Netiquette IQ: 2015-04-19

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Netiquette Core Tips for Creating an E-Newsletter People Actually Read - Via Netiuette IQ

Editor's note: View an archive of Netiquette's newsletter in the section of this Blog post
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April 21, 2015 // 8:00 AM from blog.hubspot.com

How to Create an Email Newsletter People Actually Read

Written by Ginny Soskey | @gsosk

For most marketers, this will sound familiar. You’re sitting around a conference room, trying to figure out how to best engage your leads and customers, sell more products, or just “stay top-of-mind” for your target audience, and someone decides there’s a solution that can solve all of those problems at once: an email newsletter!

Suddenly you're "volunteered" to do it. And you've got make sure that open and clickthrough rates don’t dip. Oh, and the first one needs to go out tomorrow.

That sound good?

I’ve been in that situation before, and I was terrified. Even though e-newsletters are one of the most common types of emails to send, they are actually some of the hardest to do right. It’s hard because it includes a mix of different types of content about different parts of your business, including event reminders, surveys, educational information about your product, service, or industry, and promotions.

And because it’s not an email designed to serve one purpose (say, about one promotion, one digest of previously published content, one lead nurturing email, or one transactional email providing order information), email newsletters have a difficult time trying to get readers to complete a call-to-action.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them. If done right, you could develop a really engaged subscriber base and potentially nurture them into qualified leads and customers. At the very “least,” you could engage your company’s evangelists -- and they could help bring in business. That’s not something you want to miss out on.

Want to ace your new email newsletter project, or rejuvenate an old one? Below are 10 things you need to make sure to do. And if you're looking for some inspiration, here are some awesome email newsletter examples you can check out.

Tips for Creating an E-Newsletter People Actually Read

1) Evaluate: Do you even need an email newsletter?

I know it can be kind of scary pushing back on your boss about a project you’ve been handed, but if an email newsletter isn’t right for your marketing, you shouldn’t waste your time working on one.

To figure out what you need to do, first do some research. In your industry, are there successful email newsletters that people like to subscribe to? What’s in them? With the resources you have available to you -- budget, time, and internal support -- could you be successful?

Then, re-examine your business’ goals. Are they trying to increase the number of leads? Better qualify leads to speak with salespeople? Close more deals? Retain more customers?

If your industry isn’t really interested in email newsletters, or if your goals don’t line up with what a newsletter could accomplish, your time might be better spent creating something else like a lead nurturing email workflow or content for your blog.

So gather some data, create a plan-of-action (either for a successful newsletter or another activity), and go chat with your superior. Even if you disagree with his or her vision in doing an email newsletter, your boss will be glad you came prepared with a plan for success.

Okay, let’s say you’ve found that you should do an email newsletter. What next?

2) Figure out what kind of online newsletter you want to send.

One of the biggest problems with email newsletters is that they're often cluttered and unfocused because they're supporting every aspect of your business. Product news goes right next to PR stories, blog posts go next to a random event week … it’s kind of a mess. Email -- whether it’s a newsletter or not -- needs one common thread to hold it together.

One way to help reduce the randomness of an email newsletter is by keeping it to one very specific topic. So instead of it being about your company in general, maybe it’s dedicated to one vertical.

An example of a great, topic-based email newsletter is BuzzFeed's "This Week in Cats" newsletter. (Don't judge ... I recently adopted a kitten and I've become full-on obsessed with cats.) Though BuzzFeed writes about pretty much everything under the sun, they offer up one specific newsletter for people who love reading about cats. Because the niche is aligned with a specific interest, the articles have an opportunity to get way more engagement than they would in a newsletter featuring content from all over the website.

3) Balance your newsletter content to be 90% educational and 10% promotional.

Chances are, your email newsletter subscribers don't want to hear about your products and services 100% of the time. While they may love you and want to hear from you, there’s only so much shilling you can do before they tune out.

Case in point: I have a thing for shoes, and I especially love this one shoe site. I willingly opted in to the company’s email list, but it now sends me emails 2-3 times a day to buy, buy, buy … and when I see it’s sender name pop up in my inbox, I want to scream. If they sent me educational content -- maybe about the latest styles of shoes, or how to pair certain styles with certain outfits -- I might be more inclined to buy from them, or at least start opening their emails again.

Don’t be that company. In your email newsletters, get rid of the self-promotion (most of the time) and focus on sending your subscribers educational, relevant, timely information. Unless you actually have an exciting, big piece of news about your product, service, or company, leave out the promotional parts.

