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Hello, wonderful language lovers.

We may have different lives, but all of us who read this newsletter have one thing in common: our passion for WORDS. For nearly two decades, Grammar Girl has been your friendly guide to the English language. Together, we have navigated the sometimes complicated world of grammar rules and language lingo. And for more than 1,000 episodes, I’ve tried to offer clarity and insight in a judgement-free space because really, I am learning right here with you!

It’s humbling to get messages from listeners who heard the show in high school or college and have rediscovered it as adults. Others have been “ride or die” since the beginning. Some of you are brand new and just getting aboard (cue the choo-choo theme music). But whether you are new or a long-term fan, your support in this endeavor means the world to me.

Maybe it’s not quite a movement, but we share a language-loving bond by coming together every week to revel in something positive and become stronger communicators. I think that makes a difference in the world!

Help Us Spread the Love of Language

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By subscribing to Grammar Girl and becoming what I call a “Grammarpaloozian,” you ensure the sustainability of the podcast and help us keep championing the love of language.

What Grammarpaloozians Get

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As a Grammarpaloozian, you will get bonus conversations with intellectual powerhouses, more grammar tips and tricks, ad-free episodes, and personal content from me on topics I just can’t wait another week to publish in the main podcast.

Thank you for your support over these 18+ years. With your ongoing partnership, I look forward to being together much, much longer.

Bragging on writing buddies + an Atlantic pitch

Hello from the Writing Table!

Where I, frankly, have lost all will to live, so covered am I by drywall dust and the wreckage of our house and routine. But, we have drywall. Next step is sanding floors. Supposedly, by next newsletter, we will be nearing the finish line. Renovating a house is quite like revising a book, never knowing you’re done until, well, you’re done.

Let’s hope “done” comes sooner rather than later. And let’s gossip.

Submission Success Story (Pitch Perfect Edition) — “Seven Books About How Homes Shape Our Life” by Yurina Yoshikawa for The Atlantic

Turning over today’s Pitch Perfect story to my dear friend, Yurina Yoshikawa! Yurina is the Director of Education for The Porch here in Nashville and a fantastic essayist. Most recently, she was named the inaugural Southern Prize for Literary Arts winner, receiving a $25,000 award!

I am so proud to call Yurina a friend and so happy to share her expertise here. Take it away, Yurina!

For me, 2022 was the first time since the pandemic that I was able to commit a lot of my time to freelance writing, thanks to a return of consistent childcare. I built my portfolio several months at a time, and used each successful publication as a ladder to get me to the next pitch. Having written a piece for Lit Hub in April helped secure a book review in the Japan Times in May, which helped with a bundled book review gig for NPR in August, which led to this pitch for the Atlantic. While I would personally prefer to spend the entire article dissecting one book, I learned that many publications (like NPR and Atlantic) preferred this bundled approach, which meant that I would read and critique five or more books but with a shorter word count to go with each book. This was exhilarating, challenging, and exhausting. I felt like a grad student all over again, reading novel after novel and writing many book reports on all of them.

I initially reached out to the books editor at the Atlantic in September to see if they would want me to review Haruki Murakami's nonfiction book, Novelist as Vocation. The publisher had sent me an advanced copy, and I felt pretty confident about my ability to write a nuanced report.

The Pitch:

Hi [Editor],

Thank you for taking the time to consider my previous pitches.I completely understand, and it's helpful to know about th

'Woman' Versus 'Female'

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 05:02:45 -0700
September 17, 2024, Grammar Girl
The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky

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Listen to Grammar Girl on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

The Podcast

On Tuesday, we debunked misconceptions about gendered language, tracing the etymology of words such as "cockamamie" and "gynecology." We also looked at the flexibility of English grammar, examining how common words such as "that" and "had" can work as different parts of speech.

On Thursday, I talked with two editors from the Chicago Manual of Style: Russell Harper and Mary Laur. The Chicago Manual of Style is updated every seven years, and this update was a biggie. They told me about the major changes, how the decisions get made, and the history of the CMOS (pronounced "sea moss"). This is a rare chance to hear directly from the editors!

TUESDAY SHOW: Listen. Read. Watch.

