Devising your Editorial Calendar

Exhortations to “publish, publish, publish” forget the most important advice: publish something worthwhile. To communicate in a meaningful way build an editorial calendar and stock your content pantry.

Building blocks for an editorial calendar

Seasonality. The US tax season drives business to accountants, but also  drives a spike in calls to financial advisors and some attorneys. Surely there is seasonality in your business, too. What seasonal issues do your clients face? Can you come up with one for each month of the year?

Key Messages. One of my clients is a JD-CPA who specializes in estate and succession planning. His newsletter’s target audience are accountants and financial planners. He writes about triggering events in their clients’ lives that might cause them to consult with an estate planning professional, making liberal use of case studies. What are the top ten things your clients need to know? What are the top five mistakes your clients made before working with you? What are the three most expensive errors your clients make when trying to go it alone?

Political calendar. Here in the States, 2010 is an election year, so candidates will be talking about change. Seize the momentum and prepare a series of articles or posts on topics likely to get news coverage. If you play your cards right (or hire a public relations pro) you might have the good fortune of being quoted by mainstream media.

The 24×7 news cycle. You can’t plan ahead for all breaking news, but you can capitalize on it. Once you know your key messages you’ll be surprised how often something in the news prompts you for a blog post or newsletter article.

Build a content pantry of key messages

Back in ye olde days (before 1980 or so!) people stocked “staples” in their kitchens/pantries including flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, herbs, spices…you get the idea. This made it easy to whip up a myriad of dishes with the addition of items that can’t sit on the shelf as long.

Think of your key messages as a “content pantry.” One of my clients, a mortgage planner, has this in his content pantry:

• A written mortgage planning philosophy
• Case studies of how people in various phases of life can apply his philosophy
• A recommended process for people to find and finance the right house
• Case studies of refinancing strategies gone well and gone badly
• Some mortgage planning tools like a Household Blended Debt Rate calculator
• A list of mistakes people often make when house/mortgage shopping

Add a seasonal calendar

The mortgage planner’s calendar includes:

• First Quarter:
  • Good financial/budgeting hygiene
  • Planning ahead to making deposits on colleges (refi may be in order)
  • Tax season
• Second Quarter:
  • People start thinking about selling their home
  • Get a mortgage plan before falling in love with a house
  • Local stats on home values, appreciation,  school boundary changes & other things of interest to shoppers
• Third Quarter:
  • Basic financial advice (evergreen topics)
  • Reminders to come in for an annual mortgage review
  • Looking ahead at funding college
• Fourth Quarter:
  • September is Life Insurance Awareness month; he talks about the role of insurance in an overall mortgage strategy
  • Year-end/first-of-year planning topics (might include refi)

Ready to publish

This client is basically ready to go. When something hits the news, he already has key messages from which to base commentary. How’d he get to this point? I helped.

You can do this, too. What are you waiting for?

Low-Jargon Financial Blogs & Newsletters

I write blogs and newsletters for attorneys, advisors and accountants. These professionals often need to provide complex information without making their clients’ eyes glaze over.

Professionals  with compliance/malpractice concerns  too often navigate the middle of the road where nothing meaningful is communicated. Some admit they hope readers will pick up the phone and call for clarification “on the clock.” Bad strategy.

Everyone faces this challenge of writing thorough-yet-understandable communications  from time to time. Here are writing tips for newsletter or blog writers who aspire to communicate without using jargon on one hand, or dumbing down the message on the other.

It’s a conversation, not a treatise

• Provide links to jargon, technical definitions and 50-cent SAT words like “treatise.” This way, everyone can get as much info as they need on their own and your writing doesn’t bog down
• Don’t mistake your articles for term papers!
  • Use headers, bolds and links to enable (gasp) skimming
  • Avoid passive voice; use active voice
  • Write to the appropriate reading level of your audience
    • Run your copy through a fog index calculator (tells the number of years of education needed to understand what you’ve written)
    • If you use Google Docs, click Tools>Word Count and find the analysis at the bottom
• You’re not a professor
  • Don’t try to tell everything you know about the subject. Pare it down to the essentials
  • For weighty topics, write a series of short articles
  • Provide an intro to the topic in your newsletter and link to your blog/elsewhere for details. If you can find a video (or make one yourself) your audience will be grateful. Here’s how one of my clients does it
  • Leverage industry videos and handouts (be sure to comply with licensing and copyrights)

Engage readers

• Invite them to leave comments and comment on those of others
• Offer a free worksheet to help them apply the information to their lives — invite them to review the information with you off the clock, if appropriate
• Ask readers to weigh in on a topic by linking to a survey that gives them the option to see how their answers compare to those of other respondents
• Poll readers for future articles on similar/related subjects

Brains need variety

• 

  This infographic is from a parody site

  Use stories – our brains are wired for stories -and people “find” themselves in them.

• Use case studies for the same reasons

• Link to a narrated presentation deck or video to stimulate the story-receptive part of readers’ brains. One of my clients does this very well

• Use  infographics or produce your own charts and tables. FlowingData is a great resource to learn about them and you might find one to use there

What techniques have you or others used to make complex information digestible? What have you seen out there that turns you off? 

SPAM Tweetup

Looking forward to seeing anyone who wants to talk about SPAM in Charlotte Weds, November 11 at 11:30 :

• Who decides when spam is officially SPAM
• Making sure you’re not mistaken for a spammer
• Best practices for email marketing (including newsletters)
• How to handle spammers

By nature, a tweetup is informal, so drop in at Mama Ricotta’s and meet some great tweeple. Not tweeting yet? This group might convince you to give it a twhirl.

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.

Do Your Stats Stack?

Great tables in Epsilon’s Email Trends and Benchmarks study released this July. Great for benchmarking.

Open Rate Comparison By Industry Business Products and Services General

Epsilon’s Conclusion: “Consumers are taking a variety of offline actions as a result of permission-based email communications...sophisticated marketers are incorporating triggers, transactions, preferences, segmentation and other advanced analytics to produce more successful campaigns.” (Emphasis mine)

My comments:

• These stats relate to permission-based email communications, which include newsletters. No studies available on newsletters by themselves
• Newsletter publishers need to learn how to incorporate triggers, preferences and segmentation.
  • For example, an accounting practice might begin offering a newsletter focused on the tax-planning needs of smaller segments of its client base.  Retailers, contractors, biotech, import/export businesses have different concerns and will be grateful for focused communications — otherwise, they’re likely to tune out. Publishers of e-newsletters can accomplish this by simply allowing people to opt-in to a different/additional publication in the sidebar of the publication they currently receive
  • Service providers don’t dismiss the idea of using a “trigger” to entice your clients to download a white paper or special report. It’s a competitive world out there and you need to continue providing value between service engagements

Please share best practices here.  I’m especially interested in what service providers are doing well with email initiatives.

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.

Rant on Unsolicited E-newsletters

Little did she know when she sent me her UNSOLICITED NEWSLETTER what she’d be in for!  It came with this little disclaimer:

You are receiving this email because you’ve done business with (name redacted to protect the guilty) or attended a networking event (NAWBO, eWomen,Heart Link) or are involved in the same organizations as (name redacted) and at one point, you sent her an email or gave her your business card. You’re welcome to unsubscribe (see below) but we hope you will stay on our list.

Inquiring minds want to know how I handled this:

“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.

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