End of Email?

Interesting article in WSJ about email’s younger, prettier communication sister: social media.

For those not using Twitter, Facebook and other means of connecting with the outside world, this WSJ quote explains the difference between them and ye olde email: “We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.”

The story quoted Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA: “The whole idea of this email service isn’t really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks.”

What’s this bode for email newsletters?

The article doesn’t make my point explicitly, but sets it up well. Email newsletters and all THOUGHTFUL communications have a place OUTSIDE social media. Said another way, to communicate thoroughly, thoughtfully and confidentially, if you can’t meet in person, start with email.

This mirrors my own experience, as a fairly active Twitter(er) who averages 30 daily updates.  For those of you not yet using Twitter, don’t take the impression that I have that much to say about myself — my tweets are usually in response to news items posted by other users or part of a conversation with my “followers” (feels a bit Jim Jones-ish calling them that, but oh well…that’s what they’re officially called).

Sure, I occasionally tweet out the odd “gonna clear my head by taking the dog for a walk” message, but the fun thing about social media is how people find you on the basis of these throwaway tweets. I now have a number of followers who send me pet food coupons and even Cesar Millan aka The Dog Whisperer follows me!

Belt & suspenders approach

Back to the topic at hand. For THOUGHTFUL, well-written communications, there is no substitute for email.  The only thing that comes close is what you syndicate through your RSS feed. However, people get busy and forget to check their readers. An occasional email poke to check the RSS feed will probably always be in order.

Here’s my belt & suspenders approach to being heard:

• My website is home base. It’s the hub of external communications
• Primary communications spokes
  • Blog and its RSS feed
  • Twitter
  • Newsletter
  • Email

1. When I post to my blog ( my website is actually a blogsite), it automatically sends a tweet with the title and a link for all the world to see. It also sends out an excerpt of the post through my RSS feed for those who’ve subscribed and to those directories like Alltop, that carry my content. Those who are linked to me via LinkedIn can see this excerpt on my profile page.  Anywhere that anyone sees an excerpt of my blog posts, they can click to read the whole thing on my blog.
2. I use Twitter to entice the Twitterverse to read my blog posts. With 140 characters per tweet, I use the url shortening service bitly to get the links down to 16 characters, then use what’s left to tease with leads like “Why Email Isn’t Dead.”
3. I also use Twitter to ask specific people to read or comment on posts, according to their inclination and expertise. I know who wants to read my posts about SPAM and who wants a financial blog writing prompt and who’s the best expert to comment on one of my posts. If I’m fortunate, some of my followers will “reTweet” what I’ve sent so their network of followers will have the opportunity to read something they would not have otherwise known existed.
4. When I get comments on the blog I Tweet that out to keep the conversation going. This helps those who’ve commented get their ideas in front of a wider audience, too. The least I can do.
5. My newsletter promises three things every month: something on whole-brain communications, a bit on brevity and updates on topics related to email marketing and newsletters. Eventually everything from the newsletter shows up in the blog. For those who don’t want to read every blog post or remind themselves to check my RSS feed in a reader, they can read my monthly newsletter and click through to anything else that might interest them in the blog. The newsletter is an efficient portal to all the information I offer.
6. I reserve email for my most formal and private correspondence. It’s also how I communicate with those not on social media.  As the WSJ article says, some things require attachments and confidentiality and email is the next-best thing to a tête-à-tête

OK, that’s my communications methodology.  What am I missing that works for you? Do tell (if you comment, I’ll tweet it out)!

Advice for those who need a ghostwriter

As a writer with some tech savvy and a general tendency to extroversion, social media works very well for me and and I’ve found a way to bind all my efforts together strategically. My experience is that those who invest the time in social media will benefit, but not everyone will want to make that investment. Fine.

If you’re a professional of any stripe, start with a custom newsletter written by yourself or a ghostwriter — not something you stick your logo on and call “customized.” No idea what to write? I offer news-driven writing prompts, if that helps.

Keep a consistent publishing schedule and maintain a searchable repository of your articles (not just prior newsletter editions, the individual articles) on your website. One of my clients does this so that we can eventually compile his newsletter articles into feature articles for professional journals. Another client’s newsletter articles go into his blog and will eventually become a book. Re-purpose your material.

My observation is that people are often reluctant to start small when they have big aspirations, but every desert is composed of tiny grains of sand. They add up.

ADDED 10-19-09

Further evidence of the power of Twitter: this morning one one of my tweeps, @derekhernquist, brought this video to my attention:

A Special Place for Spammers

I’ve been waiting for a good case study to illustrate what I’ve been saying about spam filtering over the last several months.

