Bill Weye Presents Handcrafted Sentences

3 Methods to a 47 Percent Email List Open Rate

Last week my friend and client Steve, from Amherst Wines & Spirits, told me that his previous monthly email newsletter open rate was 47%. If you need some context, for a retail brick and mortar business, an open rate like that just doesn’t happen (MailChimp open rates by industry). But I knew he didn’t misread the analytic report because when I started working with Steve, right out of the gate, his open rate was also a leader in his business sector, fluctuating between 20 and 30 percent. I knew most businesses would kill for even that email open rate.

Steve was complementary to me for bringing his open rate even higher, but he was clearly doing an effective job before I showed up (though he didn’t know it because he managed his email list by hand, in his regular email program).

Here’s what Steve does to get astronomical email open rates, along with some lessons this may teach us all.

Steve pre-qualifies his email list subscribers. Nearly every person that subscribes to his monthly newsletter has been into his store and bought something. And most of those email newsletter subscribers are also subscribers to his printed newsletter, mailed at the beginning of each month (the email newsletter is sent in the middle of the month). This means the number of subscribers to both of the lists climbs slowly, but the new subscribers have proven they want his messages.

Steve has a small business. He’s the only full time employee, so it’s likely that he’s personally spoken with every person that’s signed up for his print and email newsletters. Also, he’s tasted every single wine and spirit in the store, so when you ask for a recommendation, he has one specifically matched to your needs. Recently I asked Steve for a two bottles of wine, less than $11 each, that tasted more like vegetables than a jar of jam, and if they had screw tops I wouldn’t mind. A couple of minutes later he had two recommendations (both of which have been wonderful).

Given that context, it’s clear that Steve’s email list subscribers want the information he sends each month. Here are lessons Steve’s experience can teach us:

Don’t worry about the number of subscribers to your list, because if none of them open your emails, what’s the point of a big number? Being more concerned with who’s on the email list should be the priority; those are the people that want to read your messages.
Pre-approve your email list subscribers. It doesn’t have to be like Steve in his brick and mortar store. You can make a strong pitch to people who’ve already proven to be customers, and ask them to sign-up for a monthly newsletter. Just because they bought something from you, don’t assume they also want to receive other communication from you. As hot-top marketeer Seth Godin says, ask for permission.
Have a deep knowledge of what you’re trying to sell, then communicate using language that’s familiar to your customers. No, I didn’t make a leap in logic. If you communicate using language that’s familiar to your customers, then like Steve, you need to get to know them. If both you and your customers get to know each other, and treat each other with respect, then it’s a good likelihood they’ll open your emails.

Do you have any interesting email open rate stories? Please leave them in the comments below.

Single Quickest Way To Improve Your Writing, If You Can Find It

I won’t cover-up the lede with prologue: the quickest way to improve your writing is by finding your own voice.

Ah. Notice how I didn’t tell you it was the easiest thing to do? And I didn’t mention exactly what that meant — even though most of us have heard the advice, we probably haven’t understood it. With the help of my favorite book on writing, below I’ll give you three ways to find your own writing voice.

In a clever piece about losing his once forceful voice to a battle with esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens describes the advice an editor gave him about a well argued, but boring piece: write “more like the way that you talk.” Hitchens can talk. He’s a throwback to a time when intellectuals had public debates about the issues of the times. Not only were there smart people having a public dialog, but they could talk, like, in coherent, logically structured sentences. Hitchens:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions.

Since most of us don’t speak very well, it’s a tough leap to grasp onto what finding our own writing voice means, but I’ll make an attempt, with the help of John R. Trimble. He’s the author of one of the most useful, slim, books about writing: Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing. Trimble doesn’t make this argument, but based on his words, here are 3 ways to find your own writing voice:

Write to server people, not impress them. We don’t often speak in a style to impress people, so don’t do it when you write.
Be lucid. When we’re talking the object isn’t to obscure our true meaning (unless you’re Donald Rumsfeld), it’s to communicate our thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Work to be lucid.
“Have something to say that’s worth their attention.” If part of finding our own writing voice is being more like we (ideally) speak, then we should write something that’s worth people’s attention.

