A little less than two years ago, a company called Mozy was acquired by EMC for $76 million. Mozy's execs can be pretty well trusted to know their stuff, then, and recently, the company's vice president of marketing shared some tips on how to make newsletters more effective.

It boils down to really considering how viewers will react to the content of a newsletter. Dave Robinson, the VP in question, told Carmine Gallo, "If it's not interesting to our customers, we're wasting their time." And your time (and thereby your company's money), too, of course.

So consider skipping the typical marketing formats and jazzing things up with true-to-life narratives, if possible. "The last thing we want to do is tell a story with a bunch of boring copy and bullet points," Robinson said. "The best way to tell our story is through real people and their anecdotes."

This approach can work even if it means the subject of a newsletter isn't the best fit for your products or services. Mozy sent out an article about two men aboard the Hudson River flight, for example. One had backed up his data online with Mozy, the other was carrying both his normal and backup laptops. Now, plane crashes don't exactly happen every day, and your files shouldn't be your first concern when one's occurring, but that newsletter got a bunch of conversions.

Become good enough at identifying what readers want to see, and perhaps you'll even get to take part in some multimillion dollar acquisition deal.