THURSDAY SHOW: Listen. Using 'Between' and 'Among' With Multiple Choices
Plus, a great breakdown on how to write a lede

Listen to Grammar Girl on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

The Podcast

This week, we spill the tea. Most words are different in different languages, but the words for water from steeped leaves are nearly the same everywhere, the two main options being tea or chai. We look at why! Also, if you've ever mixed up words, like calling a butterfly a "flutterby," you'll love learning about what these slips of the tongue tell us about how we form sentences.

Grammar Girl Conversations also returns this week! On Thursday, I talked with Alex Temblador, author of "Writing An Identity Not Your Own," about how fiction authors can create diverse, authentic characters and learn to recognize stereotypes.

TUESDAY SHOW: Listen. Read. Watch.

THURSDAY SHOW: Listen. Read. Watch.

Testing

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 01:36:40 -0700

Testing.

Regards,

On sh*tting and remaking the bed, journalistically

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:02:00 -0700
On sh*tting and remaking the bed, journalistically

Let’s gossip. ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌

Hello from the Writing Table!
Where I have finally put final touches on a reported story I’d been working on for the last six months. My god, it was a slog. More on that below.
Meanwhile, the house is still house-ing. We have electric! We have plumbing! We have framing! The exterior is done! Smart people tell me we’re now on the downhill slope! Everything will be easier and faster from here on out!
That all remains to be seen. For now, I remain at the dining room table, surrounded by dust.
Nevertheless, let’s gossip.

Submission Success Story (Pitch Perfect Edition) — “La Grange’s Only Hospital Closed Last Year. Now An Auction Will Decide Its Fate” for Texas Monthly
In February 2023, the rural hospital my mother worked at for over 30 years laid off 40% of its employees (including my mother) in order to stay solvent. It didn’t take and they closed six months later in October 2023 for good.
This was a heartbreaking development for our family and the community and the story behind what happened to cause the closure was confusing and convoluted. Blame and suspicion abounded, everyone pointing fingers at the board, hospital admin, the community, the staff. (Not enough blame pointed at the state of Texas and its conservative policies IMO, but I digress.)
I wanted to set the record straight. I also, selfishly, was working on a novel about a journalist who reports on the closure of a rural hospital but becomes more entwined in the story than she realizes. In short, reporting the story of St. Mark’s Medical Center would be an excellent exercise of research.
I truly started my interviews thinking I would just do this for research, that I wouldn’t actually pitch the piece anywhere. But then I interviewed a nurse, then a board member, and then a community member, all of whom had such compelling and emotional narratives, I couldn’t look away.
I was sold. But I needed to sell someone else. Enter, my pitch to Texas Monthly.
The Pitch:

In 2005, the small town of La Grange (pop. 4000, median household income $31,000) rallied together to fundraise $9 million to build St. Mark’s Medical Center, a much-needed, state-of-the-art trauma care hospital to serve the surrounding counties. The hospital was to be the jewel of Fayette County, a safety plan allowing the large, elderly population to age in place, an economic driver that lifted many into the middle class. Less than twenty years later, St. Mark’s has declared bankruptcy and shut their doors for the last time, leaving a $106 million economic crater into the rural county.

While the loss of St. Mark’s has come to a shock to many of the area residents, this death has been a long time coming thanks to a confluence of factors hospital leadership could not have foreseen. The hospital was born and bred to be a 65-bed inpatient facility, opening its doors right as healthcare at large transitioned to an outpatient model. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid, which would have reduced St. Mark’s many uncompensated care costs, but fourteen years later, the state of Texas has yet to adopt it. And tragically, the visionary and beloved leader behind the creation of St. Mark’s, Kelly Oliphint, passed away from brain cancer shortly after the hospital opened its doors, robbing the hospital of the guiding hand it needed to navigate the rough road ahead.

St. Mark’s did not go down without a fight; in 2009, the hospital avoided bankruptcy by cutting a deal with the Community Healthcare Corporation (CHC), a hospital management company that attempted to steady St. Mark’s ship. In 2014, St. Mark’s and CHC attempted to strike a buyout deal with St. David’s and HCA Healthcare, a deal that fell apart after a year of negotiations for murky reasons. In 2019, St. Mark’s attempted the Hail Mary and lobbied the city of La Grange to pass a taxing district and fund the hospital through property taxes. But confusion around the messaging of how dire St. Mark’s situation was, misinformation and small-town rumor mills, combined with a robust “no new taxes” campaign against the hospital tanked the vote 81-19. A COVID poison pill briefly saved the hospital with a gush of federal funds only to kill it soundly once those funds dried up.