What makes your writing sound more like you?

Photo by chuckthewriter and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

If You Don’t Fix This WordPress Problem Now, You’ll Hate Yourself Later

In 2006, Darren Rowse at the ProBlogger site wrote that more than 200,000 people were still using the default page text that appears when a WordPress blog is first installed. Do you know the words I’m talking about?

“This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.”

That was in 2006. Today a Google search will pull more than 13 million results for those words. Sad. On my search, on the first page of results, I found a friend’s site listed. I’m embarrassed enough for them, it’s hard to mention what I found.

Part of the problem is that when people start their blogs, write new pages, then never delete the default page that’s created at installation. One other issue seems to be that some people don’t understand the difference between a page and a post, then write posts that should be pages, and never look at the Pages administration tab to delete the default page.

If you’ve installed a WordPress blog lately, double check your default page situation. Please.

Without Breaking The Bank, Local Businesses Can Drive Customers Using Discounts via Twitter Lists

This is a proposal for an experiment in Western Massachusetts to start our own “Twitter-pon” list. Most small businesses using Groupon don’t fair well, at the end of the day. But there’s a way around it: start a Twitter list of local businesses that offer discounts directly to customers. Here’s the logic and details:

I don’t get Groupon. Or LivingSocial, or whatever the next location-based couponing site is going to be. And there will be others. Because that business has such a low barrier to entry and the profit margins are so high, if you’ve got $50-100k anyone can do it. It’s not brain surgery.

Try Googling “groupon scam” or “groupon ripoff” and read the stories. They’re not hard to find. For consumers it’s mostly a good deal, but they’re not the ones footing the bill for the discount. It’s the local businesses, often small operations themselves, that have to pay for the discount, pay a fee to Groupon, and pay a tax on the whole thing. Restaurants in particular, because the margins are so tight, seem to suffer when they try Groupon. Ponder this: if the economy was humming along, do you think Groupon ever gets off the ground?

Phone Books, Craigslist, and Twitter

I think about those things a lot, phone books, Craigslist, and Twitter. They’re all different communication tools, but they do have one critical thing in common: they’re communication from individual people that’s aggregated into a whole new thing. What gives the phone book value is not that my friend’s phone number is inside, it’s that nearly everyone has a number inside.

The same can be said for both Craigslist and Twitter: when all the individual communication points are combined, it gives more value to each, in addition to the bunch of posts or tweets (easier to live in a city than an island by yourself).

But there’s a problem, especially with Twitter: while communication can be aggregated by following someone, sometimes that’s both too much and not enough. It’s too much because I don’t want all the communication from someone that has an interesting tweet once a month. BUT I do want that one tweet because it’s a local business and they’ve got a great discount on dry cleaning. See the problem?

The Power of @WMApons, Twitter Lists and #wmapon

There are sites that aggregate discount offer tweets from big businesses (two, here and here), but there’s not a site or tool that slices the number of businesses down even further, creating a group of businesses based on geography that offer discounts or coupons via tweets. Maybe it’s out there, but I haven’t found such a targeted group.

This might blow up in my face, but here’s the idea. I’ve created a new Twitter account called Western Mass Discounts (@WMApons) and along with that a list of the same name. Why do both? People don’t want to muck up their main Twitter feed by following a 100 different local businesses, BUT I think they would follow list of pure local business discounts.

Think of the @WMApons list as a mall full of businesses offering deals. People go to the mall because they’re in the buying mood, and that’s why people would look at the @WMApons list: because they know local business are offering deals there. Remember, living on an island is hard. Better to be in the city or mall where the commerce is happening.

How To Join @WMApons

Making this idea hum like a finely tuned engine is going to possibly require local businesses that want to join @WMApons to create another Twitter account dedicated to ONLY your discount or coupon offers. Why? Because, remember, people want deals. That’s what you want to give them. If you foul-up the list with general tweets about how great business was today, then the perceived value of the list is diminished. The more valuable the list, the greater the number of followers, and the number of potential customers increases. Pretty cool, yeah?

That’s the idea, anyhow. If you have questions or suggestions for tweaks on this experiment, let me know in the comments below. Otherwise, if you’re a local business go follow @WMApons and if you’re a person looking for deals, follow the @WMApons/wmapons list.

