t afford to lose their interest because of inappropriate style.

Claims come with research

Don’t make big claims without supporting source of facts. Do ample research before making statements. This way you will not land up into problems too. Include facts, statistics, graphs, expert opinions, quotes supporting your research. Such data always build credibility. But don’t forget to mention the source.

Interesting heading

It’s good headlines which instantly draw attention towards the newsletter. Make sure the headline is extremely hard hitting and catchy, evoking curiosity. To make newsletter easy to read break the content into few paragraphs with sub headings.

Audience friendly lingo

Make sure your newsletter has audience friendly, easily comprehensive language, which people can relate to. Avoid technical jargons, too long sentences.

Proofread is important

A newsletter filled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes is highly avoided. Apart from the writer, ask someone else to do the job. Mistakes show writer’s lack of concern, interest, and unprofessionalism. If a brand is laughed at, it is hardly taken seriously. So avoid this.

Now get started with it.

Too much of text

We are often tempted to overstuff our PowerPoint slides with too much of text and long paragraphs. Don’t forget presentation is all about putting points on slides and narrating or elaborating them in detail verbally. Don’t suffocate your presentation with too much of text. No one is interested in reading long texts. So write in bullets or points. Elaborate those verbally. Make sure you leave blank space in your slides.

Too much of animation

Many presenters love to show off their technical skills by animating each line or graphic of the slides. Remember, simplicity always sells. Don’t let the whoosh sound of your presentation distract the audience. It’s highly annoying when repeated. Keep slides simple, minimalistic, and elegant. Don’t animate each and every text or header or graphic element in it. Too much of rotation, blinking, floating, swinging of elements worsen a good content. Don’t use those animated sounds which are highly disturbing.

Baseless data

Presenters often put factual data, without mentioning the source. It’s a strict ‘no no’. Never put facts and figures, graphs without mentioning its source. No data seems authentic and valid without the source mentioned. People may doubt credibility of your presentation.

Reading out from the slides

Often presenters are seen doing nothing, but simply reading out whatever is there on the PowerPoint slide. It not only bores the audience, but also doesn’t add any value to the entire presentation session. You can add substantial value to a presentation only when you give your valuable inputs besides reading out from the slides alone. It also shows presenter’s lack of confidence, public speaking fear and lack of knowledge.

Make sure you avoid these mistakes.

Having sat on both sides of the table, I am pretty much in position to see both side of the picture, and from the position I occupy, both the groups are right. Copywriting is indeed salesmanship in words but it is no less an art. Although I will not qualify it as a high art, but will always give it the credit of being a commercial art.

As I see it, advertisement copy performs two specific functions:

1. It attracts retain the attention of target audience by use of sight and sound.
2. Create a ground (emotional ground) for marketer to pitch in his product.

An advertisement copy needs to be creative in order to reach these two goals and that too in very limited times (typically in 30 to 90 seconds or in a few square inches). Attaining any of the goal using graphs, charts, numbers, and presentation will not be possible, as each one of them lacks the ability to form any connection with the audience which a well-written advertisement has.

An advertisement tells a story: a story that converts features of a product into benefits for the audience; a story that helps audience make sense of data; a story that touches their emotional chord; a story that helps marketer sell his product.

Each one of them is important: no matter how creative an advertisement is, it will not be considered good, if it fail to sell.

Selling is the end goal of an advertisement copy, and creative story telling is the tool a copywriter uses to meet the goal.