Talk minus action
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) I regularly get asked two questions about CreativeBoost.
This first one is this: “Why in the world do you regularly invite people to unsubscribe to your newsletter?”
The assumption behind the question tends to be that a distribution list is only working well if it’s growing. Wrong. List growth is almost meaningless.
The objective of a newsletter (or any direct marketing) is to help you better identify and foster your core audience and then talk with them—not to them.
If you send out a newsletter that reaches thousands or even tens of thousands and almost no one does anything with it (that can range from opening and sharing, to replying and reacting to what they read), then your efforts amount to nil.
Like the beloved Canadian punk band DOA once quipped: “Talk minus Action equals Zero.”
That’s why I regularly conduct a review of my readership numbers and identify those readers who consistently do not open CreativeBoost. Then I send them a message, asking if maybe it’s time they considered unsubscribing. Some do, some don’t. But the most meaningful outcome is in my engagement data.
The industry average for newsletter opens is 22% with a click-through rate of less than 3%.
CreativeBoost’s open and click-through rates are each more than three times that average. My newsletter remains one of my top-three generators for new and repeat business. Just as important, it’s helped me foster some great friendships.
I have a loyal readership that gives a damn about what they read. I’m very okay with that.
The second question I get is this: “Why don’t you talk more about old-school copywriting tips in your newsletter?”
The simple answer: because most sales-oriented writing isn’t very good anymore. And that’s not because there’s a lack of so-called copywriting experts out there today. Rather it’s because there’s too much of that kind of advice and most of it is built on assumptions about the marketplace that are no longer true.
Copywriting is based on methods that haven’t changed much in over a century.
You’ve seen the worst examples of it, likely daily. We politely call it salesy writing.
Let’s be frank. That kind of writing assumes that most readers aren’t very well educated and don’t have the inclination or the resources to measure things, conduct fact checks or run a comparative analysis: all limitation that made perfect sense around 1898.
But this is 2016. We live in the most literate, best educated society in all of human history. If you’re like me, you’ve developed a bit of a soft filter for salesy noise. You tune-out those messages far more often than you let them in.
I’m not doing either you or I any favours if I contribute to that problem.
Again, Talk minus Action equals Zero.
Salesy writing is just like anything else that isn’t creative: it’s being commoditized.
You can hire someone today to crank out that kind of material at rates that pay pennies on the paragraph. You can drop your copy into a website that will scrub it and add all the supposed “winning words” to make you look like a copywriting pro. You can hire someone to write a listicle-style article for you for less than what you paid for that cup of coffee this morning.
What we need more of is an understanding of what creativity really means in a world that’s sliding much faster and steeper than we fully realize into something new. Kevin Kelly underlines this in his foreword to his new book, The Inevitable (https://www.amazon.ca/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0525428089) : “We now appreciate that everything is mutable and undergoing change, even though much of this alteration is imperceptible.”
Increasingly that’s where CreativeBoost takes you and I, |NAME|.
How can we do a better job of connecting things in unexpected ways? How can we find better ways of working and thinking that challenge our assumptions and force us to entertain the idea “maybe I am wrong?” How can we learn to listen better to our customers and colleagues? How can we continually be better at what we do and manage the things that hold us back from that goal?
For me, the answers to those questions form the meeting point of talk and action.
How about you?
Very best, Patrick
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