4) Set expectations on your "Subscribe" page.

Once you’ve figured out your newsletter’s focus and content balance, make sure you’re properly communicating about them on your subscribe landing page.

Get specific. Tell potential subscribers exactly what will be in the newsletter as well as how often they should expect to hear from you. Take a page out of SmartBrief’s book: On the subscribe landing page, it says what'll be in the newsletter and gives potential subscribers a preview link. Check it out:

As a subscriber, wouldn’t that be awesome? You’d go in with open eyes knowing exactly who you'll be receiving email from, what they'll be sending you, and how often they’ll be sending it. As a marketer, having this information up front will help diminish your unsubscribe and spam rates as well.

5) Get creative with email subject lines.

Even if your subscribers sign up for your emails, there’s no guarantee that they will open your emails once they get them in their inbox. Many marketers try increasing familiarity with their subscribers by keeping the subject line the same each day, week, or month that they send it.

But let’s face it, those subject lines get old for subscribers -- and fast. Why? Because there’s no incentive from the subject line to click on that specific email right this instant. A better approach would be to try to have a different, creative, engaging subject line for each newsletter you send.

6) Pick one primary call-to-action.

Okay, part of what makes a newsletter a newsletter is that you’re featuring multiple pieces of content with multiple calls-to-action (CTAs). But, that doesn’t mean you should let those CTAs share equal prominence.

Instead, let there be one head honcho CTA -- just one main thing that you would like your subscribers to do. The rest of the CTAs should be “in-case-you-have-time” options. Whether it’s simply to click through to see a blog post or just to forward the email to a friend, make it super simple for your subscribers to know what you want them to do.

Check out Second Glass' email newsletter below, which was promoting their most recent Wine Riot event in Boston. It's colorful and chock-full of information ... but it's also pretty obvious what they want you to do: purchase tickets for the event. By placing this CTA above alllll the other pieces of information, Second Glass increases the chance that their email recipients will click on it.

7) Keep design and copy minimal.

Like we said before, a newsletter can easily feel cluttered because of its nature. The trick for email marketers to look uncluttered revolves around two things: concise copy and enough white space in the design.

Concise copy is key -- because you don’t actually want to have your subscribers hang out and read your email all day. You want to send them elsewhere (your website or blog, for instance) to actually consume the whole piece of content. Concise copy gives your subscribers a taste of your content -- just enough that they want to click and learn more.

White space is key in email newsletters because it helps visually alleviate the cluttered feel, and on mobile, makes it much easier for people to click the right link.

Look to Tom Fishburne's blog post newsletters to see how this should be done. The main blog post has one large comic, a few small paragraphs of introduction, and a link. The rest of the newsletter components are smaller and more visual, making the whole design feel uncluttered an easy to read.

8) Make sure images have alt text.

Given that visual content is incredibly important to the rest of your marketing activities, it’d make sense that you’d want to include them in your emails … right?

Right. But email’s a little bit trickier. Most of the time, people won’t have images enabled, so you’ve got to make sure your images have one essential component: alt text. Alt text is the alternative text that appears when images aren’t loaded in an email. This is especially important if your CTAs are images -- you want to make sure people are clicking even without the image enabled.

Each email marketing program is different, but here is one tutorial for adding alt text to email.

9) Make it easy for people to unsubscribe.

This seems kinda counter-intuitive, but it’s key if you want to maintain an active, engaged subscriber list. Don’t use weird language like “Alter your communication with us.” Don’t hide an unsubscribe button behind an image without alt text. Besides keeping your list healthy, having a clear unsubscribe process will help ensure your email isn't marked SPAM before it hits the rest of your list's inbox.

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Have you ever wondered how it would be if your email suddenly came to life? You are about to find out.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw
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In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki

If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio Additionally, I provide content for an online newsletter via paper.li. I have also established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. Further, I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and have been a contributor to numerous blogs and publications.

Lastly, I am the founder and president of Tabula Rosa Systems, a company that provides “best of breed” products for network, security and system management and services. Tabula Rosa has a new blog and Twitter site which offers great IT product information for virtually anyone.

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Netiquette IQ Technical Term Of The Day - Digital Signature

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A digital signature (not to be confused with a digital certificate) is a mathematical technique used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software or digital document.

