E-mail header – where it all begins

We have been talking about headlines and hashtags on the blog recently and I have been thinking about how that works when we are creating and sending out newsletters/e-shots.

Good strong headlines compel people to read content - but if they don’t ever open the e-shot then it will all have been for nothing.

The e-mail header suddenly becomes even more important than the newsletter itself and the same goes for any kind of pitch, including press releases and blogger outreach. When you are calling on the phone you can charm the gatekeepers into putting you through or give them a compelling reason to do so, but with an e-mail e-shot you have only a handful of words to get the job done.

So it stands to reason that we really need to think about those words. I started by thinking long form – what is it that I wanted to say? Then bashing it down into as few words as possible. It is a great creative exercise!

But this wasn’t going to be enough to get the click. So then I thought about key words, as if I was working out the key triggers for optimising a piece of text. What gets me to open? Well I favour words like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn coupled with words like explained or common mistakes. Top twitter mistakes or new changes explained would probably get me every time!  So now I need to work out the triggers for my e-shot audience.

With the trigger words in mind I now move on to the final killer stage. I am going to list my e-shot content as a string of very short teasers. If I give them three then at least one will hit the spot! I won’t reveal all, but the words sales and secrets and top job may feature.

So how do you get people to open up? It would be great to share in your ideas.

An e-shot across the bows – saying yes to the newsletter.

I am very excited about a new project, which is always a good place to be, but as with so much that is worthwhile it is taking me into areas where I simply don’t have all the answers. So I wondered whether you do? Or at least some of them?

I’m putting together a ‘communication’ for a friend which we are far too au courant to call a newsletter – let’s call it an e-shot shall we?

We are hoping to use it to encourage a group of people he knows professionally, to stay in touch in case they might need him in the future.

The totally scary thing is persuading them that they want to receive this communication. They have to be given the opportunity to opt out and therefore it is really important that we get it right with the very first mailing. No time to bed down and develop – they either like it, or they don’t.

For that reason we are going to be focussing very much on them and their needs. We can’t afford to turn them off by babbling on about the company’s virtues. The content, the style and the images also have to appeal straight away.

The recipients will all be career minded professionals and we want to offer them interesting and useful content that will help them to get to the next level in their careers. I plan to offer a mix of material that is both original – commissioned from scratch by us – and curated articles from around the web. Like all digests you can find it out there for yourself but it is useful when someone has done it for you.

So please do let me know about your experiences of persuading people to say yes to your content – the more experiences we can gather, the less scary it will be when we press send.

Why hashtags are the new headlines.

A couple of posts back I argued what we read online has become so compressed that what were once just the headlines are now the whole story.

For example, when you scan the front page of the BBC news website or your favourite Sunday newspaper on i-pad, the chance are you’ll consume the headline but won’t actually click through to the rest of the text. But while headlines have become the story it occurred to me that hashtags have actually taken their place – hashtags are now the new headlines.

Think about how the tabloids have always reduced stories to the fewest possible, strongest words. Now think about the hashtags that came out of the last budget, ie #grannytax or #pastytax. Political tweeters took arcane fiscal measures and turned them into punchy two worders that had meaning for a wide number of people and all before the Chancellor had had a chance to sit down.

Hashtags have an enormous power because they are so sharable and spread like wildfire. Political prs are going to have to be careful in future that measures don’t boil down so succinctly!

How to get people to follow you on Facebook.

How to get people to follow you on Facebook

Why headlines have become the story.

Pushed for time, I’m skim reading again. Glancing down the story list on BBC news on-line I take in the main news of the day without clicking. Now I’m flicking through the pages of the Evening Standard looking at the photos and then taking 30 seconds to scan the underlined bits of the school newsletter. It is much harder these days to get me to stop and read the full version because there is so much media competing for my attention. So, in this busy busy world the headlines have had to become the story. 

