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- Hate to Write? 3 Ways to Start Enjoying It
- What to Write When an Employee Dies
- 5 Ways to Get Your Email Read, Remembered and Responded To
- Six Tips for Writing in Easy Reading Season
- 12 Ways to Plug the Email Productivity Drain
- Two Questions to Ask Before You Start Writing
- 6 Ways to Aim Your Arrow for the Heart
- 6 Ways to Become an Idea Machine
- 3 Reasons Why You Need to Improve Your Writing Skills
- Get Personal With Your Holiday Greetings: 3 Tips
Archive for the ‘Email newsletters’ Category
Remember when gurus insisted that email would be killed by RRS feeds, Facebook and other innovations? Turns out they were wrong. The contact lists you compile from your newsletter and other sources are now touted as solid marketing gold.
You are your lists. You need to grow yours. But how? Here are eight simple ways:
- Offer high-value content, a discount on your product or some other incentive in exchange for a new subscriber’s email. Ask yourself what your customers or community would most like from you.
- Promote your blog and newsletter subscriptions in as many places as possible, for example prominently displayed samples of past newsletters on your site accompanied by a signup form or a link in your email signature.
- If you blog, compile your posts into a newsletter. If you publish a newsletter only, revise and publish the content as a blog. This will give you more ways to meet people and fit your readers’ medium of choice.
- Ask people you meet if they’d be interested in your newsletter and sign them up. Don’t wait for them to act. But make sure you have their permission. Email them a past issue and ask if you’re not absolutely certain.
- Promote your newsletter through social media. Don’t fire to every site automatically. For example, I don’t always update to Facebook, because my personal friends who hang out there don’t give a fig about some of my business or professional interests.
- Make sure your email content is valued by your readers. If you only push products or services, people will stop reading and clicking. They might unsubscribe. If they love your content, they will pass it along. Give them terrific content all of the time so you can sell to them some of the time.
- Remember that email is the mother of social media. To keep the personal touch with long lists, offer different versions so content matches different groups’ interests. Ask questions, give prizes and think of other ways you can encourage interaction.
- Keep the design simple, following the F pattern of online reading, so your content can be easily read on mobile devices.
Thanks to Geoffery Kehring for the photo.
What would make you open an email a few days before Christmas? I’m sick of the Christmas deals those hyped-up marketers are still cramming into my inbox. I’m winding down from work too.
But like most people I’ve talked to, I crave advice on dealing with one or more touchy family situations.
Marketers, you can fool me into reading those pitches once you’ve calmed me down. As my last-minute Christmas gift back at ya, here are 11 email subject lines that woul entice my friends and I to open your email:
- Smile politely while spitting that inedible Christmas cake into your napkin: 3 tips
- What if everyone brings jello?
- An Alzheimer Christmas. What to do when Granny won’t stop yelling
- Uncle Sid has passed out in the mashed potatoes again: help or ignore?
- How to get the in-laws to go home, without risking war
- Silent night, no more: how to start a conversation with cousins you haven’t seen in years and never liked
- Whining kids-how to make them sleep, in the spirit of the season but without spirits
- Survive carols with the tone deaf: how to sing LOUD
- When cats, dogs and other species mix: a furniture survival guide
- Do you mention food spilled on the face — or other places?
- 11 foolproof excuses to leave early
I’ve survived most of these situations by laughing. That way, they don’t spoil all the wonderful ones.
Thanks for the photo.
Some people gear down on their content marketing and other writing for the summer. They offer the excuse that everyone they want to connect with is playing at the cottage or on the patio, not reading.
But the smart ones know better. They shift to a writing style that appeals to a more relaxed frame of mind and on-the-go lifestyle.
From all the recent lists of summer reading recommendations, they know that most people aren’t shutting down their brains. Many, me included, read more. But it’s easier reading–a novel on the dock between swims or a white paper on my laptop under a tree.
Here are six tips for smart summer writers.
1. Be more relaxed. Try a more casual style. Lighten up the serious business. I call it business casual writing.
2. Don’t waste their time, even more valued during splendid weather. Get to the point. Write as concisely as you can.
3. Provide links, for those who want a longer, leisurely read.
4. Chunk up your writing with subheads, numbered lists or other visual aids, so people distracted by a humming bird or a call from the boss can easily get back on track.