Of course, like the phone book, Craigslist, and Twitter, the more people who use @WMApons, the more valuable it becomes.

Photo by eschipul and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

How are you holding back that flood?

How much information can you consume in a day? When your belly is full, can you leave a full plate sitting there, or do you go cold turkey and never look at another post?

In an effort to save the failing mental barricades, today I unsubscribed from the Boing Boing RSS feed. Had to. They left me no choice. Sometimes the information comes down the pipe in such a rush that the spigot has to be turned off.

Over the past 5 days, the wonderful writers at Boing Boing put more than 102 posts in my feed reader. I was surprised at how the content piled up because over 600 posts had just been marked as read, in an effort to get a handle on just how fast they were producing new content.

Boing Boing isn’t the only site I’ve shut out of my daily information smorgasbord. More than 50 other feeds have been pruned because they weren’t either producing enough, or producing too much for me to track. A lot of it’s interesting content, though it doesn’t fit into my life. The priority now is becoming a wonderful writer too, so it’s time to be picky about when I turn on the spigot.

Photo by echobase_2000 and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

5 Things I don’t know today

Right now I’m writing my first book that I plan on publishing for eReaders like Kindle and Nook. And it’s a lot harder than I thought. Writing isn’t the trouble — I think my writing is okay — the problem is how much I don’t know. During the writing process I discover something new every day.

Part of the process of writing, as espoused by William Zinsser in his book, Writing to Learn, is learning as we write. That even though we may know the topic, have done the research, we’re still learning as we write. We’re making connections and discovery during the act of writing.

And if you add to the mix more reading about a topic while you’re writing? It just might make you’re ear drums pop.

Given just the “known unknowns” (a favorite Rumsfeld double speak), here’s what’s missing today:

I don’t know how to study other writers without becoming overly self critical of my work.
I don’t know how to write powerful sentences that don’t sound like writing.
I don’t know to physically do the job of writing. Sciatic nerve issues have been giving me a dead left leg.
I didn’t know that self discipline wouldn’t be enough to keep me off the Internet when trying to craft sentences.
I don’t know what I’ll write tomorrow — which is kind of scary — but I will write and it’ll be okay. There are always revisions.

What don’t you know today?

Oh, why this photo: I don’t know! I searched on Flickr for Creative Commons photos using the phrase “what I don’t know” and this photo appeared. The mysterious, confident smiles made me happy.

Photo by moonlight on celluloid and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Weekend reading – 3 Dec 2010

Weekend reading for your pleasure and edification …

Seth Godin says “Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit.” Online instructors should definitely learn that lesson.

From EDUCAUSE, 7 Things You Should Know About Agile Development. It began in the world of software development, but the project management method Agile has expanded into other disciplines. I’m very interested in how I can integrate Agile methods into my work.

Dan Rodney’s list of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts, keystrokes, tips & tricks, and recommended programs. A great one-stop resource for becoming a power OS X user.

From Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, “Underlying Factors of Sense of Community in Asynchronous Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Environments”:

Currently, many CSCL [Computer Supported Collaborative Learning] environments enable students to create personalized profiles and provide virtual spaces, such as online Coffee Shop for off-task discussions. This serves to get students more engaged in learning activities, to improve students’ connectedness, and to enhance sense of belonging in the learning environment. Yet, the findings of this present study suggest that to achieve such goals, CSCL developers should also add features and capabilities to the environment, which enable students to be aware of other’s activities and status.

Photo by Troy Holden and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

When professors go wild! Cell phone edition

There seems to be an Web meme of capturing video of professors going crazy in live classes. Because more and more classes are video taped and posted online, more of these videos are surfacing.

For your entertainment pleasure, and a holiday treat, I present a selection of my favorite professors going wild when cell phones ring in their classes. Hey, you can’t get this stuff in online education!

If you’re cell phone rings in class, think twice about answering it.

Photo by hillary h and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

5 Mac apps that can improve your work efficiency

Here are 5 applications that I use every day on my Mac, making my work life a bit easier. If you’re a Mac person, please leave a comment with your favorite work productivity apps and how you use them.

