Michael Katz's E-Newsletter On E-Newsletters
November 18, 2005
Issue #140
Is Your E-Newsletter Worth A Kiss?
My wife Linda is a peer mediation trainer.
She and
her colleagues at School
Mediation Associates (SMA)
travel throughout Massachusetts, teaching middle
and high school kids how to mediate their own
disputes in school-sponsored peer mediation
programs.
(By the way, SMA's founder, Richard Cohen,
writes a
terrific E-Newsletter of his own — and I'm not
just
saying that because I hope he gives Linda a big
raise. Although I do. Follow this link to see for yourself.)
The trainings are intensive, three day courses, filled
with discussion, role playing and group exercises.
Last week, Linda got home from a session and
told us
about an exercise they did that day involving
Hershey's chocolate kisses. Here's how it
works. . .
The kids in the group pair up, hold hands, and stand
side by side about two feet apart (get the picture?).
When the group leader
says "Go!," each person tries to pull his partner's
hand towards himself. Getting your partner's hand to
touch your own hip earns one chocolate kiss per
touch.
The object of the game is stated clearly at the
start: "Get as many kisses for yourself as you
can in
twenty seconds."
The rules are equally simple: You can't talk,
you
can't move your feet, you can't let go and you can
only use your one hand to pull towards yourself.
According to Linda, students often lock in a
stalemate during the entire 20 second period, with
neither side strong enough to move the hand of the
other. Often however, a pair of kids has a
breakthrough.
It happens when the two suddenly realize that by
working together, they can both earn dozens of
kisses. All they need to do is stop fighting, and
simply take turns moving their joined hands back and
forth from one person to the other.
And that, according to Linda, is the essence of a
successful mediation: Realizing that it's usually
in
both parties' interest (i.e. they each get more for
themselves) if they work together with their
adversary rather than try to beat them.
As with most things here on planet Earth, this got me
thinking about E-Newsletters. In particular, how
E-Newsletters are different than traditional
advertising.
If you think about most of the advertising you come
in contact with every day — TV, radio, print,
direct
mail, billboards, etc. — it's passive at best,
and
frequently adversarial. You don't go looking for
ads
(in fact, you often go out of your way to avoid
them), they simply show up in-between where you
are and where you want to be.
That might mean an ad in an elevator as you're
waiting for your floor; an ad in an on-hold message
as you're waiting for a human being; or an ad in the
men's room as you're waiting for. . . OK, you get the
idea. Like a couple of middle school students pulling
as hard as they can in two different directions, you
and the advertiser are often working at cross
purposes.
In the world of e-mail (and therefore E-Newsletters)
however, it's an entirely different story. The
only
one who controls entry into your e-mail box is you,
and while a company might sneak in once pushing
something you don't care about, with a click of your
e-mail filter you can keep that sender out of your
in-box from now until the end of time.
What this means of course is that the only way
to
make an E-Newsletter work for your company is for
somebody on the other end to want what
you're
sending.
I'm pretty sure you didn't hear what I just said, so I'll
say it again. The recipient has to want what
your
sending.
You can't trick or force or buy your way in because
the end user holds all the cards, and the end user
— not you — decides whether or not
your message
gets through. Step one for a successful
E-Newsletter therefore, is to figure out and focus on
what your readers (i.e. your prospective clients and
customers) want to know, receive or learn.
I know that you want them to know all
about you,
and I know that you want them to buy more
from
you and more often. And I'm not suggesting for
a
minute that you abandon these objectives.
All I'm
saying is that in the Bizzaro world of e-mail, where
the power is nearly 100% in the hands of the person
receiving the message, your only option for influence
is to be invited into the conversation. Figure out
how to do that, and they'll buy from you all day long.
Bottom Line: A successful E-Newsletter
— like a
successful mediation — requires the willing
participation of both parties. And, like mediation,
getting what you want is often no more complicated
than first helping the other person to get what they
want.
Enough About You, Let's Talk About Us
With this issue I'm introducing a new and, I hope,
useful way for you to get your twice monthly dose of
this newsletter. . . audio. That's right, as
someone
who's often told that he has a face for radio, I've
decided to make each newsletter available as an
audio file.
Don't worry, from a technical standpoint it's
unbelievably easy to make it work so that you can
listen. You can either:
-
Click here and it will open up a browser window
and
start playing automatically, or
- Click
here and download the entire thing as an MP3
file (it's about 10 minutes long) for taking with
you and listening in your car, on the train, or
wherever you like.
The audio newsletters will be close — but
not
identical — to what you read here. I
tried doing
that
at first, but frankly it sounded canned, so I decided
to make it a bit more free flowing. See what you
think and please let me know if you like that
approach. Any other suggestions are very much
appreciated as well — just click "reply" to send
me an
e-mail.
Special thanks to my friend Ilise
Benun, of Marketing Mentor for telling
me about Audio
Acrobat, the
inexpensive and relatively easy-to-use service that
makes this
all work!
About Blue Penguin Development, Inc.
Blue Penguin Development helps professional service firms get clients,
by showing them how to strengthen relationships with the people they already know.
I specialize in the development of electronic newsletters.
Click here for an overview of my services.
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