Choosing Courteous and Great Marketing
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
In a public e-mail to her clients, someone near and dear to me (an expert) said most people look at the first two lines of an email. That’s it. They aren’t interested in fishing through pages of post-signature blather. People need to have ways to learn about you, not reasons to put up shields.” She advised three or four lines, tops. Boy, did that set me off. So, these people we send mail to are in such a hurry that they’d rather spend time looking up in dozens of places for the information that could just as easily have been in the contact’s e-mail signature? Here’s my rant—er . . . rebuttal:
My old friend, I so disagree with
this.
For one thing, there are no fast rules. Much depends on the genre
an author writes in. Another depends on the author’s personality. But more than either of those, a complete signature is a courtesy to the person an author is corresponding with. Put that word in caps! COURTESY!
There is nothing more annoying than getting an e-mail from someone
who doesn't have proper contact information in it. And the trouble is,
depending on what the recipient plans to do with the email, it is difficult for
the sender to know exactly what will make the life of that contact easier. Will
she need your website address? Will including your Twitter moniker help her in some
way? Won't the repeated visual of your book cover to your contacts help your
branding? And if your contact has seen your cover before, will it hurt her that
much to see it again? Especially considering that old marketing advice based on
research that people need to see something seven times before they act on
it.
And don't you––as someone whose business it is to help authors--want
your authors to sell as many books as possible and to get as much media
attention as possible? In the PR world the winner is the person who makes it easiest
on the gatekeeper to do her job. It is a busy world. She doesn't need to be
searching for information, especially information that could easily go into a signature.
To arbitrarily tell anyone how to sign their emails without any idea of the tone or purpose of the email seems very presumptuous to me.
To arbitrarily tell anyone how to sign their emails without any idea of the tone or purpose of the email seems very presumptuous to me.
I hope you will give your authors this alternative view. Many
authors are already far too reluctant to get the word about their books out
there. Telling them to arbitrarily limit information in their signatures may
encourage their reluctance to do right by their books—and their own careers.
Hugs, [Yes, hugs. Even rants are mostly designed to help rather
than make enemies!]-----
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a former
journalist, retailer, and marketer who started publishing how-to books for
writers for the classes she taught for UCLA Extension’s renowned Writers’
Program. Members of the California Legislature named her Woman of the Year in
Arts and Entertainment. Learn more about her how-to books and her creative
writing at http://howtodoitfrugally.com Learn more about book promotion (and avoiding being the reluctant book promoter!) in her The Frugal Book Promoter and the rest of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers at http://bit.ly/FrugalBookPromo.