When I got my new work computer, I immediately loaded the 5 applications that I find most useful: LaunchBar, Adium, SoundSource, Growl, and iShowU HD.

LaunchBar might be the most powerful productivity application for the Mac. Ever. Quicksilver is a similar application, though it hasn’t been updated in a while. Among other things, you can launch every application, document, web page, email … anything from your keyboard. It’s like Spotlight on steroids because within LaunchBar is a system of widgets and AppleScripts that add other features like searching the Web, calculating, copy and paste history, moving files. It’s kind of crazy because most people never use all of the available features. I’d like to do an experiment to see how many days I could go learning one new feature every day. I suspect that it would take more than a year before I exhausted all the features of LaunchBar. If you have any intention of become a Mac power user, get LaunchBar.

SoundSource is a wonderful free app that does one thing well: helps you choose the source of your sound and where it’s supposed to be output. It loads on start-up, appearing in your menu bar, and from there you choose the various options where the sound is coming from and going. You could do this by opening the Sound Preference panel all the time, but I’m making sound adjustments on my computer at least 5-6 times a day, which would be a pain in the neck. Normally I have one set of ear buds through the headphone jack and a USB headset/mic at the same time. I listen to sound through the external speakers, the ear buds, or USB headset. SoundSource is the traffic control for all those inputs and outputs.

Do you know Growl? It’s a notification system that works in the background, letting you know when activity is taking place in various programs on your Mac. It’s real simple. When I get an email, chat activity, or am using my favorite FTP program, Transmit, Growl gives a graceful pop-up on the screen with information like the email subject line. Not a must have, Growl does make the work day marginally easier.

One thing that irritates me about instant messaging are the too numerous standards: IM, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google/Jabber, and many others. I have three different instant messaging accounts myself! Adium is an open source (free) program that handles all your different chatting accounts in one interface, seamlessly. If you have to use instant messaging for work, get Adium.

I believe one of the most under used tools in online education is the screencast. Depending on your discipline, screencasting can be a useful tool to describe and demonstrate procedures on a computer screen (read my blog post Common elements of effective screencasts). There are probably a half dozen different Mac applications that can help you create screencasts, but I find iShowU HD the best. Based on price and ease of use, iShowU HD is the best. Unlike some others, it’s Mac only; in general I find applications with both Mac and PC versions to be a lesser grade than those developed strictly for the Mac.

iShowU HD comes with presets for creating videos that can be posted to all the major video sharing sites, allows you to create watermarks on your videos, record your face using the built-in iSight camera at the same time as creating the screencast, among many other features. If you need a tool for creating screencasts, I recommend iShowU HD.

Okay, Mac people, what applications make your work day a little easier and more productive?

I haven’t forgotten the Windoz people; stay tuned for a future post running down the best work productivity apps for Windows.

Photo by mag3737 and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Future of the textbook

I saw an interesting presentation by the co-founders of Smarthistory.org, Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, sponsored by UMassOnline on October 1 (more, detailed info). Smarthistory.org is a project to create a Creative Commons based, online art history text book (Harris and Zucker are art history professors). You can watch the video of their presentation below.

I have two takeaways from the presentation. First, about the technology I used to record the video, the new iPod Touch. I was able to record 40 plus minutes of high definition video (720p) with decent audio and video quality, which took almost no effort. It’s not professional broadcast quality, but given the circumstances — like the lights being turned down — the video came out well. Our instructors should think about using this or similar easy video technology to create content for their courses.

The second takeaway from the talk is also video related. The folks at Smarthistory.org are using video in some interesting ways, including using Second Life to take virtual tours and do commentary about the Sistine Chapel. Other videos feature Harris and Zucker standing in front of a piece of art and having a conversation about it (not in Second Life), like this conversation they had while in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

Hey, instructors, you too can do this! Making quick field videos with commentary, no matter what you study, is entirely possible. I can picture biologists, economists, historians, and zoologists taking their $150 video cameras into the field and creating brief commentaries that can bring students into your world.

Anyhow, enjoy the presentation from the fine folks at Smarthistory.org.

Photo by Old Shoe Woman and republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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