You already know the benefits of open communication with your customers, employees and stakeholders and therefore you utilise different communication tools. You are an active user of Microsoft 365 and its collaboration tools, you use your phone, email, chat or text messages but is this enough to keep your customers interested in your organisation, especially as face-to-face meetings can still be weeks or months away?
Who knows your business better than you? The answer is simple – nobody! By communicating directly with your customers and employees you share your expertise and insight, you demonstrate your commitment and loyalty, and as a result they trust you. But what else can you do to stay in touch with your valuable stakeholders? One of the solutions you could add to your marketing communications mix is an email newsletter.
Newsletter?
You may be thinking this is not something I do in my business; this is time consuming or I don’t know which tool I should use to produce this type of communication document. Let me help you!
Why newsletter?
Newsletters are great ways of communicating both externally and internally at all levels of your organisation. They can be used to get attention as they are an important medium for advertising your company’s new products, services or special offers. They can be used to encourage your customers to contact the company, which not only simplifies the sales process for your sales team, but is also a perfect opportunity to talk to your customer directly, which supports the relationship building process. Employee newsletters can keep your employees informed about new policies and processes, about your products and services as well as about any awards or future training, which strengthens the relationship between you and your staff members.
So why not invest a little bit of time each day or week to prepare your monthly newsletter? I guarantee you that this marketing communications tool will help you establish trust with stakeholders, showing them that they are valued. What’s more your competitors cannot see this activity and be assured this builds your competitive advantage.
Newsletter layout is important!
Businesses, schools and not-for-profit organisations use newsletters to share news, ideas and events. The layouts vary depending on the industry, audience and distribution channel. There are many programs that can be used to create newsletters and MailChimp or Canva are only two examples, but we strongly recommend Microsoft Sway because it allows you to create professionally and visually stunning newsletters in minutes!
Never heard of Sway? Here are a few lines about it:
Microsoft Sway is a presentation program which is a part of the Microsoft Office family of tools. You can access Sway on the web or on your phone app which makes it very convenient. It allows you to create a professional looking newsletter regardless of whether you wish to start from scratch and create an entirely new template or whether you want to use a ready-made template and work with it, making changes and adding content as and when required. You can pull up the content locally from your device or you can use the content that is available from Internet sources such as Facebook, OneDrive, YouTube or Bing, but don’t forget copyright! Your content can be in the form of a text, photo or even media.
So, now you understand that Sway is a great solution and when combined with other Microsoft 365 for Business tools it can help you build, maintain and strengthen business credibility and relationships with your customers, employees and stakeholders, contributing to your competitive advantage.
As you may have guessed I’m a Microsoft 365 enthusiast. It’s difficult not to like the solution as it combines the three most important aspects of business today: 1) collaboration, 2) flexibility and 3) security in one package, adding to your business success.
If you would like to learn more about Sway to see how it can support building your business credibility and relationships please get in touch with me, I will be happy to help. You can reach me over the phone – 01522 797520, email – kamila@octagontech.com or we can arrange for video conference via Teams, I’m flexible!
Kamila
General Manager