The digital equivalent of a handwritten signature or stamped seal, but offering far more inherent security, a digital signature is intended to solve the problem of tampering and impersonation in digital communications. Digital signatures can provide the added assurances of evidence to origin, identity and status of an electronic document, transaction or message, as well as acknowledging informed consent by the signer.

In many countries, including the United States, digital signatures have the same legal significance as the more traditional forms of signed documents. The United States Government Printing Office publishes electronic versions of the budget, public and private laws, and congressional bills with digital signatures.

How digital signatures work

Digital signatures are based on public key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography. Using a public key algorithm such as RSA, one can generate two keys that are mathematically linked: one private and one public. To create a digital signature, signing software (such as an email program) creates a one-way hash of the electronic data to be signed. The private key is then used to encrypt the hash. The encrypted hash -- along with other information, such as the hashing algorithm -- is the digital signature. The reason for encrypting the hash instead of the entire message or document is that a hash function can convert an arbitrary input into a fixed length value, which is usually much shorter. This saves time since hashing is much faster than signing.

The value of the hash is unique to the hashed data. Any change in the data, even changing or deleting a single character, results in a different value. This attribute enables others to validate the integrity of the data by using the signer's public key to decrypt the hash. If the decrypted hash matches a second computed hash of the same data, it proves that the data hasn't changed since it was signed. If the two hashes don't match, the data has either been tampered with in some way (integrity) or the signature was created with a private key that doesn't correspond to the public key presented by the signer (authentication).

A digital signature can be used with any kind of message -- whether it is encrypted or not -- simply so the receiver can be sure of the sender's identity and that the message arrived intact. Digital signatures make it difficult for the signer to deny having signed something (non-repudiation) -- assuming their private key has not been compromised -- as the digital signature is unique to both the document and the signer, and it binds them together. A digital certificate, an electronic document that contains the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority, binds together a public key with an identity and can be used to verify a public key belongs to a particular person or entity.

If the two hash values match, the message has not been tampered with, and the receiver knows the message is from sender.

Most modern email programs support the use of digital signatures and digital certificates, making it easy to sign any outgoing emails and validate digitally signed incoming messages. Digital signatures are also used extensively to provide proof of authenticity, data integrity and non-repudiation of communications and transactions conducted over the Internet.

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Have you ever wondered how it would be if your email suddenly came to life? You are about to find out.
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Friday, April 24, 2015

Netiquette Basics For Work Email - Via Netiquette IQ

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For those of you who have read my blogs or book, you may have noticed that I believe there are Netiquette fundamentals, but there are also exceptions which branch out once you get past Netiquette 101. There are differences for person email, business email and jobseekers email. For the later, I elaborate significantly on these differences which I write about in my soon to be release new book, "Your're Hired . . . ".

Enjoy the article below on office email, still another another catagory.

Good Netiquette to all!
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Andrew Brodsky

April 23, 2015

The Dos and Don’ts of Work Email, from Emojis to Typos Via hbr.org

Imagine sending a detailed question to your boss and getting a one-word response: “No.”

Is she angry? Offended by your email? Or just very busy? When I conduct research with organizations on the topic of communication, one of the most common themes raised by both employees and managers is the challenge of trying to communicate emotional or sensitive issues over email. Email, of course, lacks most normal cues for relaying emotion, such as tone of voice and facial expressions.

But in many cases, using email is simply unavoidable. So how can you balance the need to communicate with avoiding the potential pitfalls of using emotion in email? Here are five concrete, research-based recommendations:

Understand what drives how emails are interpreted. It is clear that people often misinterpret emotion in email, but what drives the direction of the misinterpretation? For one, people infuse their emotional expectations into how they read messages, regardless of the sender’s actual intent. Consider the email “Good job on the current draft, but I think we can continue to improve it.” Coming from a peer, this email will seem very collaborative; coming from a supervisor, it may seem critical.

In addition to relative position (emails from people high in power tend to be perceived as more negative), there are other contextual factors to consider: The length of a relationship (emails from people we know well tend to be perceived as less negative), the emotional history of the relationship, and the individual’s personality (negative people tend to perceive messages as more negative).

The first step in avoiding miscommunication is to try to stand in the recipient’s shoes, and imagine how they are likely to interpret your message. Doing so can help you to prevent misunderstandings before they ever occur.