Last week a global provider of bulk email services had to deal with one of its rogue customers who’d gained a reputation as a spammer. While it did, a large-but-untold number of innocent and spam-compliant emailers couldn’t get their messages into customers’ inboxes.

Aha! The rubber hits the highway. Here’s how it went down:

Spamhaus Project, the international cyber crime fighting organization, placed the rogue emailer’s internet (IP) address on its blacklist of spammers. The rogue’s IP address belonged to the rogue’s email provider, which meant the millions of innocent commercial emailers also using that provider were painted with the same “spammer” brush. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who subscribe to Spamhaus’ blacklist wouldn’t deliver anyone’s email from that service until the matter was resolved.

Damage control overdrive with Hotmail, Yahoo! and others

The commercial email service provider had to go into damage control overdrive, suspending the rogue’s account, communicating with innocent emailer senders about the delay to their campaigns, and proving to Spamhaus that they’d taken the right precautionary and reactionary measures required. Until Spamhaus removed the address from its blacklist, ISPs like Hotmail, Yahoo! and others wouldn’t deliver any of the provider’s clients’ email.

Ouch!

This is tough to convey in words, and I acknowledge using some jargon here, so I suggest you visit Spamhaus for flowcharts that illustrate how filtering works.

Follow commercial email rules

The upshot for commercial emailers: if your email service provider advises you to use a double-opt-in subscription process or to certify that you haven’t purchased an email list, or subscribed people without their permission, comply quickly and don’t complain about the extra steps. These procedures are necessary to convince Spamhaus and the ISPs that you’re a compliant emailer, even if someone else using your service isn’t.

This also points out the reason to use a bulk email service instead of sending email campaigns from your own email account. That way, if you are accused of spamming, you’ll have a knowledgeable and experienced company go to bat for you with the international cyber services. If I may be so bold to ask, please consider using my email service.

The Spamhaus Project is a great study for international cooperation. Be sure to hit the tags to the right for more of what I’ve written on SPAM and e-newsletters.

Spamhaus: Cyber Crime Fighter

In September I had the pleasure of being a Twitter panelist on how to avoid the spam filters when emailing.  This is the third time I’ve spoken formally on the subject (if you consider tweeting “formal”).  By this third presentation, it struck me that spam is like porn, everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but few can define it in their own words.*

Looking for the most succinct explanation, I turned to the  Spamhaus Project, an international non-profit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations, to provide dependable realtime anti-spam protection for internet networks, to work with law enforcement agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.

The word “spam” as applied to email means “unsolicited bulk email”

The two most important words there are UNSOLICITED and BULK.

Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent.

Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.

A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.

Unsolicited email is normal email, for example first contact inquiries, job inquiries and sales inquiries.

Bulk email is normal email, for example, subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists.

Point of clarification: The CAN-SPAM Act goes beyond the technical definition of spam; it applies to commercial email sent to recipients in the US and originated in the States. Download this CAN-SPAM Quick Guide.

*Wow your friends with your command of factoids

Justice Stewart

I’m not the first to use the phrase ” everyone thinks they know it when they see it.”  The origin is in a US Supreme Court case that helped define the legal standards for determining obscenity. Here’s a bit about the case.

In 1964, movie theater manager Nico Jacobellis was convicted of exhibiting an obscene movie, Louis Malle’s Les Amants, “The Lovers.” The ads were hyperbolic.

“When all conventions explode . . . in the most daring love story ever filmed!”

“As close to authentic amour as is possible on the screen.”

“The frankest love scenes yet seen on film.” “Contains one of the longest and most sensuous love scenes to be seen in this country.”

In the words of the Supreme Court decision: “‘The Lovers’ involves a woman bored with her life and marriage who abandons her husband and family for a young archaeologist with whom she has suddenly fallen in love. There is an explicit love scene in the last reel of the film, and the State’s objections are based almost entirely upon that scene. The film was favorably reviewed in a number of national publications, although disparaged in others, and was rated by at least two critics of national stature among the best films of the year in which it was produced.”

Although the film was shown in some 100 U.S. cities, including Columbus and Toledo, Ohio, Jacobellis was prosecuted for showing it in Cleveland Heights, a middle-class suburb of Cleveland. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court decided that Jacobellis had been wrongly convicted.

The most famous opinion in the case came from Justice Potter Stewart, who said that the only unprotected material in his opinion was “hard-core pornography.” Stewart expressed his concern that such material was impossible to define. “But I know it when I see it.”

Me, the Twitter Panelist

I find Twitter to be an efficient and effective way to grow professionally and personally.