Ticker tape news headlines now run across the bottom of the TV screen, on mobile phones, on bill boards and in school/hospital/hotel receptions. Text alerts are the one sentence headline that has to tell the whole story.

Now think about the way you use social media – Twitter is just a series of headlines and those links on LinkedIn and Facebook – do you actually open them or just read the top few lines that display on the page?

Once you get this, you know that you are implicated too. It’s not just about how we consume, it also has to translate into how we produce – because we all ‘do’ content now.

So make your headlines count.

Confusingly there are 2 approaches here. One is to accept that your audience is going to want to swallow the information in one bite, so you need total transparency. This has to be upfront, honest and factual;

2 dead in Solent jet ski crash

The other way in is to tease the reader into opening the link. Here you can try clever, funny and irresistible. It’s hard and it’s a gamble - so good luck with that. Ideally you can be both witty and transparent, handing over both a piece of useful information and an invitation to find out more - like,

10 things you need to know about social media marketing

or, The New York Post’s,

Headless Body In Topless Bar

There are puns ; “Diageo reports spirited growth in whisky sales.”  

and then there are just times when punctuation causes confusion; “Hospital sued by 7 foot doctors.”

But nobody can rival The Sun for headlines. In Feb 2009 to accompany a picture of a Kestrel and a Barn Owl  fighting over food:

“Hawk Kestrel manoeuvres in the park”

or on the marriage of Elton John and David Furnish,

“Elton takes David up the aisle”

and finally a Yorkshire tale of foot and mouth disease – not the Sun I think,

“Sheepless in Settle”.

Something to think about while you’re composing your masterpieces. Do you have any favourites?

In search of the social media holy grail?

I’ve been at this social media marketing and pr a few years now, yet there are still times when I long for a quick fix, a universal panacea - an answer to all my problems.

Because, as I am sure you know, each social media project raises new issues and problems. This is not a one size fits all kind of game. Some clients need a dynamic Facebook presence while others are going to thrive on LinkedIn AND the landscape of social media itself keeps changing.

So every so often I go trawling the internet for answers. God what a frustrating business that can be! It seems that everyone today has become a how-to merchant and a ninja monger. At best you will find straight forward tech advice, at worst you will find badly spelled cut and paste jobs masquerading as top advice. It makes me wonder who I was taking advice from when I used to suck up all this stuff years ago.

Well it’s good to know that there are still some reliable refuges. Again and again I come back to The Social Media Examiner for a huge range of articles pitched at varying levels. I would also take a look at Social Media Today which aggregates thousands of articles from around the web and Hub Spot for a trawl through the archives. Next time you are stuck, try these resources and you are bound to find something of relevance.

What I’ve found is that even if you can’t locate the exact answer you’re looking for, you can get enough information here to set the brain ticking over and with a little thought, trial, error and effort the solution will come to you. Either that or you need to get a man/woman in!    

Is it ever ok to use jargon?

Jargon is unacceptable. Isn’t it?

Tell me this then, do you think there is ever a case for a certain level of business-speak in your communications?

I would genuinely like to know the answer. In journalism we were always taught to strip out anything that obscured the message, so interviewees referring to the governments RPIXY scheme would be challenged and asked to explain what they meant. But at the same time we had our own jargon with RJs and SBJs and DOGs   (Regional journalists, Senior broadcast journalists and digitally originated graphics) A great favourite in broadcasting at the moment is UGC – user-generated content and I have even heard social media types using that one, so you don’t have to be in the board room wearing a suit to be guilty.  In fact any plumber or electrician will reel off an entire dictionary of twobefour type slang.

A certain amount of shorthand can create an easy bond between equals and saves time when everyone knows what you mean.

So, if you are a business to business organisation – can your communications bear some jargon? KPIs and SLEs for example. Does it make you sound more professional – does spelling them out make you sound infantile? 

While you are pondering this, have a look at these posts from my back catalogue;  Top 10 jargon howlers  and Jargon to make you smile