When you make an offer either online or through an email campaign, is what you wrote clear enough for your readers to understand? Full disclaimer: I’m a huge fan of Total Wine & More. I like browsing through the store, finding interesting wines and related gadgets, talking to the staff and getting their recommendations. Though [...]
Do you receive the marketing emails your company sends out? Do you open them, look at the design through the eyes of your customers, check the offers and the links, even place the occasional order or put in a help request? If you don’t, you should. You may be thinking that you pay other people [...]
How often do you check your email spam folder? We represent extremes in our office: I check mine daily, sometimes more. Jerry rarely checks his. I recommend you consider a compromise, such as once a week. In any case, don’t automatically let what’s in your spam folder be trashed by your email system. Without a [...]
Recently I received a voice mail message from someone I know professionally. Our relationship isn’t particularly close, we just met through a business networking group. We’ve not actually done business together and we haven’t spoken or even seen each other in about a year. Two issues related to his message prompted me to write this. [...]
On August 31, I received an email from Home Depot with the subject line: Is Your A/C System Ready for Summer? Really? My A/C system has been working overtime for months. And the email offered Labor Day savings – on summer A/C service? The end of summer is almost here. Maybe they're getting a head [...]
A young entrepreneur doing some major hotel renovations in Orlando recently got caught with some inaccurate information in the bio on his company website. He says it was a mistake and it’s apparently been corrected, but the fact that it happened is casting an unnecessary shadow on his reputation and credibility. If you put yourself [...]
We all know that the fastest way to find a mistake in something you've written is to publish it. As much as I preach proofreading, I'm well aware that mistakes will slip through. And sometimes what you write is accurate when you publish it but may change later. So the question is: Should you make corrections [...]
If you have a question, just ask it. Whenever there’s some controversial issue in the news (and when isn’t there?) and the pundits are engaging in their usual back-and-forth, someone almost always says, “And that begs the question …” and asks a question about the issue or situation under discussion. For example: “That begs the [...]
One of the best ways to promote yourself as an author or expert in any arena is through speaking gigs. But if you do these don’ts, you won’t be invited back or referred to other organizations. 1. Don’t respond promptly to requests for information. You may be busy, but so are the people in charge [...]
If you share any type of files with anyone for any reason, you need an efficient file naming protocol. Okay, I confess I just re-read that, and it made me yawn. But even though this sounds like a boring, geeky topic, stay with me. It’s important. A file naming protocol is the system you use [...]
