Make Your Ideas Sticky


Click here to download this quick reference sheet by Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick. It'll help you make your ideas and communication 'sticky'.

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Your Goals Shape Your Content

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You may have several goals you want to achieve by way of your newsletter (substitute website, blog and/or social media as it applies to you). Probably you want to increase sales. Here are some other possible related goals: 'Touching' your customers, prospects and colleagues on a regular basis Building strong business relationships Developing your reputation and sphere of influence Sharing your valuable information, products, and services Being seen as an expert Growing your fans, followers and blog readership Keeping up with your competition These all may well be good reasons to have a newsletter. The ones that are most important for you will depend on what type of business you have, how long you’ve been in business, what your competitive situation is, and more. You should be able to pick 2-3 goals to specifically focus on - then match your content to those goals. (It's simple logic, but sometimes we forget.) For example, if building your reput...
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A Few Good Reasons

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"Why do I care if I get along with my co-workers or not?" This bold statement came from a young woman participating in a workshop I was delivering at a Halifax cosmetology school a couple of years ago. It was more of a statement than a question. Oddly, it actually shut me up for several seconds. Not because I didn't know the answer but because I was surprised that she didn't. That day we brainstormed 6 key reasons why getting along with other people is critical to any success. Working together, we can achieve these things that we cannot accomplish alone: More creative solutions. When we bounce ideas off each other, we arrive at better solutions than we would alone. Implementing complex plans and strategies. Because the work can be divided, together we can tackle complex projects more effectively than we can alone. Learning from others' skills and experiences. When we work with others, we also learn from others. Endurance. If one person is resp...
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eNewsletters and Charities in Canada

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If you Google " CASL and charities " (in Canada), you'll find lots of reading on the subject. I'm not going to repeat all that here but rather give a quick snapshot of how CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation) impacts charities. CASL applies to 'commercial electronic messages'. This means that most (but not all) communications sent from charities are completely exempt from the requirements as they wouldn't be considered 'commercial'. Soliciting donations is okey dokey, as long as the charitable donation # is included. Things to be careful about ( may void the exemption): paid advertisements (funders/sponsors might be a grey area) promoting programs/courses "offering services to individuals who may benefit, where there is a cost-recovery element (for materials, for example)" internal job advertisements (because there's a commercial aspect, this may also be a grey area) Even if a message is not exempt, it ...
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Proofing Checklist for Error-free Newsletters

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Having prepared and sent over a thousand different newsletters, this is what I know to be true: mistakes happen . There are so many opportunities for error that I still cringe inwardly when I click 'publish'. This checklist gives you an easy way to remember all of the things to check before you click 'publish':  Proofing Checklist for Error-free Newsletters Click to Tweet this Article
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Even Good Advice Expires

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One of the questions I get asked the most is, "When is the best time to send out my newsletter?" It's a great question because the timing really is important. During a lunch and learn workshop a few years ago, I suggested that Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays were best, at about 9:45am. At the time that tended to be the rough schedule I followed for myself and some of my customers. I even said that I felt Wednesdays were the better than Tuesdays and Thursdays. Two weeks later on Wednesday morning at exactly 9:45am, I received 3 newsletters - one I sent on behalf of a client, and two others from workshop attendees. Suddenly 9:45am on Wednesdays seemed not quite as stellar. It's a paradox that the more a piece of advice becomes popular, and the more it's implemented, the less effective it may become. There are many  other reasons for good advice to expire, mostly to do with changing conditions or specific situations. Check that your source of advice i...
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Deciding to Delegate

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Fiasco in the Fields

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screen shot of email header There's nothing like getting an email addressed to 'fname' or 'subscriber' for making you feel valued. Yes, I'm being sarcastic. This is definitely  not the message you want to send to your readers. You want to make a personal connection with your readers but using form fields is not the way to do it , even if you use them correctly. A form field is simply another automation. People know. Am I blown away when I get a newsletter addressed to 'Linda'? Not usually. Sure it takes a little more time to set up and maintain. Various experts will tell us that using a person's name will have a subconscious impact. Is the sender suddenly my trusted advisor? No. Let me start at the beginning. What do I mean by a form field? They're places in an HTML document used to insert specific data from a database. As an example, [fname] will insert the person's first name from the database. You can type "Hi [fname]...
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Make it Obvious

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“Put a sign-up form on every page of your website.” You’ve heard this, right? Well, it’s good advice… sort of. Half the story is missing. Here’s the other half, with context. Imagine that your best friend has just forwarded to you a newsletter that they’re raving about. You have a look and realize that you really like it too and want to subscribe so you don’t miss future issues. (This happens to me a lot.) You scroll around and can’t find anything about subscribing. Being tenacious, you click through to the website and spend a couple of minutes scrolling around and clicking. Still no sign-up form. I once called a lady in New York because I could find no way to subscribe to her newsletter, either in her newsletter or on her website, although apparently, it was there somewhere. If you ask people to 'subscribe', in your newsletter or anywhere else, you want to send them to a webpage where they can’t miss your sign-up form. If you don’t have it on a page of its o...
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An Adventure in List Cleaning

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photo by perthclotheslines It felt like doing laundry. Throw in the dusty email addresses and out come clean ones, with all the grime left behind. List cleaning involves 2 basic steps: identifying email addresses in your database that no longer exist or have been spelled wrong removing non-existent email addresses and correcting obvious typos List cleaning was a new experience for us. We had anticipated it might be needed at some point so had done some research – enough to know that there were many options available online. We figured it should be easy to do when the need arose. When the need did arise recently, I clicked my way to those apps we'd flagged as promising. I quickly discovered that it wasn't going to be as straightforward as I had imagined (and hoped). The first 2 apps I tried left me scratching my head in puzzlement. With no time to waste on a big learning curve, I did a new search and decided to try ListWiseHQ. What a pleasant surprise! It w...
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When are you Reading This?

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One question I get asked a lot is, “When is the best time to send my newsletter?” If the person asking has an hour or so, we might chat about how it can depend on a lot of things about their business, strategy and target market. Then I might tell them about the overall industry statistics . But really, do you pick Tuesday because it’s half a percent better than Monday? That will only make a difference if you have thousands of subscribers. Consider your own email habits. How do you vet that backlog of emails you find on Monday morning? Keep in mind that, if you aren't part of your target market, your habits will vary from your subscribers’ habits. Don't project your own judgments onto your readership. Ideally, you want your newsletter to arrive when your subscriber is using their email. And when they read is often dictated by where they read - at home, at work, or out and about. So, the answer is simple: figure out when your subscribers are using their email and s...
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