Part 1 – Don’t annoy people

If your email inbox is anything like mine it’s constantly filling up with marketing emails from various sources. Some of these are newsletters I’ve manually signed up for (fine), some are from companies I’ve bought something from in the past (fair enough) and some are completely unsolicited (no, no no!)

Why would you annoy potential customers?

When I received unsolicited emails I reach for the ‘junk’ button. This is not something you want people to be doing when they receive your emails. What many people don’t know is that every time a user clicks the junk button in response to an email a black mark is counted against the sender’s email provider. Services such as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp are very serious about spam – there are actually laws about it in both Australia and the USA where the companies are based. Enough of these black marks can result in you being unceremoniously blocked from using their systems. Rules on email are more vague in the UK and consequently providers based in this country are less strict on where you get you mailing list from. But ask yourself this, on receiving an email from a company you’ve never done business with, probably never even heard of, how often do you feel like investigating further. I have enough stuff to do without responding to junk mail. By spamming my inbox a company makes a poor first impression on me.

So how should you contact people initially?

If sending bulk email to a purchased list is bad idea, what’s the alternative? It’s very simple: Look at the list you have, pick one name, and send that person an email. Then pick another name and repeat. The subtle difference with this approach is that when you send an email to an individual, you are starting a conversation with them, rather than broadcasting at them. Emailing an individual and letting them know that you would value a few moments of their time to explain your services is a very different thing to adding them to your mailing list. Is this method going to take longer than writing a single email and clicking ’send’? Of course it is. Will it be more effective? I would say so. And once you have started that dialogue, there’s nothing to stop you adding that person to your mailing list, just make sure you ask them first.

Making a good first impression

When sending that initial email keep in mind that you are asking someone to pause their day and pay attention to you. Remember that you are not doing the recipient a favour by emailing them so keep it brief and think carefully about the tone.

I received two very different ‘first contact’ emails this week. One from a print company included the line: ‘I would be grateful if you could come back to me by way of return e-mail or by phone’ – Yeah I bet you would. Because that way you can just send this email to a hundred people and then forget about it. The next email I received was from an Accountant who started by telling me that he’d got our details through a recommendation from a friend on Facebook. He told me a little about himself and then simply said ‘If you ever need any help then please do not hesitate to get in touch.’ The request was the same, but then tone was very different. I actually will get in touch with the second sender, whether I decide to use his services or not. He got the tone of his email spot on, and that’s what you need to do to be effective.

What’s next?

In my next post I’ll talk about what to do once you’ve legitimately built up mailing list of people who actually want to hear from you.

Stock image libraries are strange places for graphic designers. The rise of cheap, affordable image libraries in recent years could be seen by some as a God send. However I don’t see it that way. I see them as a kind of Hell, Purgatory if you like. A place where a once creative individual can spend hours locked in a world of annoyingly over smiley, slim, attractive American models with perfect teeth. Not that I have anything against attractive American models with perfect teeth, it’s just they don’t always look like they belong. Like Lady GaGa at a W.I. meeting. I’ve lost many hours of my life trawling through these websites trying to find something usable. Hours that I can never get back, and it was killing my creativity.

Have you ever been given a design brief and found the first thing you did was type words into a stock site to see what came up? To my shame, I have. That’s what these sites do to you, they whisper in your ear and tell you there is a stock image for everything. You can have your cake and eat it, all for $5.

A while ago it hit me. I was fed up with being a graphic designer. I hated that my job had become so predictable as it was unpredictability that had attracted me to design in the first place. As a kid growing up I loved art, but when I was deciding what career path to follow I came to the conclusion that artists only became famous and made money after they’d died. I mean no disrespect to artists, but in the words of Brian Clough, “Don’t send me flowers when I’m dead. If you like me, send them while I’m alive.” So I chose the world of commercial graphic design.

It occurred to me that I’d been neglecting the very skills that had brought me to where I was. I can hold a pencil, I can draw, I can paint. I like to create something new, something unique, something artistic. Why was I wasting hours of my life sifting through endless pages of search results? I could be spending my time coming up with a truly creative solution. And with that thought, with the decision to pick up the arts that I loved, I rediscovered my passion for design and my inspiration to do something new.

If you browse our website, I’m sure you’ll be able to spot a few stock images in some of our work. Unfortunately in some cases, stock images are a necessary evil. I’d much rather come up with an illustration or commission a photographer, and where I can, I do. Sometimes though, it’s just not practical, it’s unavoidable. When a client asks me to “just find a stock image to go there,” I now tell them that every time I have to search for a stock image, a part of my soul dies! On a tangent, if there are any photographers out there reading this, my advice to you (free of charge)… Get together a large group of people made up of multiple ethnic groups, all ages and both sexes. That image will make you a small fortune! My advice to my fellow designers though, see royalty free stock image websites for what they truly are… a last resort.

We went along last night to a talk at Friar Gate Studios by Derby business entrepreneur Perween Warsi. Starting in her kitchen making Indian food in the 70’s, she now has a £75m business called S&A foods, supplying supermarkets across the UK and abroad. Her story can be found at the Times Online.

Thanks to Patrick Welsh for hosting a great event.

If you’ve read this blog recently, you might recall I posted a project up here not that long ago, which I said I was intending to turn into a series. Well the series is slowly developing, and here is installment two of the ‘In their own words’.

I’d really value your feedback, let me know what you think!

We’ve done some design and illustration work for the Tuk-Tuk Challenge, a fund raiser for Elim’s youth department ‘Serious4God’, where a 3 wheeled Tuk-Tuk will be driven from John O’Groats to Lands End. My sister Sarah Cogdon has edited our graphics into a short promo video. I think it’s pretty neat, so have a watch!