Mimic behaviors. What is the best way to convey emotions via email? Emoticons? Word choice? Exclamation points? There is no single correct answer; the proper cues will vary based on the context. For instance, you likely wouldn’t want to send a smiley face emoticon to a client organization that is known for having a very formal culture. Alternatively, you wouldn’t want to send an overly formal email to a very close colleague.

One strategy that has been found to be very effective across settings is to engage in behavioral mimicry (i.e., using emoticons, word-choice, and slang/jargon in a similar manner to the person with whom you are communicating). In a set of studies of American, Dutch, and Thai negotiators, using behavioral mimicry in the early stages of text-based chat negotiations increased individual outcomes by 30%. This process of mimicry increases trust because people tend to feel an affinity toward those who act similarly to them.

State your emotions. While mimicking behaviors can be effective, it is still a rather subtle strategy that leaves the potential for emotional ambiguity. The simplest solution to avoid any confusion is to just explicitly state the emotion that you want to relay in your email.

One excellent example of how this works comes from a media organization I recently worked with. I asked employees for an email that they felt was written very poorly, and one employee provided me with the following message from a manager:

The intro of the commercial needs to be redone. I’m sure that’s the client’s doing and you will handle it :). Warm Regards, [Manager’s Name].

To me as an outsider (and I’m guessing to the manager as well), this email seemed well-crafted to avoid offending the employee. However, the employee felt differently and explained: “She knows perfectly well that I made the terrible intro, and she was saying, well I’m sure the client made that segment and that you will tackle it, and then she put a little smiley face at the end. So overall, a condescendingly nasty tone.”

If the manager had avoided subtlety and stated her meaning directly, there might have been less room for interpretation. For example, what if she had stated:

I am very happy with your work so far. I think the intro could be improved, though; would you mind giving it another shot?

The employee would have had far less ambiguity to fill in with her own emotional expectations.

Yet people rarely state their intended emotions, even when the stakes are high. Research from NYU has shown that many people are overconfident in their ability to accurately relay emotions when it comes to email. It may seem obvious that a coworker who never takes sick days will realize a comment about them leaving early is humorous rather than serious. However, that coworker might be particularly concerned about being seen as lazy and will feel hurt or offended.

Consider making some strategic typos. While being explicit can increase the clarity of the emotion you wish to display, it does not mean that people will actually believe you are experiencing the emotion. Oftentimes, people intentionally display emotions that they may not be experiencing for strategic purposes. For instance, negotiators may feign anger to gain concessions, and salesmen may pretend to be excited to get sales (Do you really believe the salesman who states in his email that he is thrilled to meet you?). This approach also ended poorly for the manager in the media company example above.

Given that email makes it so easy to fake and edit emotional displays until they are “perfect,” how can you do more to make your emotions seem authentic?

The answer is to do something that makes it seem like you are not actually “crafting” your message. Counter to most business advice, in situations where authenticity is very important, it may be worthwhile to consider making a couple of typos. What makes errors so believable is that they make you seem less competent: Why would someone ever make a typo if they were trying to impress me?

Especially when you are high in power, making occasional minor errors can even help you to seem warmer and more approachable. There’s an important trade-off to consider here, however: Is it more important in the situation to seem more emotionally authentic (by making errors) or competent (by making no errors)?

Disclose personal information. One of the benefits of email is that it tends to result in more straightforward and productive work communication, avoiding the potentially unproductive schmoozing that tends to occur in face-to-face conversations. However, disclosing personal information while making small talk actually helps lubricate social interactions by building familiarity and trust. Studies that have examined email negotiations show that simply having people engage in a brief “getting to know each other” interaction prior to negotiating can significantly improve negotiation outcomes. So if your interactions are longer-term, limit misinterpretations and increase the believability of explicit emotional displays by letting a fuller version of yourself show through.

Given the constantly evolving nature of organizational communication, there is still a lot to learn about effective email use. However, there are some clear areas where we can improve. In reality, we all have the same flaw: We tend to be overly focused on ourselves and our own goals, while failing to amply account for other people’s perspectives. Using these methods for bridging your and your email recipient’s perspectives, through both increasing message clarity and building trust, will help you ensure effective communication.

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Have you ever wondered how it would be if your email suddenly came to life? You are about to find out.
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Saturday, April 25, 2015

Netiquette Core Tips for Creating an E-Newsletter People Actually Read - Via Netiuette IQ

Netiquette IQ Technical Term Of The Day - Digital Signature

Friday, April 24, 2015

Netiquette Basics For Work Email - Via Netiquette IQ