Whether it is a single-sided page of paper or a magazine-style, multipage document, a company newsletter is often part of a business’s marketing and personnel strategies. Newsletters are a way to distribute information widely, from company-specific data to important industry facts, and also to invite the opportunity for customers to reply back with their own information.

New Personnel

Whether your company is a small handful of people or spread out over the globe, it can be difficult to get a sense of your fellow employees. When you have an internal newsletter, an objective may be to announce new hires so that employees may familiarize themselves with their new workmates, even if they never share the same time zone. Depending on the number of new hires and available space, the newsletter can include photos, names, job titles and short introductions to new personnel. Topics could include prior work experience, hobbies, family and favorite things about their jobs. If the newsletter is published before the employee arrives onsite, current staff will be able to welcome the new hire into the fold.

Technical Documentation

Both internal (company-only) and external (for customers’ eyes) newsletters may have an objective to document a technical product or process clearly within their pages. This may be something like a single component (featuring the robotic arm’s blueprint, for example, for a company producing a pharmaceutical robot), a piece of code (a bug fix on a software product) or an entire step-by-step process. Whether your newsletter is electronic or printed, photos of the technical process may be included along with the instructions to guide readers. From the company standpoint, including technical documentation achieves the goal of educating employees better about the product they’re working on. It also puts more information into the customers’ hands, which may reduce calls to your customer support lines.

Increase Contact

Even if your newsletter is not specifically a sales-pitch piece, it can work towards your objective of increasing contact between your company and potential and current customers. Including an article about an upcoming version release of your software, for example, gets current customers revved up about features and bug fixes for which they have been waiting. They may contact their established sales representatives to place an order or request more information. Potential customers may read the information and call with questions about how the product could affect their businesses. Newsletters also offer the opportunity to gather customer information. Including a survey, contest or comments form is a way to reach out to customers and invite them to get in touch with you; they will do it at their own pace without you having to use additional resources to solicit their information.