You’ll be amazed
 
If you toil in creative services, you’re constantly searching for new sources of inspiration. Sure, you can keep tabs on the latest trends, but that’s effectively tracking other people’s work.
 
So you need to think outside the box. Outside the computer screen. And outside your office. (Or cubicle, bull-pen, what-have-you.) 
 
We devoted an entire article, and it’s a good one, on drawing inspiration from nature. It’s an ideal starting point. It’s also very very broad. You can select a single aspect or denizen of the natural world and derive a ton of inspiration from it. 
 
That’s what we’re going to do in this article. Don’t worry: This isn’t some academic exercise or flight of fancy. All of this is strictly business. It’s about nailing that next assignment in a way that those trend-setters—and certainly followers—haven’t yet perceived. They might say that the approach we’re about to pitch is for the birds. And they’d be more right than they can imagine. 
 
Look up
 
We confess to being bird nerds here at Copel Communications. But we don’t see that as a liability. To the contrary, it’s an opportunity. Not only for us, but for sharing with you. 
 
“But how,” you might ask, “does bird-watching, or ornithology, help you create a layout for a direct mailer?” How can it help you with a website design? A home-page video? Or any other of the multitude of creative assignments you’re typically handed? 
 
The answer, quite simply, is “A lot more ways than you might think.” 
 
The important thing here is to work backward. Start with the birds. Do lots of exploring, looking, listening, researching. Step out of that stress-box and immerse yourself in the avian world. Soak it all in. The more you do, the easier the assignment will become. Bonus: It will be more fun. 
 
Depending on where you live, and the time of year, the birds in your neighborhood will vary greatly. That doesn’t matter. Manhattan is known for its pigeons—but said pigeons have attracted a dedicated population of peregrine falcons. If you’re in the burbs, you’re surrounded by the usual suspects: Robins, starlings, various types of sparrows, jays. 
 
Some species are more common than you might imagine. Take turkey vultures. We used to watch them in old western movies; they’d always be circling that dying cowboy in the desert. Turns out, however, that they’re pretty much everywhere; they’re easily the most successful vulture species on earth, and dominate the entire western hemisphere. 
 
Crows are also wildly successful birds. And, for the purposes of this article, helpfully ubiquitous. Like turkey vultures, they have their share of detractors, but that’s simply because they’re misunderstood. 
 
Some fun facts about the two species above, just to get your juices flowing: 

• Crows are astonishingly smart. Some species even make tools (take that, chimps). They’re also very social, often roosting in huge colonies. 

 

• Turkey vultures are often maligned for spreading disease. In fact, the opposite is true. By consuming carrion, they rid the landscape of nasty pathogens like anthrax. 

 

• Turkey vultures are also among the most efficient flyers on earth. Watch them circling, riding a column of thermals, and count how long they go without so much as a single wingbeat. 

 
Of course, in the spring and summer, especially as you head south, you’ll see more colors and be treated to more songs. Brilliant yellow goldfinches and warblers. Dazzling iridescent indigo buntings. Even common birds can dazzle: Cardinals, blue jays, and mockingbirds (we love their Latin name: Mimus polyglottos, for “many-tongued mimic”), with their endless vocal inventiveness, make them the Mozarts of the avian world. 
 
How to observe
 
Sure, you could hide in a woodland blind with a $5,000 pair of Nikon binoculars. But when you’re pressed, simply walk out to the parking lot, or even look out the window. And then pay attention: 

• Don’t take “shape” for granted. Everything from wingspan to beak shape serves a purpose. Look at the streamlining. Study the feet. 

 

• Observe behavior. Some birds soar; others flap. Some walk; others hop. Black-capped chickadees can be coaxed to eat from your hand. Great blue herons, on the other hand, will give you a nasty look before flying far away from you. 

 

• Study colors and patterns. Few birds are monochromatic like crows. Most have species-specific patterns; many also exhibit gender-specific colors, with the males generally splashier than the females. Some patterns are intricate, such as the mottled spots on a flicker; others are subtle, like the shading of a bluebird. 

 

• Listen for calls and songs. If you’re new to this, you might be surprised that the same bird may have several totally different calls. It’s easier to find a singing bird among the branches in winter, when the trees are bare, than it is during the warmer months. Pay attention to the songs: How many notes? Ascending or descending? How long of a pattern before it repeats? Does a nearby bird of the same species answer? If so, can you tell the individuals apart? 

 
You can take notes if you like. You can make sketches. Recordings. Snap photos or videos. Whatever helps you capture what is new and interesting to you.
 