On October 12, 2023, after attempted resuscitation from the Board, CHC, and a new community player that once lobbied against the taxing district, St. Mark’s was taken over by HUD, where it will be auctioned off piece by piece—unless another buyer can be found.

You're always welcome back
Hey there,

You haven't opened one of my newsletters in a while, and we don't want to keep sending you emails if they're not useful in making you the best content marketer you can be.

As a courtesy, we've gone ahead and unsubscribed you from Contentment. If you ever want to resubscribe, you can always do so by clicking HERE.

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Cheers,
Tracey

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✍️ 11 content team values and expectations

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 06:00:13 -0700

That lead to team success and personal career growth

PARTNERED WITH
Hey folks and happy Wednesday! I’m coming up to the end of my maternity leave, and will be back with fresh content and fresh perspectives in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, this week and next, you’ll be getting a repurpose of some of my most popular pieces. Surprise, surprise––my most popular issues are often less about content marketing tactics and more about content marketing mindset and leadership.

This week, let’s review the values that drive how I work, and those that I look for and try to cultivate in my teams. I’ve found that these values help you create a strong content program, stave off burn out, and grow your career.

Let’s go.
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DEEP DIVE
11 content team values and expectations (that lead to team success and personal career growth)

In the weeks leading up to my maternity leave, I created a content marketing handbook for my team that they could reference in my absence.

It ended up at over 30 pages long and included everything from how our production process works, to how we repurpose content, to the names and bosses of all the key content stakeholders across the company.

It talks about the channels in which we distribute content today, and the areas where there are opportunities to do better. The bigger bet content pieces we have coming up, and our goals in general, of course.

It also included a list of 11 content marketing values and expectations.

Why? Because I have a lot of little content and career mantras I’ve learned over time––and I wanted to document them for my internal team to create a list of content marketing values. Something that they can reference in my absence to hopefully hear a little bit of my voice and help them solve a problem, approach a situation, and overall learn and grow personally and professionally.

More, I wanted to document them for myself because they are core beliefs for working that I abide by, and that have helped me move up in my career, make career decisions, and more.

So, today, I thought I’d share them with you so that you, too, can think through each one, apply it where it makes sense, and leverage them to build your own career.

Because content marketing, and marketing in general, is tough. And while there is no one right way to do this job, hopefully this can be a list of grounding pri

✍️ Want to stay subscribed, right?

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:00:57 -0700

There's a lot more content marketing tips ahead
Hey there,

It looks like you signed up for Contentment's newsletter, but I noticed that you haven't opened an email yet. Don't worry, life can get busy, and I understand!

That's why I want to make it super simple for you stay subscribed. Just click HERE and I'll know that you want to keep receiving the best of content marketing.

And of course, if this isn’t for you anymore, you can unsubscribe by clicking the link below. Either way, THANK YOU for your attention. I know how valuable it is.

Cheers,
Tracey

Get your brand in front of 10,000+ content marketers and executives.
Let's Partner

Workweek Media Inc.
1023 Springdale Road, STE 9E
Austin, TX 78721

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✍️ SEO is harder—but not as complicated—as you think

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:00:16 -0700

Today is a guest post by my friend Nigel on how to get buy-in and focus on what matters to win at SEO (for B2B SaaS)

✍️ Really need you to open this email

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 11:01:18 -0700

Still want to be the best content marketer, right?
Hey there,

I noticed you signed up for Contentment’s newsletter, but haven’t opened an email recently.

And I get it, things happen and people especially content marketers get BUSY.

So here’s what we’ll do-I want you to stick around, so just click HERE to stay subscribed.

And of course, if this isn’t for you anymore, you can unsubscribe by clicking the link below. Either way, THANK YOU for your attention. I know how valuable it is.

Cheers,
Tracey

Get your brand in front of 10,000+ content marketers and executives.
Let's Partner

Workweek Media Inc.
1023 Springdale Road, STE 9E
Austin, TX 78721

Want to ruin my day? Unsubscribe.

Kill the Newsletter! feed settings

✍️ 12 places to find trustworthy, relevant sources for your content

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 14:49:05 -0700

A list of places to frequent to find sources for your content that add credibility and distribution

PARTNERED WITH
Happy Wednesday, good folks! Hope you are enjoying your summer.

