The Maine CFA Society got into the spirit of my Sept. 17 presentation on “How to Write Investment Commentary People Will Read.” They skewered me for using an unnecessary adverb in a sample sentence.
That’s the enthusiasm I enjoy when I teach CFA charterholders to write more concise, compelling investment commentary.
Everybody sends occasional emails with typos and punctuation mistakes. But some emails are more important than others. When you want to make your email perfect, follow these rules.
1. Print out your email.
Somehow it’s easier to see errors on paper.
2. Read it out loud.
This is good for catching missing words that your mind might otherwise fill in.Otherwise, you often see what you expect to see.
3. Get someone else to proofread it.
It’s easier for a third party to catch your errors.
4. Let it sit overnight.
When you read with fresh eyes, you’re more likely to catch errors.
5. Use a spell-checking program.
If your email program doesn’t support spell-checking, copy the email into your word-processing program, so you can check it there. However, remember that spell-checkers aren’t foolproof.
6. Create a checklist of common errors.
Using a checklist makes you slow down and, so you’re more likely to catch the errors highlighted on the checklist. For example, let’s say you’re confused about “How to punctuate bullet-pointed lists.” Add to your checklist: “check bullet point punctuation rules” with a link to the rules.
Have you got other suggestions for keeping emails error-free? Please share them in the Comments section.
As a dinosaur who wrote the first chapters of her Ph.D. dissertation on a manual typewriter, I grew up leaving two spaces after every period. But times have changed, and today I leave only one space between a period and the new sentence that follows it.
The two spaces made sense when we used typewriters with monospacing, as Grammar Girl explains in “How many spaces after a period?” But now that we’ve switched to proportional fonts, one space has become the standard.
If you feel passionately that we should use two spaces, you’ve got company, as you’ll see in “How Many Spaces After a Period: One or Two?“
More posts about punctuation:
* How to punctuate bullet-pointed lists
* Bloggers’ top two punctuation mistakes
Image courtesy of Just2shutter at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Newsletters are an important part of marketing for many investment and wealth management firms.
You’ve got lots of options.
I’d like to learn your opinion on what works best. Please answer the poll in the right-hand column of this blog.
Also, feel free to leave a comment below.
Registered representatives, if you distribute an article with your name, FINRA wants you to contribute most of the content.
That seems to be the minimum requirement, according to comments I’ve received from other financial marketing writers in LinkedIn’s Financial Writing/Marketing Communications Group. Your compliance department may have stricter requirements, so check before you publish.
“Misleading Communications About Expertise,” a FINRA regulatory noticed dated May 2008, appears to lay out the rules. It says, “Registered representatives may not suggest (or encourage others to suggest) that they authored investment-related books, articles or similar publications if they did not write them. Such a publication created by a third-party vendor must disclose that it was prepared either by the third party or for the representative’s use.”
However, what does it mean to write an article?
It appears that ghostwriters can be involved if they aren’t providing the information for the article. In other words, if the rep provides the article’s substance–either through an outline or an interview conducted by the ghostwriter–and if the rep oversees revisions to the article, then it’s okay. At least that’s what I took away from the comments of writers who interact more closely than me with compliance experts.
Again, be sure to check with your firm’s compliance department before you publish.
If you’ve had experience with this topic, I welcome your comments.
“10 Easy Secrets of Good Grammar” by Martha Brockenbrough gives useful advice.
Many will be surprised by number 2: ” ‘I’ isn’t always the more educated choice.” But she’s got it right.
I don’t agree that “semicolons are easy to use,” even though I’m getting better at them.
But don’t rely on my comments. Read Brockenbrough’s article now!
Having a hard time writing your first sales letter? The “60-Minute Naked Truth Salesletter Formula” can get you started. But you should tweak his formula to reach your audience and to keep your compliance officer happy.
The formula
Here’s my interpretation of the formula. You can read more details in Michel Fortin’s explanation of Dean Jackson’s formula in “60-Minute Naked Truth Salesletter Formula.”
1. Start by completing the following sentence: “I’m writing to you because I want you to…”
2. Complete the following sentence with a bulleted list: “The reason I’m writing to you specifically is because I think you want…”
3. List your services’ features and benefits.
4. List your prospects’ top 10 questions or objections–and your answers to them
5. Explain how you guarantee results or remove risks. Obviously this step poses challenges for financial advisors.
6. Write a “call to action,” giving steps the reader can take to connect with you or your company and describing exactly what the reader will get.
