Bye, Bye, Ancien Régime

Kings, aristocrats, tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves rebelling 

against the sovereign of the earth, which is the human race.

— Robespierre

Call me crazy, but I believe we'll look back on December 2017 as the month billionaire GOP donors signed their own death warrants.

In 1789, when France's overtaxed 98% decided enough privation was enough, they tore down the Bastille, looted the artisocrats' châteaux, and burned tax collectors' homes. 

A month later, they enshrined equal opportunity in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Bye, bye, ancien régime. Hello, guillotine.

Riot and bloody mayhem.

It can't happen here, you say?

It can. It has. It will.

Republicanism (small R) runs deep in our history, from Jefferson to Lincoln to Eisenhower to Sanders. It doesn't suffer fat cats.

To honor Emancipation's 24th anniversary in April 1886, Frederick Douglass spoke in Washington's Israel Bethel Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

Criticized by newspapers at the time of waving the "waving the bloody shirt," Douglass warned the audience:

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe."

Is Your Copy Ducky?

There once was an ugly duckling.

And if you read to the end, you'll learn how he dealt with his handicap.

But first, let me ask: Do you know how to guarantee readers won't abandon your copy?

Copywriter Joe Sugarman has two rules:

• Start with a story. It creates an emotional bond with readers.

• Seed your copy with hooks. Sugarman calls them seeds of curiosity.

Sugarman also urges you to start your story with a short sentence.

Short spurs curiosity.

Short openers are the novelist's trick, as Anthony Doerr demonstrates in the first sentence of All the Light We Cannot See:

At dusk they pour from the sky.

And a short opener can be even stronger, Sugarman says, if it jibes with readers' feelings:

There once was an ugly duckling. 

Poor guy. Would you like to be called ugly?

Once you've started your story, to urge readers on, you must continue to play to their curiosity.

You do so with hooks, like this one:

Now here comes the good part.

Hooks work because the human mind doesn't like unfinished business.

That's why TV series like Stranger Things exploit cliffhangers. They prompt viewers to binge.

You want readers to binge on your copy.

Otherwise, they'll never buy a thing.

And things could get ugly for you. 

Fast.

But, you say, B2B doesn't work like that! B2B is boring.

Baloney.

Tell it to Farmers Insurance. 

Here's the opener of an email I just received from the company:

I'm a small business owner, and I visit my clients' offices often.
I pretty much live on the road. Here's my challenge.

Hooked yet?

You'd laugh, if I told you the email promotes a Certificate of Insurance.

How boring is that?

Now back to our duck...

Natural Born Artists

In November, I rode in a car to the top of one of nature's wonders, Arizona's 9,200-foot high Mount Lemmon, only to encounter, of all people, the singer-songwriter Sting (dining with his wife in a mountaintop restaurant) and to discover the mountain is named for a nature artist.

In 1861, Sara Lemmon (née Plummer) was teaching art in New York City when she volunteered as a nurse in the Union Army. But she caught pneumonia while serving and was ordered to journey west for the air. Sara did so, and opened a stationery shop in Santa Barbara, California, turning it into a hangout for local artists and intellectuals. She also began to paint botanical subjects around town, and founded a natural history society.

Through the society, Sara met and fell in love with a professional botanist, John Lemmon. He also had fragile health, thanks to wartime imprisonment at Andersonville, and when the couple married in 1880, Sara suggested they honeymoon so as "to make a grand botanical raid into Arizona, and try to touch the heart of the Santa Catalina's."

Together, on horseback, the nature-lovers rode to the top of the tallest peak in the chain, he cataloging and she painting plants the whole way. At the summit, at the urging of their guide, they named the mountain for Sara. Her artwork later won awards at national expositions, and a number of plants (as well as the mountain) bear her name today. Sara would also serve four years as the official artist for the California State Board of Forestry, and lecture about conservation at scientific conferences and the Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

In April, I visited Cumbria in England, where I met a famous shepherd and also discovered the wondrous world of another nature artist, Beatrix Potter, better known as the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

Born in London, Beatrix grew up enjoying a posh life as a painter of plants and animals (her wealthy parents enrolled her in art lessons from age eight). At 20, she was earning commissions on her illustrations for greeting cards, and even produced an illustrated scientific paper about mushrooms that was presented to The Linnean Society.

At 35, Beatrix self-published Peter Rabbit. It was immediately picked up by a trade publisher and became an overnight best-seller. With the money earned, she bought a farm in Cumbria and became a lady farmer, supporting herself by raising sheep, while writing 27 more of her "little books" and investing the proceeds in local real estate. 

Beatrix's love of nature led her late in life to help found the UK's National Trust, and she devoted her time and money to the preservation of Cumbria's farmland and farming methods. In her will, she left the Trust 14 farms and 4,000 acres, still under protection today.

Marketing Misfires are Maddening

Old-line retailers are deluging holiday shoppers with irrelevant emails this season, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Among other misfires, retailers have been promoting luxury underwear to broke college kids and women's clothing to men.

"Retailers have their work cut out for them when it comes to customizing and personalizing their email offers," the paper says.

So do many event marketers.

They're swamping attendees' in-boxes with vague offers of "must-attend" conferences.

Attendees are growing angrier and more resistant by the day.

The counter-move is targeting, and you shouldn't be surprised if 2018 turns out to be the year event marketers mastered it. 

The stakes are too high to do anything less.

Targeting demands not only that you segment your lists, but that you think hard about the relevance of your value proposition, and its expression. Can you:

• Distill your value proposition? Can you convey is a few short, simple sentences why anyone attends your event? Can you make the sentences memorable?
  
  
• Capture the message in a Subject line? Can you convey that value in 10 characters?
  
  
• Personalize the email? Can you avoid sending generic emails? Simply including the reader's name in the Subject line boosts open rates 26%.
  
  
• Assure readability? Can you design emails that encourage speed-reading and comprehension (especially on a mobile phone)?
  
  
• Leverage your content? Can you put content and speakers center stage? Will attendees meet celebrities, thought leaders, and influencers at your event?
  
  
• Provide social proof? Can you persuade readers they'll miss opportunities others enjoy by attending your event? Dropping names and including testimonials do this.

Not Our People

Hidebound execs often don't grasp why you'd recommend multichannel marketing.

They project their own media habits onto customers.

"Our people don't watch videos. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't watch videos.")

"Our people don't attend webinars. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't don't attend webinars.") 

"Our people don't read newsletters. Not our people." (Translation: "I don't read newsletters.")

Foreclosing the use of entire channels based on your own media habits is foolery. A diversified marketing spend is a smart one.

And yet execs do it all the time. At their own peril.

A new study by IEEE reveals, for example, that many engineers like videos, webinars, and  newsletters. They also like many other channels:

• 67% routinely watch videos on YouTube
• 64% routinely read online catalogs (and 40% read printed ones)
• 36% routinely attend webinars
• 33% routinely read free newsletters
• 30% routinely visit online communities
• 22% routinely attend trade shows and conferences

No matter who they are—doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs—you need a firm grasp of your customers' media habits, to counter the recalcitrant exec who says, "Not our people."

If you don't have that data, get it now. A simple online survey will do.