My friends at Understanding Marketing facilitate a weekly discussion on marketing and PR topics of interest to small business owners on TweetGrid and asked me to be the expert on call Tuesday 9/22/09 8-9om EST.

We’ll be discussing CAN-SPAM and how to write email marketing campaigns and e-newsletters so they won’t be scraped into the “junk” or “bulk” or “spam” filters of recipient mailboxes.

Since it’s a Twitter-based discussion, anyone can chime in with questions and answers — and it’s free.

If you have anything specific to ask and can’t attend next week, leave me a comment below and I’ll get it in.  Have a study or resource on the topic you’d like to share?  Again, leave a note below.

“Undelivered” Email

According to MediaPost, even when people opt in to your email list, 3.3% is sent to a “junk” or “bulk” email folder and 17.4% is not delivered at all. Not delivered at all?  Where’d it go?

Making sense of your email reports

If you’re using an email service/listserve, ask how they calculate the “delivered” rate.  Why? Because a rate upwards of 90% may be giving you a false sense of  success.

According to the MediaPost report, in most cases the “delivered” metric is simply assumed.  Assumed?  Yes, they take the number of messages sent through the pipe and subtract for the number that return a hard bounce (which is what happens when the email address no longer works at all).  In other words, it does not reflect how many hit the actual inbox.

This brings up the point to ask your email email service if it cleans out hard bounces immediately (mine does).

Differences when mailing to business and personal addresses

The report found that it’s more difficult to reach business addresses than personal inboxes because corporations have sophisticated security software to scrub mail deemed outside the company’s business interests (always remember that Big Brother is watching).

The good news for commercial emailers, including business professionals sending e-newsletters, is that these corporate systems are more likely to deliver messages to a junk folder as compared to consumer Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which are more likely to simply vaporize your email than send it to the junk file.

Frequent readers of my blog already know this:  whether the ISP sends your email to the inbox, junk file or vaporizes it is based on a unique recipe of your reputation as its sender and other factors like the email service/listserve you use.

For more on this, click the “CAN-SPAM” tag to the right for a complete list of articles I’ve written on the topic or download this narrated presentation: CAN-SPAM Compliance.

Here’s where the various ISPs stand in delivering commercial email all the way to the inbox:

*Source: Return Path, July 2009

It really helps to know which ISP the majority of your list uses, so that you can test your email against the filters that matter to your clientele.  What, your email provider doesn’t give you this information?  Your email provider doesn’t allow for pre-send testing?  We need to talk because mine does.

Avoid the blacklist

• Don’t ever add someone to your list without their permission
• Include a message reminding recipients to add your address to their “white list”
• Don’t bombard your list; if you told them they’d get a monthly newsletter, send no more and no less than that
• QUALITY QUALITY QUALITY content that makes recipients money or saves them time, money or effort
• Be sure the majority of your content is text, not graphics.  You need both; just don’t send email with no text

And if you’re still sending email from your own outbox, here’s information on why you should stop doing so.

Ready to consider my email platform? Please call 704-907-2811.

CAN-SPAM Clarity

The  recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision surprised me.  In it, the judges touted the “beneficial aspects” of email marketing. WOW.

“The purpose of the CAN-SPAM Act was not to stamp spam out of existence,” the court wrote. “There are beneficial aspects to commercial e-mail, even bulk messaging, that Congress wanted to preserve, if not promote.”

The court decided that the federal CAN-SPAM law doesn’t allow individual recipients to bring lawsuits. Instead, the only private parties who can sue under federal law are Internet service providers (ISPs).

Putting the ISPs in the driver’s seat means now, more than ever, you need an email service that they trust.  Do not try bulk mailing from your own inbox.

Why Outsource Newsletters & Email Campaigns?

After June’s speaking engagement, members of Charlotte Professional Saleswomen and Entrepreneurs (CPSE) have been in touch with questions about email and newsletter marketing.  Since we ran out of time in person, this post is fourth in the series of online follow-ups.

Question: Why not just send my newsletter from my own email account?

Answer: There’s a lot more to email marketing than selecting recipients from your address book and hitting the “send” button.

"Just the facts, ma'am"

I’m proud of the email/newsletter service I offer and in answering this question I’ll identify when I’m pushing my own service so you can skip the parts labeled in blue if you want to be like Joe Friday and get “Just the Facts, ma’am.”

Administrivia

• Subscribe and unsubscribe requests — every time you send a campaign, some people are likely to want to get off the list. It may only take you a minute or two to deal with, but if you need to stop what you are doing and switch tasks, it adds up quickly. And what happens if you miss one and send to that person again? Federal CAN-
  SPAM violations can run to $11,000.

  Commercial: My service lets people unsubscribe instantly from any email they receive, and your list is updated automatically — just what CAN-SPAM envisioned.
  

