Covering your ass to get the asset: check, double check, and triple check for effective e-mail marketing

[2009]

When one thinks of quality journalism, The New York Times indubitably comes to mind. For decades, the Sulzberger family has continuously put its readers first, building a public trust of editorial excellence that is unprecedented in the media world. Indeed, the underlying mission of Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the company chairman whose family has controlled the paper since 1896, is truth—“probably one of the greatest missions of any organisation in the world,” he says.

But even great papers like The New York Times need to bear in mind the importance of checking, double checking, and triple checking facts…before they’re posted online.

A recent online article in the New York Times, commemorating the life of television news anchor Walter Cronkite, contained some major factual errors. In addition to misreporting the details of Mr. Cronkite’s D-Day coverage, it misdated both Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death and Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon—two major events in world history. The article also cited a communications satellite called Telestar, which should have been Telstar, and United Press International, which was actually United Press at the time.

This is the New York Times, whose coverage of world events we turn to for up-to-date stories and reliable research tools. But even they can admit when they stuff up, and post factual, grammatical and spelling corrections (in normal-size font) at the bottom of online articles.

Luckily, most of us don’t have hourly deadlines screaming down our throats, like the journalists at major newspapers do. We are given the luxury of time to check, double check, and triple check our facts.

Before sending out e-newsletters, ensure that all aspects of the message are accurate—including spelling and grammar. Some helpful tips:

1.      Copy and paste the letter into a Microsoft Word document, so that spelling errors are immediately noticeable

2.      Hike up the zoom so that tiny errors such as a missing “a” or “the” can be spotted. Or, if the computer screen tends to play tricks on your eyes…

3.      Print it out in a larger font and have another look

4.      Read it out loud to yourself to check that it flows and makes sense throughout.

Now that your letter is spelling and grammar perfect, you want to make sure than any links and images show up properly on the computer screen. Send a copy to yourself, and check that the links work from the message you receive from yourself. As Dain reminds us, “A good way to check [for broken links and images] is to send to a Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo account.  Basically any webmail browser will show you pretty quickly if there are any issues with your links.”

As you’re reading, keep in mind your audience. Ask yourself: “If I was someone else, would I really care?” Eliminate any unnecessary information, because if people stop caring, they’ll stop reading.

Make sure the subject line draws them in. As Kevin stated in a previous blog, “Powerful subject lines should generally be short and tap into peoples’ curious nature; they should generate a thought in the recipient along the lines of ‘I wonder what that’s all about…tell me more.’”

Put the most interesting and relevant information first. Most people will probably browse for a few seconds before deciding if they want to read the whole thing—if you don’t grab their attention for those precious few seconds you have—it’s gone forever, lost in inboxes or—heaven forbid—the trash.

Keep the language informal and conversational. Many people are reading it from work, and so have been reading formal reports and boring memos all day. If they enjoy reading it, they’re likely to look forward to it every month.

Writing a good e-newsletter can be a tricky business. If it’s too long, the language is dry, or your topics aren’t interesting, you’ll lose the reader. And chances are, if they aren’t interested in one newsletter, they’re less likely to read next month’s.