I am only a few weeks out from being back from maternity leave. Can’t wait to get some new content and thoughts in front of y’all, and I truly hope that all the work I put in up-front, prior to maternity leave, helped you out in one way or another in my absence.

This week, I thought I’d answer a question I get a lot of emails about from y’all, which is “How do I find these trustworthy, relevant sources to interview?”

Lots of ways! Let’s dive in!
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TRUSTWORTHY, RELIABLE, AND RELEVANT
Where to find trustworthy sources
I’ve mentioned in this newsletter several times that I’m a content marketer who believes very much in interviewing folks for all of my content pieces (Ok, maybe like 80% of my content pieces).

This is for a few reasons:
Distribution! When you interview folks and include them in your content, you build distribution in. You can share it with them when it goes live and ask them to help promote (and they are more likely to help promote because their insight / expertise is featured!).
POV! Because so much content marketing is the curation and re-hashing of information people already know and have published. Interviewing others allows you to test hypotheses on a topic and ultimately create a piece of content that add to the conversation of an overall topic, which add credibility to your content when you do this consistently over time.
Third-party validation: Things are more trust-worthy when more than one person is saying it. A lot of content on the internet makes a lot of claims and calls this “thought leadership,” but then those teams don't see a ton of great results. Well, duh. One person’s opinion on a topic is nowhere near as powerful as when 2-3 people have a similar opinion on that topic. In other words, interviewing folks helps to build your content’ credibility and even the credibility of your company’s overall narrative.
All of it sounds great in theory, but how do you build a stable of trustworthy folks to interview? Well, there are several ways––and you’ll likely need to use a variety of these tactics to find folks:
Partner networ

The best content campaign I ever did was 100% a repurposing play

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 06:00:52 -0700

And I wrote it in an hour. Let’s break it down.

Hey folks and happy Wednesday! Hope you’re having a great one.

This week, I want to really emphasize the power and importance of content repurposing. In fact, most of my biggest successes or wins in content marketing have been through repurposing––and wouldn’t have been possible without it.

That’s saying a lot––so I’m going to start telling the stories behind these pieces and how they came to be so you can learn from a real-world situation.

Let’s go!
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LEARN TO MIX AND MATCH WHAT'S ALREADY CREATED
The power of reformatting revealed
A couple of years into my tenure at BigCommerce, I was handed the case study program. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, except that PR had owned it before me. Did I ask to do case studies? Was I already helping out with some and the rest just fell into my lap? Did PR need to shift priorities and so this was just left…available?

I have no idea––but I loved writing case studies because I loved interviewing customers. And I figured out a really easy back to scale case study production.
Interview the brand.
Record that interview (with this permission!)
Transcribe that interview with Rev.com.
Write the intro, but leverage their actual quotes to build the majority of the case study.
Edit those quotes to sound better in writing (since they were originally said over the phone).
Add headlines to make them relevant to the product and offering.
Pull numbers for the brand to approve (these are the performance numbers all case studies have).
This made the writing of a case study take about an hour for me, because all that I really had to write was the introduction and the headline. From them, I was repurposing from the interview and editing.

This also made it really easy for the customers to approve the case study. After all, I hadn’t put anything in my own words. I’d used theirs––and they seemed to really like that.

Our sales team and web team really liked it too, because once a customer approved the case study and their quotes within it, all of that was fair game to use on the website, in ads, and of course, as sales collateral.

I swear, people over think this stuff sometimes. The best recommendations and insights into how to use your product come from your customers. You don’t need to restate their words. Use their exact words. It works!

A lot of BigCommerce’s case studies live today are ones I did––so here are a few examples so you can see what I’m talking about:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Now, doing case studies helped me in my content role at BigCommerce is a lot of ways. Now, I had direct access to customers and could hear their pain points, start to understand their view of the market, and start to weave their own words and point of view into my content (both literally in terms of using their quotes, but also just by soaking up their knowledge).

This is around the time I started speaking at ecommerce conferences. Now, I knew a lot about running successful ecommerce businesses at that time, but I was quick to tell audiences that it wasn’t because I had done it on my own. It was instead because I had interviewed hundreds of successful brands, and could synthesize the trends across all of them that they themselves often couldn’t even see.

