New Look Newsletter Increases the Response

Newsletters, like any other sales and marketing tool, need refreshing from time to time, to maintain and regenerate interest in them and, subsequently, in your company and its services or products.

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Released: Monday, 9th January 2006

Bradstone, the market-leading company in the supply and manufacture of pre-cast concrete products for the garden and housing markets, had maintained the same look for its newsletter, Outlook, for some years.

The company appreciated that a new look was required to re-energise Outlook and to demonstrate to its customers that it intended providing more support in helping them to sell Bradstone products.

Most of all Bradstone wanted to open a dialogue with customers, to help generate sales.

Refreshing an element of your marketing portfolio does not mean that wholesale changes need or have to be made.

The A4, four-colour format that Outlook had always had has been retained and the copy and images would continue to be supplied by Bradstone’s PR agents.

There was also a desire for the front cover of the new look newsletter to be similar to the 2005 brochure, thus creating an automatic association between the two.

Quiet Storm took all of these considerations into account before beginning work on Outlook. The designers also decided that it was important to create a lively look but the newsletter needed to be easy to read and to follow.

In addition, the restyling provided an opportunity to introduce graphics and colours that could be used on other company literature, helping to strengthen branding.

One of the methods to be used to generate reader response was a competition and it was the job of Quiet Storm’s designers to create visuals to draw attention to this.

The competition has provided a method of measuring the effectiveness of the revamp. Competitions had been included in Outlook in the past with response minimal. By comparison, the entries to the competition in the revamped newsletter flooded in.

The result of bringing together all of these elements is a bright, lively newsletter that looks inviting.

Commenting on it and the way in which Quiet Storm handled the re-design of Outlook, Paul Wagstaff, Marketing Manager for Bradstone, said: “We were very pleased with the appearance of Outlook and the readers have reiterated that the changes have been positive.

The competitions have generated a much greater response than ever before and people have actually made comments to us about the new appearance.

“What is more, Quiet Storm created this from an outline brief and delivered the finished product on time.”

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