• Dealing with bounced emails — For any given campaign, you might expect up to 10% of the emails to be bounced back to you. That could be hundreds or thousands of emails you need to handle somehow.

  Are they permanent bounces? Then should you remove them from your list? Or do you need to resend the email to them?

  Commercial: My service instantly removes hard bounces, and re-sends your campaigns automatically to addresses which soft bounce.

• Dealing with spam complaints — Sometimes people forget that they signed up for your emails, and hit the spam button. No one wants to defend themselves against the feds in a CAN-SPAM matter.

Commercial: My system instantly removes people from your list as soon as they make a spam complaint, ensuring they do not receive any more email.

Improve your deliverability

Your email campaign can only succeed if your recipients are actually able to read it. When you subscribe to my service to send your campaigns you’ve entrusted a powerful ally.

• Commercial: Whitelisting and feedback loops — My service has relationships with major Internet Service Providerss like AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo! and many more.  This means our mail servers are recognized as legitimate senders of bulk email, so your campaigns have a much greater chance of being delivered.

• Commercial: Monitoring of blacklists — We continually check blacklisting services to make sure our servers are not being listed, something which is time consuming and complex to do for your own servers.

• Commercial: Specialized network of mail servers — our mail servers optimize email delivery for particular recipient mail systems, throttling the speed of delivery to match acceptable levels for each system.

You’d be hard pressed to do these with regular email:

• Personalization — Use custom fields to adapt your emails for individual subscribers
• Segmentation — Send focused emails to subsets of your full lists
• Powerful import and export — Easily get your subscriber lists into and out of the system at any time
• Archive your campaigns — Easily display your previous campaigns on your website

Focus on your customers, not on your technology

Sure, you can use your own email client and deal with unsubscribe requests and bounces from bad emails all day. But wouldn’t you rather use an email service provider that lets you avoid the mundane administrative work and concentrate on serving your customers better?

Question: What’s this service got to do with you as a ghostwriter?

That depends on you.  If you want to use my service and write your own content, go for it. At least you’ll get the advantages discussed above (and a great custom template).

If you want my help, it can range from editing your work to developing an editorial calendar, integrating newsletters and email campaigns with your blog and marketing strategies.  Or, I can simply write your content from source material you provide.

Let’s talk about your skills and needs.  You want to be free to focus on the aspects of your business that can’t or shouldn’t be outsourced.  If you’re not a Business Person who writes like an English Major, you can hire someone who is.

Next Q: Online/Offline

I’m having a good time responding to questions from my 6/18/09 presentation to CPSE.  Thanks, ladies.

Q: With so much moving online, what do you bother to print?

If a tree falls and no one hears it...

A:  I’m not qualified to answer questions about e-commerce and web-based customer self-service.  I’ll answer this from the perspective of the solo-preneur who asked the question.

What goes online and in print varies from a person to person and must align with industry norms. For example, when I ran an environmental contracting business my market was general contractors with public-bid jobs.  Contractors are low-tech, and expect bids to be FAXED, not emailed.  Most of them have Yahoo or Hotmail accounts and a LIGHT web presence if any.  I could have senselessly spent a fortune on multimedia that would have been like the proverbial tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. Instead, I hired a telemarketer who made personal contact with the estimators and then followed up with a customized packet that spoke to our expertise on the kinds of jobs the contractor bid.

On the other hand, when I ran a software and services consulting firm we had to demonstrate our tech chops — everything was online.

Answer these questions:

1. Where do the people you  most want for customers turn when they’re looking for your products and services? Referrals from people they know or from independent raters like Angie’s List?  Straight to the Google search page?
2. When you’re at a business mixer, how often do people ask you to send them a packet of information?
3. When you present your qualifications/proposal to a new prospect, what materials do they spend time REALLY looking at?  What do they repeatedly ask for that you don’t often bring?
4. Why do your competitors do what they do?  They may have best practices or they may be laggards, but it’s always prudent to check them out.
5. Do you represent a product or offer a service that requires buyers to hunker down and study to make a decision?  Offer that online for sure — also in print if you’ve got lots of money to spend.  When I meet a new client I find it helpful to simply sit with them at a computer screen and go through pages on my site and elsewhere.  This assures that they’ve seen my site and gives them a constant place to go if a printed piece goes astray.

Business cards & postcards

Business cards are, in my view, still a must. There’s an ongoing and lively discussion on whether you should include your social media “handles” on the card (for example, you can follow me on Twitter @TamelaRich).  I can see all points of view.