It’s a superpower—and you have to interview a lot of people, often!, to achieve it. It’s why I’m such a firm believer that companies shouldn’t outsource those interviews. There is just too much value to having someone or a team of people do this regularly for your organization, give feedback to your product team, speak at events, write content, etc.

But it wasn’t until BigCommerce decided to bifurcate the brand into a small business and enterprise segment that I did something that proved incredibly powerful with case studies. Like many brands, we struggled to get large enterprises to do case studies with us or to give us quotes.

But, because I had been running the case study program at that time for at least two years, I had already interviewed several of them, and more––I had at least 3-4 good case studies for that segment.

Now, 3-4 good case studies for any segment your company is going into is pretty baseline. It’s nothing to scoff at, but it definitely isn’t “world-class.” But as so many of you know, it’s incredibly challenging to get enterprise brands to say yes to case studies––so having 3-4 of them was gold, from my perspective.

Not so for our sales team, nor for our marketing team. They needed more. They needed more brands saying “Why BigCommerce” for this segment. And they needed it yesterday.

In crunch moments, I do what I do best––I look to what I already have to see how I can repurpose and repackage. It’s the only real thing to do in moments like that when folks are telling you they need something in an unreasonable amount of time. Instead of thinking about how to create something new from scratch, it’s better to look at what you’ve already created and see how you can repurpose and reformat to get them what they need.

Trust me, most of the folks demanding content from you haven’t actually read any of the content you’ve produced. It’s an annoying part of the job––but helpful in moments like this, and anytime you need to repurpose.

That’s because for a lot of your teams, and even your audience!, the way something is packaged defines their idea of the quality of it. Human beings judge things by their looks. I get it.

So, I took the 3-4 enterprise case studies we had––and repurposed them into a short white paper titled, “Why fast-growing enterprise brands choose BigCommerce.”

I cut the case studies down. Pulled the performance stats out, and had a two sentence line about their success with the company plus a pull quote. On the page beside it was an image of their website (which was built on BigCommerce, so technically a product tie-in).

I sent this through the design process, and it back at about 10-12 pages, and it was beautiful. I sent it off to the sales team: “Would something like this work?”

It absolutely would. The paid ads team loved it, too. So did the CRO team on the web side, who used it across the website for lead generation. Our events team printed it off and brought it to events for years. It became one of our most downloaded pieces of content––and the primary lead gen asset

✍️ Free templates for your email marketing woes

Wed, 31 May 2023 06:00:12 -0700

Because these are the ones content teams end up writing most often
Happy Wednesday, folks! Today––we’re handing out email templates, and everyone gets one!

The goal of these templates is to help you see how to structure these types of messages, which are typically more designed (dedicated emails and nurture streams), and which can be more text-based (technically all of them, but automated emails almost always are), and more.

All right, let’s dive on in!
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FOR AUTOMATED AND DEDICATED EMAIL SENDS

Free templates for your email marketing woes
Last week, we talked about how nurture streams work, where content comes into play, and how content marketing teams rely on nurture streams, and their variants, to improve content CRO and better track content efforts back to revenue.

We covered a few different types of nurture streams:
Automated emails: These are the emails you send to someone when they take an action on your site—most often when they download a piece of content.
Dedicated emails: Dedicated emails are those sent to a dedicated segment or audience in your database (leads, MQLs, paid customers, mid-market customers, etc) about a specific message. Typically these are used in content to announce new research and reports, important webinars, product updates, etc.
Lead > MQL nurture streams: These streams are ones that work to convert leads into the next part of your funnel, typically an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Many organizations build content-specific lead > MQL flows that present content leads with even more content related to what they downloaded as a way to educate them more. It will be important here to know how your company classifies leads.
Newsletter: Most content marketing teams manage a weekly or monthly newsletter. A lot of these newsletters are just an RSS feed of the content most recently published. I’d encourage you to change this, but only if you have the time and have a solid content flywheel working (Which is, your content is driving decent organic search traffic and converting readers into leads). Content RSS feed newsletters aren’t incredibly effective, but of course creating a unique newsletter every week takes time.
This week, I’m going to give you templates for the automated and the dedicated emails. Why not for all of them?

Well, building out nurture streams isn’t typically part of a content marketer’s job, though it is a good skill to learn. That would require its own newsletter––or honestly, an entire course!