7. Give your reader a sense of urgency, so they’ll act soon.
8. Supply testimonials. This is another step that financial advisors–especially investment managers–should skip because of the SEC prohibition against testimonials.
Pros and cons of applying this formula
The pluses of this formula include
* Making it easy for your readers to understand what you want and how it’ll benefit them–Too many financial advisors get hung up on features instead of benefits. Or they fail to anticipate objections.
* Organizing your information logically
* Developing a good understanding of topics that you need to discuss with prospects
* Ensuring that you include an action step, the “call to action,” in your letter
The drawbacks of this formula include
* Landing you in trouble with your compliance officer through discussion of guarantees or testimonials (although it’s easy enough to skip Steps 5 and 8)
* Sounding too formulaic and too much like a late night TV ad for something that grinds, chops, and does everything else
* Creating a letter that’s so long no one will read it
I learned about Michel Fortin’s blog post in an email from marketer Sonia Simone of Remarkable Communication. Thanks, Sonia!
Related posts:
* Focus on benefits, not features, in your marketing
* Your mail has three seconds to grab your reader’s attention
* “Institutional investing” isn’t as great as you think
“Titles and subtitles are turbocharged text. They are your work distilled,” says Francis Flaherty in The Elements of Story, p.247.
So, don’t just dash off your titles and subtitles. Put some thought into them. Make them convey the main points of your articles or blog posts. You’ll get more readers, if you follow this advice.
For example, which article would you read? One entitled “Cost Basis Records” or “Save Your Cost Basis Records Now, Or Pay More Taxes Later”?
“When Will Housing Recover?” This title reeled me in. I flipped directly to the article, bypassing two others. But what I found disappointed me. I’ll use this article’s mistakes to suggest rules you can follow in your article introductions.
The writing problem: Boring introduction
Then article’s first paragraph stopped me cold. It held a long-winded description of a home price index’s composition. It’s information that I might exile to a footnote if I wrote a white paper on this topic.
Here’s the first sentence of the article: “The S&P/Case–Shiller Home Price indices measure the growth in value of residential real estate in various regions of the United States.” The first paragraph devotes 247 words to the details of the markets tracked by these 23 indices.
Three rules for an interesting introduction
1. Answer the key question. That’s “What’s in it for your readers, if they slog through your article?” The authors nailed this question perfectly with their title. But they forgot about it when they wrote their introduction.
2. Keep it short. Direct marketers have discovered that readers start to lose interest once a paragraph runs longer than 42 words. Sure, investment professionals have more patience than folks opening junk mail. Still, the authors’ 247 words–almost six paragraphs of words according to direct marketers’ standards–is way too long.
3. Don’t save the good stuff for your conclusion. If you’re like me, you learned in school that you should build your argument logically to a conclusion. Throw that habit away, if you want people to read what you write. At a minimum, hint at your conclusion in the introduction to your article.
My rewrite of the article’s introduction
Everybody wants to know when housing will recover. But you can’t make a meaningful estimate until you understand the data. It seems to us that the severity of the decline has been overstated because of problems with the S&P/Case–Shiller Home Price indices. Once we understand the data better, we can make a case for housing getting on the road to recovery by the second quarter of 2010.
The indices are dominated by states, such as California and Nevada, that have experienced a housing boom followed by a bust. In fact, price increases and declines vary greatly by state. The price of housing in roughly two-thirds of our 50 states have risen–or fallen by no more than 5%–during the two years since the fourth quarter of 2006.
My rewrite isn’t perfect. Some of the sentences are awfully long. But I feel confident that it’s more engaging than the original. What do you think?
“The consumer decides in 3 seconds whether to trash your mail, or take 30 seconds to scan and prioritize your mail, and 3 minutes to actually sit and read it,” according to a RR Donnelley Direct Marketing Tip of the Day provided by copywriter Pat Friesen.
That’s why it’s so important to create a compelling subject line for your emails and a strong opening paragraph for your letters.
Related posts:
* When NOT to personalize your email’s subject line
* Boost readership of your enewsletter with powerful subject lines
* “Email Subject Lines: 15 Rules to Write Them Right”