We hear it all the time, manage your contacts, keep in touch, communicate, put yourself out there. So, we did; we took that great advice and published our first ever, newsletter!! It wasn't hard at all, right? Gather the relevant horse farm, and equine information, a few fun facts, a local calendar, some local market statistics, a funny story, and voila! Unfortunately, it wasn't the content, the research, or the hours it took to write relevant, interesting, informational, stories that was the tricky part. It was the emailing of the newsletter, the compliance with the post office, and the address labels, that would prove to be not as easily mastered as we once thought.
If you copy and paste a four-page newsletter into the body of an email, the glorious Internet, that enriches our lives so much, can jumble the whole thing at it's whim. After sending the email several times back and forth between associates, to what seemed to finally be a perfect format, with no more scrambling of text and pictures, the email was ready to be sent to all our contacts. Unfortunately, the email was too large for some email servers to accept, and those who did receive it, had difficulty piecing it together, as somehow in transmission, everything was moved up, down, or too the left, with no rhyme or reason. At this point, we decided, because we had so much content, and an attachment might not be able to be opened depending on the receiver's programs, we would upload the newsletter to our website and send out an email with a brief description and list of stories, linking the email to our newsletter. Now that we had defeated one issue, it was on to the next, actually mailing to other contacts in our database.
Printing those address labels can be interesting to say the least. After you import your contact's emails into a label printing program (which can be time consuming if you haven't done it before), your computer screen might look like the addresses fit perfectly on the labels, but the printer might decide to print someting totally different. I had to adjust the size of the labels, and play with my font, and hit print again. If that didn't work, I tried another size, and re-printed again, that fidgeting took some time. Finally, I found the magic sizes, and I printed readable, one address per label, labels.
Staples are forbidden in the USPS system. We bought the circle stickers, folded the newsletters perfectly, stickered the open edges, and brought all of them in a box to be mailed. Our post office is small, and doesn't have the machine that automatically stamps mail, so you have to peel-and-stick every stamp. I stood at a closed window for longer than I like to admit, sticking stamps. Good news- the newsletter was just light enough to only require one stamp!
We might have gotten a little frustrated along the way, but it was all worth it. The newsletter was a success, and we learned lessons from all those unforeseen snafus, so next month, hopefully, it will be smooth sailing. If it isn't, we will learn something knew, and know better for the following month.
Don't be scared of that glitches, good things don't always come easy!
Take care from all at Horse Farm Partners
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