E-Mail Newsletters Are Still Relevant
March 22, 2009
I’m not one to throw out the old completely for the new, especially when it works.
One of the most successful underpinnings of providing the opportunity for videos or other content to go viral is the email newsletter (after all, we can’t guarantee virality, but we can do our damndest to allow for the opportunity to it occur).
You should value and respect every one of your subscribers, and not waste their time. Entertain and inform them, so that they’re looking forward to hearing from you.
Some ask me – isn’t a blog the same as an email newsletter? Well, it’s really not.
Although email newsletters do allow for some response, they’re not as conversational or anywhere near as two-way as a blog. And best practices probably means not hitting “send” to your five or ten thousand person email list every single day (unless it’s a very special case, such as a media outlet, but that is another discussion entirely). Not to mention, you’re interrupting people with email, so you have an even higher value proposition to meet in order to engage your customers or potential customers.
So what are some key things that I still folks miss in 2009? Let’s go over them quickly so that you, too, can get the most from your email newsletter.
1) No tracking. At least in aggregate, get an idea of what links your users are clicking on, as well as open rates and time open. This is important for you to know what is actually making an impact with your readers. After all, this is a results-oriented business and just assuming what people want is very dangerous to your pocketbook as a course of action.
2) No text-only version. There’s a ton of email clients that are set at various businesses or mobile devices that prefer the text-only version, and it’s important because you don’t know at what point or how someone is going to view your email.
3) No text at all. If your stuff is valuable, people keep it around and then are going to search their inbox for your message. If you’re one of those all-image newsletters, it might be hard to find you without the perfect subject line.
4) The subject line is crucial. There’s only a few words, if that, to make an impression on folks to give them the information they need to make a decision on opening the email. A bunch of formalities and then the meat is not going to work as effectively. Give’em some relevant sizzle to get them to buy your email steak.
5) It’s about them, not you. Give value to get value. Ask yourself, before you send, why does the reader care about this?
What are your tips and experiences? Have additional questions? Share below.
Lesson Learned From Robert Scoble and Rocky: Keep Your Stars By Keeping Your Team Together
March 15, 2009
Recently, “Rocky,” Robert Scoble’s Aide De Camp, was let go from Fast Company.
Scoble, however, wasn’t.
There’s a lesson to learn here for businesses.
You can’t cut your way to prosperity. You can’t take out important parts that people need and expect them to do the same work. It just doesn’t work – and your competitors will see what you’re doing and quickly move if they can.
This recession is showing the truly strong companies – this is the time to invest in yourself or your company and take advantage of the opportunities out there – and Fast Company’s loss is Rackspaces’ gain. Fast Company now doesn’t look so fast, and Rackspace has instantly jumped ahead in the social media game, which one of the Rackspace folks on the Gillmor Gang podcast said very succinctly, “If your company is not in social media, in five years your company won’t be into much of anything.” Obviously hinting if you’re not starting to get into social media now and making moves, you’re going to miss the boat completely.
He also mentioned the same thing for Cloud computing for hosting – which I agree. Our personal experience with cloud computing for us, our projects, our project management and our clients has been reliable, flexible, and scalable, able to do many more things for much less price. Some of the things, when hardware folks come to me, think we spend five or ten times the money we do; but, as always, being near the cutting edge with a protective cover (i.e. being cautious yet still getting it done) gets our clients more for less.
Because that is the way of the world. Big iron is dead; flexible iron is here to stay.
Why Marketers Are So Desperate For Trust
March 3, 2009
Having read the RWW article on paying bloggers after Jeremiah Owyang making the statement that paying bloggers should be “part of a toolkit,” it jogged my memory.
Here’s a study from 2008 from Gallup. What it shows is that the perceived ethics and honesty of advertising practitioners is less than congresspeople, lawyers, building contractors – in short, the very bottom of the list only to be rated as “more honest” or “more ethical” than telemarketers, lobbyists, and car salesman. Around 10% of people think that advertising practitioners are very honest or ethical.
So news flash – there’s not very much trust from the public there with marketers. Hard to build a “trust economy” (brilliant term by Chris Brogan) when there’s little trust to start with (not a reflection on individuals, but the industry). There’s a reason why Leo Laporte does not allow marketers on his “This Week In Tech” or “MacBreak Weekly” shows. The audience, and he, does not trust that there will be honest opinion.
In short, with the influx of all of these already not-trusted by the public marketing and advertising professionals, the “run” on social media is in many ways all about people wanting to “create” trust in a field where the public does not trust advertising professionals. You can’t create trust – you build trust. And turning bloggers into salespeople isn’t the way to do it.
Some of the new folks on the scene may not remember this, but why did/do advertisers pay premiums for news content? Because it was perceived as trusted information. That seemed to transfer to the companies and brands that advertise during the news (not saying news reporting was perfect in every instance – but rarely, and never where I worked, were stories traded for monetary compensation).
By doing pay-for-post campaigns, as marketers, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot as one will erode the initial trust that social media has built up mainly because it’s up until now not as touched by marketing (or perceived to be). Sure, everyone needs to eat, there needs to be money made, short term gain will be had, but I think it’ll cannibalize the long-term possibilities of the space (and possibly, just for the properties that partake in this trust auction).
If the social web continues to move down this path, that trust factor that’s been built up is going to flip, and flip hard. Google knows this and I can surmise that’s why they’re having such hard and fast rules around not allowing page rank to be passed on through sponsored links or posts. It’s their job to provide the best results, not the bought results on organic search.
A good sign of someone who I know what they’re doing is if I see them cringe around promising a “viral” video. Viral video promises are bull, plain and simple. We’re not interested in lying to our client’s customers, and I’d rather make a little less money but say we had honest conversations, and created compelling content directed at people that they enjoy and get value from. It’s about giving value to get value, and this axiom is decades old, if you look back on Jeffrey Gitomer and his predecessors, Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightengale… the list goes on.
Although it will work in the short term, selling away trust in increments will eventually bankrupt the relationships built with people. We should take a lesson from mortgage/financial disaster hit that all of our stocks have taken after people figured out the truth, and tread carefully.