5. Don’t make your readers work harder by having to look up words or ponder what you mean. Use clear, plain language.
6. Think mobile. Make sure everything works on a small screen. When the weather is hot, the people you want to connect with are more likely to be reading your content on a smart phone or other mobile device while lolling by the pool or waiting for an outdoor concert to begin.
Happy Canada Day, Independence Day or whatever holiday kicks off your summer.
Photo credit: Jonathan Bloom
Although social media and other online collaboration may have diverted some traffic away from email, the overall volume has grown so much that few adults are seeing much difference in inbox size.
The time we spend reading and writing is an enormous productivity drain. In her book Managing Your Email, Christina Cavanagh estimates that most business people spend almost four hours a day reading, responding to and otherwise managing their email.
According to this professor in the MBA program at the University of Western Ontario, that adds up to an average annual email overload cost of nearly $22,000 per employee. Holy smokes.
To reduce the productivity drain, Christina made several recommendations many people continue to ignore.
Sigh. Even a fraction of $22,000 per employee could do a lot of wonderful things. So let’s try again. The next time someone wastes your time with a sloppy email, send them here.
12 tips
1. Don’t hit “reply all,” unless all those people really do need to receive your email.
2. Don’t use email as your default channel. Consider whether the circumstances or the recipient’s personal preferences should lead you to choose a personal visit, phone call, tweet, text message or other medium.
3. Keep your messages short and to the point. Read more advice in my previous post.
4. Summarize clearly in your subject line and first sentence.
To Christina’s sage advice, let me add these tips:
5. Tell the short story before you bomboard the recipient with a string of emails that they would have to read in reverse order to make any sense of.
6. Don’t chit chat in the intro. Unless it’s a social email, save your personal greetings for the conclusion.
7. Avoid old-fashioned dictaphone jargon, such as “as per your request.”
8. To flow with the F-shaped pattern of online reading, use short paragraphs broken up by bolded subheads, numbered lists or other visual reading aids.
9. To help people scan, bold action items, names and other important points.
10. Summarize and link, where possible, to more information, to give readers the choice of detail level.
11. With bare bones emails such as meeting invitations, consider adding a compelling and concise note about what’s in it for the recipients.
12. Remember you are writing for people, not robots. Show them courtesy, respect and sensitivity. Be friendly. After all, email is the mother of social media.
I could go on, but I need to check my email. So over to you. What are your recommendations for plugging the email productivity drain?
Jakob Nielsen is my sherpa. He’s guided my ascent to high open rates, about double the industry average.
So I was thrilled to read that his latest findings confirm the value of compelling subject lines, getting to the point quickly and other earlier recommendations. Better still, he explored the impact of social media, smart phones and video.
Social media
According to Jakob, people prefer longer updates, though not too long, in email newsletters. Save Facebook, Twitter and similar micro-communication for information snacks.
However, many people like to grab these snacks from newsletters. Let me add that most email service providers have added options for sharing your newsletter on social media sites.
As a result, email newsletters and social media, though different, can feed each other. Brilliant.
Mobile
While I used to think that smart phones people were too busy to read longer content, Jakob’s respondents told him they often read them when they need to “kill time.” So give smart phone people interesting content to scan while waiting for a cab or a meeting or filling those countless other open minutes in their day. This works, however, only if your newsletters display well on a small screen.
Video
Although we’re seeing so many more videos on the internet these days¸ Jakob’s research subjects didn’t think video belonged in newsletters. Sigh of relief.
I’m not impressed by most of those flip-cam-in-the-face reels, but I’m keeping an open mind. Communication can change for the better, or worse, in the blink of an eye. We need to think critically, but quickly.
Evolve and endure
Jakob conducted his first research eight years ago, when email newsletters were in their infancy. Facebook wasn’t invented. Mobile phones were just for calls. Video was reserved for slick corporation productions or shaky family memories.
Despite predictions of their demise with RSS feeds, social media and other developments, email newsletters have evolved and endured. So hang in there if you have one. Don’t think the parade has passed you by if you haven’t started yours yet.
As Jakob concluded: “When it comes to customer relationships, newsletters must be seen as a long-term investment: they work their magic over time.”