Week 10: Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

After reading the lecture and text book assignment, write a blog post in response to this assignment:  Newsletters can be sent weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even twice a year for certain businesses. With that in mind, what information could your business use for a newsletter, and how often would you send one? Write a list of content ideas you think your customers would enjoy seeing and why.

I think newsletters are a great tool for a business to utilize to not only welcome new customers and provide information in a push type format, but as a way to remind your customers that you are still around. I know I can't be in the minority when I say that although I don't mind newsletters being sent to my e-mail from business that I have actually done business with, but there are two things that I require in order for me to consider reading your newsletter:

• ease of opening/accessing - every month, I am sent a newsletter from my child's pediatrician's office. In order to access it, you have to click open a new window in which you are required to enter your patient portal number (which, because of HIPAA, is not anything remotely related to your email, name, number, or any other commonly used function to log in with) and some obscure password that I know I was given when we first started going to this office. Well, if you don't have kids, here's how that first office visit goes: about 48-72 hours hours after having a human whatever way you needed to, you are asked to bring said human into the pediatrician's office for whatever examination and hovering wasn't taken care of in the time frame the child has been alive. Since newborn infants don't care about things like a good night's sleep or the mental health of their parental units, you drag your zombie-esque self into said pediatrician's office barely remembering to brush your teeth, let alone the obscure password you are given while filling out the mounts of paperwork require to enter. So that being said, I have never opened a newsletter from this doctor's office. 
• layout - if your layout is convoluted and you have re-written War and Peace to tell me that you are having a 20% off sale, I will delete it faster than....well, I don't know what, but it will be fast.

For LoBue Laser & Eye Medical Centers, I think a newsletter could be of value to the business, especially because this is not an business that is frequented for the majority of their patient base. I do my once a year standard eye exam, but otherwise, it's a good thing to not be seeing Dr. LoBue or his staff once a month. However, if LoBue forgot about me the rest of the 11 months, would there be a chance I would forget about them the one month I was supposed to go? Maybe? So this is where the newsletter would come in. 

For LoBue's offices, I would recommend a quarterly newsletter for the existing patients. For new patients, I would definitely send a welcome newsletter along with the currently quarterly newsletter. The ideas that I think patients would find interesting include:

• Current specials for exams
• Current optical discounts and sales
• Eye health news
• A personal message from Dr. LoBue or his staff
• A welcome section featuring new staff members
• Philanthropic or Community centered activities and events from the staff
• I would also include a trivia question or hide and seek/treasure hunt kind of item that would help to engage customers. You can not change when insurance chooses to cover a yearly eye exam, but as someone who loves finding and submitting those Get1Free "Where is Freebee?" contests, (Yes, I am a dork.) I may not use anything right away, but I could tell you what the junk mailer was called, right? 

These are just some ideas - the major component, as I stated earlier, are ease of use and layout. Without those keys, unlocking the tool box is never going to happen.