Services > Client Newsletters

Build relationships with a soft selling newsletter

Successful client newsletters give customers and prospects accurate information that helps them understand how your services and products will make their enterprises more profitable. And they include "hooks" that draw inquiries about your products and services.

A successful newsletter:

• Demands to be read. It offers news and data that are compelling.
• Showcases your specialized knowledge, products and services.
• Includes a hook that causes prospects to call for more information.
• Develops and enhances your image.
• Increases communications with your clients without requiring you to add sales personnel.
• Provides a continual, low-cost stream of information about you and your industry. Strong prospects and good customers like to read about you and your industry.

The best newsletters and Web sites give your customers information they will not find elsewhere. By publishing an authoritative and interesting publication, you show your firm is service-oriented and knows its business. Your readers anticipate receiving your newsletter and keep it as an essential source of information.

Let us help you create a winning newsletter

We know how to highlight your expertise and enhance your corporate image. Our consultants are experts at positioning newsletters for maximum impact. We do the work for you, freeing your staff for other projects. We cut the dozens of hours you would need to produce a newsletter to a few minutes of planning and approval over the phone for each issue.

Our timely production scheduling guarantees your newsletter will be done on time and within budget.

The Business Word's full-time staff that can give your newsletter the continuity of attention needed for a consistent editorial product.

Our team of professional business writers, editors and designers are skilled in communicating with your top executives and managers to elicit information of vital interest to your readers-and we will present it in a visually stimulating package.

Our state-of-the-art desktop production system allows us to make your changes quickly and inexpensively.

We write, edit, design, print and mail your newsletters-we are a one-stop shop. You can turn over to us any headaches or activities you don't want to or don't have the skills to handle yourself. Our ability to handle everything in a single location helps you dramatically reduce the hassles of acquiring and maintaining your mailing lists and dealing with the U.S Postal Service-chores often imposed on marketing managers and staffers who have other pressing duties. You decide what parts of producing your newsletter you will do in-house and what to delegate to The Business Word.

At The Business Word, we take a marketing approach. We see information itself as a selling tool. When you become our client, we help you develop marketing objectives and strategies. We become your publications consultants and managers.

Here is a typical proposal from The Business Word: This is a proposal to an insurance broker to produce content for a newsletter for physicians and their administrators. The Business Word Inc. is uniquely qualified to plan, design, write, edit, print, mail and e-mail this newsletter. We have been writing about insurance, health care, physicians and many other industries for years as editors and marketers. The Business Word has created newsletters, data books and magazines for dozens of clients, large and small.

Your company needs visibility and warm leads

Existing clients usually hear from your company only around renewal time. Typically, sales people call clients call 90 days before malpractice policies are up for renewal. Usually, a sales person calls with bad news. Rates are up again. The client asks why and often is bewildered and dismayed, if not angry. Too few clients know about your special capabilities in shopping the market for the most appropriate policies at the best rates.

Thus, your company wants to help its customers learn about the malpractice insurance market and stay on top of the latest important developments. And it wants to raise its visibility so that prospects will give it a chance to quote on their business. You want to turn your clients into loyal customers, and you want to turn your cold prospects into warm ones.

Physicians need insurance educations and market news

Physicians are tough customers. They're extremely busy, hard to reach, impatient and very value oriented. Doctors consider themselves quick studies, well informed and wise, and they feel that they are under attack from payers and malpractice insurers. When they buy, they want proof that they are making good decisions, and they are used to reading well-documented, scientific and quantitative articles and literature. While they have reputations as lousy business people, they seem to be more profitable than most other small businesses and professionals. Money is important to doctors, especially when it comes to controlling their costs and improving their incomes.

The trick is to educate physicians and help them stay on top of the insurance market without appearing to talk down to them or to impose on their time. What's needed is a strategy for getting a physician to make a positive decision without appearing to take a lot of his or her time, which already is over committed.

To grab a physician's attention and a bit of his or her time, a newsletter has to be:

1. Extremely relevant to the physician's specialty, practice size and insurance market.
2. Authoritative and credible.
3. Hard news.
4. Very readable and scannable. You've got 30 to 90 seconds to get your message across.
5. Something that a physician's staff will open and show to the physician instead of throwing it away.

Multi-media leverages investment in marketing communications

A quarterly, two-color, four-page newsletter will help increase customer loyalty and will help you acquire new clients. A newsletter will:

• Put your company's name in front of customers at least four times a year.
• Establish you as a primary and credible source of malpractice insurance.
• Give your sales people another reason to call the physician and office administrator: "Did you get our newsletter? Would you like to be on our mailing list? The letter really does a great job of explaining the malpractice market, and it's free to our customers and friends of the firm."
• Provide a platform for a small promotion or other hook that will bring in some inquiries from physicians about other insurance or brokerage services you offer.

Your Web site offers an opportunity to leverage your investment in a newsletter. The more often you can get your name in front of customers and prospects, the more likely you are to make a sale.

1. Post the newsletter on the Web site. This allows information seekers to research the malpractice insurance market on their own schedule. It adds to the firm's image as an important industry player and information resource. And posting newsletters on the firm's Web site will allow the gradual accumulation of a number of educational articles that will make the Web site a reference point over the years.
2. E-mail the newsletter to customers and prospects and the media as well as to employees and insurers. This makes the news very timely, allows readers to store the newsletter on their computers and provides an opportunity to invite calls and visits to your Web site. It also alerts readers that the print version is in the mail.
3. Print and mail the newsletter, because many people prefer to read printed articles and don't like to read computer screens.
4. Mail 5" x 8" postcards four times a year to promote your firm, your Web site, your newsletter and products.

Your consultants and writers

Susan J. Alt, Chartered Property & Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) and Associate in Risk Management (ARM), President of The Business Word, would be the primary writer and editor of a newsletter. The former editor of Business Insurance Magazine (1973-1980), Susan has been writing and editing articles about insurance, managed care, employee benefits and health care since the early 1970s. She has created numerous newsletters and managed care data books for pharmaceutical companies and other clients. She is a former risk management consultant with Towers Perrin and Wyatt Co. Susan also has created sales training materials for organizations selling to hospitals and medical groups.

Donald E. L. Johnson, MBA, Chairman, The Business Word, is the former editor of Modern Healthcare and is the editor and publisher of Health Care Strategic Management, Hospital Materials Management, Profiles in Healthcare Marketing, Healthcare Advertising Review and Financial Advertising Review. He has created numerous newsletters and managed care publications for pharmaceutical companies, consulting firms and other clients. In addition he has created several Web sites for clients and www.BusinessWord.com and www.TwinsMagazine.com for The Business Word. He also reviews corporate Web sites for his publications.

Todd Reid, has designed numerous newsletters, brochures and publications for clients.

Penny Dottavio, Webmaster, The Business Word, has created and maintained Web sites for The Business Word.

Summary

The Business Word is proposing to create and execute an aggressive and effective marketing communication program for you. Physicians need information, your sales staff needs promotion and leads. The Business Word is the best qualified firm to provide your organization with a marketing program that will help you grow your business.