We've got two newsletters, one targetting each of our primary customer bases / brands (these go out to our current clients - we don't have a newsletter for non-clients). We include the usual - news about what's going on in the business, information about any new offerings or service changes, et cetera. We'll also spotlight a genearl site or resource themed for the different brands, so that it isn't just a "news" letter. We also offer an announcement service for our clients, and we'll link to any announcements that have gone out in the past quarter.
We haven't gotten any new clients specifically from the newsletter (obviously - since it goes out to existing clients), but we've gotten some comments that the clients appreciate the extra mention, or that they like the tips we send along. It isn't raw spam, it does contain occasional helpful advice, and it puts our name in front of them several times a year - even the clients who sign up, put up a basic site, then appear to pretty much forget we're there.
At one time we thought about having our clients suggest the various resource-sites, but we couldn't think of a way to do this without either giving ourselves a huge task in screening all the sites, or possibly creating a perceived atmosphere of favoritism, if a handful of clients did all of the suggesting. Neither of those seemed like good outcomes...
I don't know what you mean by "successful" - we created the newsletter as a way of reinforcing our clients' connections to us, and of passing around the major news items so that everyone is informed and reminded about the forums' announcements areas. In this, it seems to have been successful. We haven't had any clients upset or confused because something caught them off-guard, which is always good. Based on the content of our newsletter, I'm not entirely sure that we would want to create a newsletter for non-clients - that would be a different newsletter, and would require a bit more maintenance in terms of maintaining easy unsubscription mechanisms. I wouldn't want to be the one to maintain that, and I can't imagine any of the others on staff would want to step forward either
Still, we seem to have done something that our clients appreciate.
