I had a newsletter once...
It was called "The Rognog". In case you're wondering, that's the name of a Dungeons & Dragons character I used to play. Great branding, huh? Anyway, I started sending out a quarterly newsletter in 2004. Here what it looked like:
Yeah, Not So Great
As you can see, it was highly self-centered, toxically positive, and, well, lame. It took me many years to figure out what it took to make a newsletter more effective but I stopped sending it out a while ago. Why? I didn't see any ROI. All I saw were a bunch of "unsubscribe" notifications. Was it because of the quality of the newsletter? Maybe. Was it because nobody has the time or interest to read most of our voice marketing content anymore? Probably. Can a newsletter still be an effective tool to stay top-of-mind with voice seekers? Possibly.
Tip Of the Week
If you wanna give a newsletter a try, here are some tips:
Get permission to send them the newsletter first! This is very important. Many companies around the world have adopted the GDPR guidelines established by the European Union. In other words, if you add someone to your mailing list without their permission, they can flag it as spam and you could get in trouble. That means you need to cold call or cold email them first which takes lots of time & effort but could be worth the effort.
Make your newsletter about demonstrating your value & progress as both a voice actor and a business, not about showing off. There is a subtle difference but there's not enough time to get into that here.
Make your newsletter about demonstrating your value & progress as a human. Most of the newsletters that voice seekers get are nothing but an obnoxious LOOK AT ME!!! AREN'T I GREAT?! exercise and is very off-putting. Talk about you as you: maybe share your hobbies or your family life or your personal challenges. Be vulnerable, be transparent, be genuine. That will resonate with them much more than you bragging about the last Explainer video you narrated.
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Tom Dheere is the VO Strategist, a voice over business & marketing coach and demo producer since 2011. He is also a voice actor with over 25 years of experience who has narrated just about every type of voiceover you can think of. When not voicing or talking about voicing, he produces the sci-fi comic book Agent 1.22.