I also carry 4.25″  x  5.5″ double sided postcards that act as a mini home page.  Most people, when given the choice, will take a p-card instead of a b-card.  Given the nature of my work, that’s all the print collateral I need, b-cards and p-cards. Your mileage may vary.

How ’bout it, experts?  What else should entrepreneurs/small business owners consider?

Next Q: Personal vs Professional Blog?

Continuing my series of answers from questions asked at the CPSE meeting 6/18/09.

Q: When should you have a personal blog and when should you use a blog professionally?

A: (From the perspective of a self-employed/solo-preneur who asked it) This can be a delicate balance.  Find your voice somewhere between “faux big business” and the emerging “my-life’s-an-open-book” ethos.

Set the tone with your bio

Here’s a Twitter follower’s bio, (@ex-wirehouse) which sets the stage for the voice he uses in his blog posts and tweets:

“One time Infantry Officer, longtime wirehouse veteran. Currently Principal and CEO of Andover Equity Investment Group LLC an independent asset management paractice,successfully focused on absolute return investing. Proud husband and father of 7 year old twins. Discplined trader who is constantly humbled by the markets. In no way should this even remotely be construed to constitute investment advice, more aptly a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

When you go on to read his posts, you’ll see that he blends strong professional views with a heavy dose of humility, just as his bio suggests he would.

For something a bit more traditional, here’s my bio.

Find your voice

Let’s say you’re a baseball card collector, you love all things about the sport but your paid work is interior design.  How to get into the new media groove?

You might talk about the parallels between project management and third base coaching or dealing with a difficult customer with a personality like Ty Cobb’s.  This makes you a REAL PERSON, infuses warmth into your posts and will probably garner you a following of other baseball lovers.  Wow, imagine having a client roster full of other people who love the game — that’s the potential of your new media voice.

Next post:  What to put in print/online

e-Newsletters: Track Them, You Must

The first week of the month is popular for publishing newsletters.  I publish the first week.  So with the June flurry largely passed, here’s food for thought before firing off your July edition.

"Do it, you must!"

In a study reported on MediaPost on email marketing (which isn’t exactly newsletter campaigns, but sufficiently related), roughly 18% of marketers admitted they were NOT tracking campaign performance.  Stunning.

Marketers that do not track normal site conversions

• Don’t know how      42.86%
• Don’t have budget     4.76
• Don’t have time        14.29
• Other                           38.08

Newsletter metrics

Of course I wish you were using my service, since it provides exquisitely detailed reporting, but no matter.  If you’re using an off-the-shelf provider, start with what you can track and pay attention.

How’s your open rate over time?  What about subscriber base?

Do specific topics generate a higher click-through rate?  A higher unsubscribe or forward rate?

Clients ask, I answer

Yesterday a client called for my input.  She wants to move her ad-sponsored printed newsletter clients over to an ad-sponsored blog and wanted to check her logic with me.  She asked why I bother to publish both a blog and a newsletter.

Answer: I want to make it easy for clients and prospects to hear from me.  My audience ranges from the tech-savvy  to the tech-impaired,  so whether they stream my blog to a reader or hit a blog post I’ve tweeted or look at the monthly newsletter in their inbox (and click through to the blog, or not) I’m doing the hard work so that they can skim what they need and move on with their lives.

This works for me because I’m *good enough* with technology, I have a sales and marketing background, and I love writing, a lucky combination.  Few people, including my client, have the same mix of strengths and preferences, so my advice to her and anyone else is to go with your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

This might mean hiring a ghostwriter, but should never mean publishing an off-the-shelf newsletter.  Realtors can get away with recycled articles like carpet cleaning tips and how to stage a house for showings, but I can’t think of a profession besides theirs that should even consider it.

Goal-driven newsletters

From time to time I have tactical goals, like drumming up attendance for a speaking engagement, but my overall publishing goal (blog and newsletter) is client acquisition and retention.  I want to keep my services and expertise top of mind.  Someday, someone will remember I’m a Business Person who writes like an English Major and engage me.

Staying top of mind is also why I publish free blog/newsletter topics for clients and prospects in the industries I know best: financial services, consulting, services and environmental.  I exercise the “give to get” philosophy that feeding professionals ideas for their publishing endeavors will someday yield a harvest for me.

Whether your goal is converting readers to a seminar series or a sit-down session, you need to start with that goal,  figure out how to make it happen, and how to track what’s happening along the way.  With rare exception you’ll need to make corrections to your current path that will bring you to your goal.  But if you don’t know you’re off course, you can’t get back on track.

Unless you’re a statistician, analysis isn’t the sexiest thing you’ll do with your day.  But to quote Yoda, “Do it, you must.”  Feel free to reach out if you want my feedback.

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