And for newsletters––these are different for every single company. My best piece of advice here, though, is to subscribe to as many of them as you can and learn what you like and what you don’t. But I promise you, if all you’re offering in your newsletter is your already existing content—without any new formats or any real benefit for fold to subscribe to your newsletter, you’re going to lose them.

Ok, now, into the templates:

Important!!
Always edit templates for your own brand and voice.
Leverage AI to help add more personality or your own spin to these templates. AI has been amazing for me and my team in email writing help!
Put yourself in your recipient’s shoes. What are they looking to get out of their email? How do they want to be spoken to? What is the point of the email, anyway? Make these things clear, make your wording clear, and by all means–-don’t waste their time. They signed up to get this. Make it worth it.
The automated email

Automated emails are the easiest ones to write. These are typically test based, though some companies have light design on theirs.

Automated emails are a great way to help maintain strong email deliverability, especially if you’re driving a ton of content downloads. Folks open these (because they requested the asset by downloading it!) and engage with them by clicking on the link to get the asset they want.

Here is how I usually write mine:

Template:

Subject line: [Something that makes it clear what this email is. I like to relate it back to their immediate action]
From: [name of person at the company]
Body copy:

[Friendly intro]

[Thank them and give them what they want—that asset! Even better if you can give it to them in a way that seems like you’re doing the a favor.]

[Soft sell, related back to the guide they downloaded]

[Close]

Example:

Subject line: Here’s your guide: Ecommerce trends in 2023
From: Tracey at Klaviyo
Body copy:

Hi there,

Thanks so much for downloading our ecommerce trends 2023 guide. You can find your copy here for safekeeping.

Our goal with this guide is to surface some of the fast-growing trends in the industry, and help you and your team decide if they are ones you want to invest in for this new year. Quick hint: the answer shouldn’t be yes for all of them. Be mindful that as you go after new trends, you want to cross other potential tactics off of your list so your team has the time and resources to dedicate appropriately to something new (and make sure it works!).

One key ingredient for doing that is having a reliable ecommerce CDP like Klaviyo in your tech stack. Collect customer data, track success, and more readily understand what’s working, what isn’t, and figure out where to focus next.

If you haven’t already, you can start a free trial with us here.

Thanks so much again, and happy selling!
Tracey

The yellow highlights are where you should link to your asset or your main CTA.

The dedicated e

✍️ Learn to master nurture streams

Wed, 24 May 2023 12:31:06 -0700

To improve your content conversion, you’ll need to master nurture streams. Start here.
Happy Wednesday, folks! Excited to be back in your inboxes and talking about a lower funnel tactic within content CRO.

Hopefully this week’s issue answers some questions for you, and helps you work better with your email marketing or lifecycle marketing team.

Dive on in!

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A CRUCIAL STEP TO CONTENT CRO

Mastering nurture streams
On the path to driving more revenue from your content (and tracking it directly), you’re going to need to learn more about nurture streams. Yes, even if you have an email marketing or lifecycle marketing team––you still need to know how nurture streams work, how they are measured, testing possibilities, and more.

This is because it’s likely that even if you have a team that can help set these types of emails up for you, you’ll still need to write them, or work closely with copywriters to write them.

Let’s start with the basics on these, and drive deeper from there:

What are nurture streams?

Nurture streams are a sequence of emails (and sometimes SMS messages!) from a brand following you taking an action with that brand. For ecommerce companies, nurture streams can be abandoned cart flows or even welcome flows, and I bet all of us have been in several of those.

For B2B companies, nurture streams usually come after someone downloads a piece of content, starts a trial, or signs up for a demo.

What is the goal of a nurture stream?

The goal of a nurture stream is to get folks to take the next steps in the customer journey. You can imagine when you are in the abandoned cart flow for an ecommerce brand, they want you to come back and buy that item. It’s a similar concept for B2B brands, too.
Once you download a piece of content, the nurture stream is there to get you to either download another piece of content, start a trial, or schedule a demo.
Once you start a trial, the nurture stream is there to help you set everything up, and ultimately become a paying customer.
Once you schedule a demo, the nurture stream is there to make sure you show up to that demo.
Who creates nurture streams?

Well, it depends. At many companies, an email marketer or a lifecycle marketer (or a team of them) will set up nurture streams in tools like Klaviyo (for ecommerce), Hubspot (for B2B), and Salesforce (for both ecommerce and B2B).

