Category: communication

Blogging tips for business (and higher ed, too)

No one, to my knowledge, has written a manifesto about blogging for higher education, so until they do, Debbie Weil’s Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging will have to do. Here’s an excerpt:

Why Blog? Isn’t My e-Newsletter Enough?

Unless your e-newsletter or ezine has your customer’s mortgage statement attached to it, you’ll be lucky if your subscribers open it. Between the new federal CAN-Spam legislation, spam filters and actual spam, inbox noise has reached an all-time high. Don’t get me wrong — email is still a viable marketing tool. In fact, email is now in its mature phase as a killer app of online marketing.
But a blog may be the perfect complement to an e-newsletter. Here’s why:
» Since blogs aren’t email, inbox clutter and spam filters are a non-issue. But readers can still subscribe to blogs using an RSS newsreader.
» Blogs, through an easy interface, publish instantly. No formatting, no templates, no fancy coding.
» Search engines love blogs. Each entry on your blog is its own Web page (even if it’s a one-liner). And search engines are drawn to fresh, updated pages. So by virtue of blogging, you can drive traffic to your company or business site — without hiring an expensive SEO (search engine optimization) service.

There’s a lot more good advice for beginning bloggers — and handy reminders for those of us who’ve been doing this for awhile. Link via ChangeThis.

Enticing email for AutoPreview surfers

…some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.

You know the routine. If you’re like 69 percent of Outlook users, you scan through the morning’s email using AutoPreview, deleting all the html-email marketing pitches that show up as a hairline box outline where some image is supposed to be and the text, “”Click here to download images.”

Instead, you click to delete.

Again. And again.

So, what if your prospective students, alumni, potential donors and other potential readers are doing the same thing with your oh-so-important email messages?

The crack research staff at Marketing Sherpa has combed the web looking for good examples of email that just might make it past the Outlook AutoPreview gatekeeper. According to Marketing Sherpa, “some pretty big mailers (Target, The Company Store, the DMA and ourselves among them) have blah, please-don’t-open-me AutoPreview copy.”

But there’s hope. In this article, Marketing Sherpa offers some great tips for more readable email.

Among the tips:
Start with compelling copy. “Instead of beginning the text-version with administrative crud, emailers including JetBlue, Mystery Reader and the Motley Fool launch directly into their content — the letter or article summary that the email is hoping recipients will react to.”

Use CAPS to catch the eye. “The average Outlook in-box screen has five-six emails when viewed in AutoPreview. So, your message is competing with four-five other messages to get the open. Putting all caps in your subject line is a no-no due to spam filter restrictions these days.”

Use text symbols to catch the eye. Adding a row of symbols is another way to catch the eye in a busy in-box.

Bonus: some examples of what and what not to do.