These tools are sometimes called CRMs or ESPs, depending on the depth of their capabilities. The B2B tools, like Hubspot and Salesforce, are more known as CRMs since they also have the capacity for lead scoring, and lead management by the sales team.

Some email marketers write their own copy, but I haven’t seen that be incredible common. Think of this split as a similar one between SEO marketers and content marketers. SEO folks can typically write copy––esp. with all the new AI tools out there––but I’d caution any organization away from having their SEO person also write their content. They are simply two different specializations––albeit ones that work closely together.

So, email marketers typically work closely with copywriters for the content and graphic designers for the design.

These teams usually live under a mention marketing, performance marketing, or campaign marketing umbrella––and are responsible for email marketing conversion rate reporting (typically you can to see about 30% of your revenue coming from the email channel), conversion rate optimization, email deliverability, form management, data flow management between various aspects of the CRM (honestly, not even going to touch this one in this newsletter. We can do a deeper dive at another point if anyone is at all interested, because WHEW there’s a lot to unpack here).

Why should a content team create content for nurture streams?

Well, because it speeds up the process, and because your team is the closest to the copy you already wrote for your content. Now, you just need to further that conversation you started in a blog and bring it through in your email communications.

Plus, if you write it, it helps solve for the “who’s going to write it” question that will inevitably come up. Take the initiative here, and help your email marketing team help you.

There are several types of emails and nurture streams content folks should be thinking about often, and all of them tie back to content marketing CRO.

Automated emails: These are the emails you send to someone when they take an action on your site—most often when they download a piece of content. With downloadable content, you can either, on download:
Redirect a user to the content (not recommended)
Redirect the user to a thank you page that tell them the asset was emailed to them, and presents additional, relevant content (Most recommended).
Replace the form with a thank you message advising the user to check their email for the asset (Most common).
In all cases, you still want to send an automated email to thank the user and to give them the asset in a place they can easily access.
Dedicated emails: Dedicated emails are those sent to a dedicated segment or audience in your database (leads, MQLs, paid customers, mid-market customers, etc) about a specific message. Typically these are used in content to announce new research and reports, important webinars, product updates, etc.
A lot of folks create two dedicated emails and send the second to those who do not engage with the first. Engagement should be defined as “clicked” –– since “opens” are no longer a reliable metric.
Send this second email 24-48 hours after the first (in business-day time).
Lead > MQL nurture streams: These streams are ones that work to convert leads into the next part of your funnel, typically an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Many organizations build content-specific lead > MQL flows that present content leads with even more content related to what they downloaded as a way to educate them more. It will be important here to know how your company classifies leads. Typically there are 3 ways, but not all companies use all 3:
Number of content downloads or lead score: Lead scoring measures engagement on a company’s website and keeps a score on a lead as they take various actions. Typically, downloading multiple pieces of content (at least 3) from your company can be a sign that they are highly engaged, and worth MQLing so the sales team can reach out.
Starts a trial: If your company has a trial, then the starting of a trial typically MQLs the lead, and sends them into a trial flow that works to push them toward a paid account. If your company doesn’t do lead scoring or count multiple content downloads as an MQL, then you’ll want your lead > MQL flow to try to push folks to a trial (or a demo, below) to MQL them.
Schedules a demo: If your company has a demo, then scheduling a demo typically MQLs the lead, and sends them into a demo flow that puts time on the lead’s calendar, and sends them follow up emails about the upcoming meeting to encourage them to attend. If your company doesn’t d

✍️ Learning to craft compelling hypotheses

Wed, 17 May 2023 06:00:29 -0700

inspired by a question one of my direct reports asked me in the weeks leading up to my maternity leave.
PARTNERED WITH
Happy Wednesday, folks! Hope you’re having a great one.

Today’s newsletter is a continuation of last week’s, all based inspired by a question one of my direct reports asked me in the weeks leading up to my maternity leave.

Today, we get to exactly what that question was––why it matters, how I answered, and how it applies to you.

Let’s go!
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CONNECTING DISPARATE DOTS

Learning how to craft compelling hypotheses
I was talking through the art of persuasion and storytelling formats with one of my direct reports, when she asked me a very good question:

“So, do you just wake up everyday excited about what is happening in ecommerce and email and SMS marketing?”

LOL, I absolutely do not, but I understand where she’s coming from. I am passionate about business––that’s for sure. But it isn’t because I find ecommerce or any particular marketing exe

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