Make it pay
 
It’s simply not feasible to take a half-day field trip for this kind of exercise when you’ve got assignments on your plate and deadlines looming. But you can easily sneak out for, say, 15 minutes. You can just as easily layer this activity into a lunch break. 
 
Now’s the time to put all this newfound bird inspiration to work for you. If you did the first part—what we’d described above—correctly, then the second part—applying it to specific creative assignments—will be much easier than you might expect: 

• What about that direct mailer? Do you now perceive a novel form-factor for it? Might you employ die-cutting to create an original shape? Might you proportion it and fold it in a new, organic manner, so that it opens up, “spread eagle”? 

 

• What about that website design? Sure, you can start with a template. But we’ll bet you’d never considered a color palette of buff, rust, and royal blue until you watched an Eastern bluebird sitting atop a fence. 

 

• What about that home-page video? You were probably considering a linear approach before, but after seeing that robin fly by—not by continually flapping its wings, but rather by alternating between strong flaps and folded-wing coasting—you realize you could purposely alternate the pace of the editing in a strong, heartbeat-like fashion that will provide subtle organic energy. Similarly, you can structure its voiceover in a fact/response fashion, inspired by the one bird that sang from a nearby tree, only to be answered, slightly differently, by its companion further away. 

 
These are admittedly subtle applications. But the important point is that they’re new. They’re a nice, fun, and totally free way to bring another dimension to that next creative assignment. 
 
And just in case you need another bird-brain on your side, well, call us. We certainly practice what we peep. 

You might be shocked at how hard it is to be simple
 
Email isn’t going away. It’s one of those paradigm-shifting developments that everyone predicts will die, but doesn’t. LinkedIn, Slack, instant messaging, blah, blah, blah; fact is, businesspeople still use email all the time, despite its often overwhelming burden. 
 
In this article, we’re going to help you improve two different types of emails that you often must create. First, we’ll cover the topic of basic business correspondence, and how to get what you want from it. Then we’ll touch on the mysterious, often taboo subject of writing emails to cold prospects.
 
The first verse
 
If you learn nothing else from this article, let this be it: Keep it short, and organized. A business email is often, at its heart, a request. You want your client’s blessing to proceed on the next phase of a project. You want a vendor to revise a deliverable. You want to solicit feedback to a piece your team just created. Each of these is an “ask.” 
 
So if you’re going to 1) keep it short, and 2) keep it organized, consider: 

• What “news” do you need to impart, in order to set up the “ask”? 

 

• How can you present that news in its most enticing and favorable light? 

 

• How do you go about asking what you’re about to ask? 

 

• What’s the “call to action” that will best ensure a response—indeed, the response you seek? 

 
And once you’ve done all that... 

• How do you edit that email so it’s as short as possible? 

 
Here’s a hint. It’s often helpful to begin an email like this with a “state of the world” statement, or a “What’s the challenge?” question. Examples: 
 
As you know, our team was tasked with devising a wholly new way to reach prospects in Q2.
 
Or: 
 
If we’ve already maxed out our development budget, how can we possibly increase production?
 
Note the similarities. Each opener suggests “an impossible mission” or “an insurmountable challenge.” 
 
Of course, that’s how you want it to read. The unspoken word is “seemingly”: A seemingly impossible mission. A seemingly insurmountable challenge. You’re crafting a little mystery story here, and you, as the author, already know whodunnit. So you’re well within your bounds to tease it as impossible/insurmountable. Consider your audience: Whoever it is, you can assume that they absolutely hate going through their overloaded in-box every day. 
 
Why? It’s not just quantity. It’s quality—or the lack thereof. Herein, by the way, lies a massive opportunity. It’s very safe for you to assume—indeed, your own in-box is proof—that most business emails that arrive to your audience, well, suck. No one is putting any thought into them, in terms of how they read, how they go over, how they respect the recipient’s time. So they’re, patently, time-wasters.
 
Not yours. You can actually condition your frequent/important recipients to look forward to reading any email from you. Because they know it will be fun, engaging, informative, terse, and worth their time. 
 
Boy are these no-brainer concepts. But 99.9 percent of the email-writers out there fail to heed them. Hence your opportunity. 
 
So. You’ve just posed the insurmountable challenge. Next, of course, you brilliantly “solve the problem,” using the exact info which is the meat of your email. 
 
This segues to “the ask”: 

• “Green-light the next phase.”

 

• “Review the attached PowerPoint deck.” 

 

• “Mark up this shared document.” 

 
Importantly, “the ask” is usually the very last thing you mention in your email. It’s your closer. The last thing you want them to remember. To act on. Thus, it doubles as your call-to-action, or CTA. 
 
We always bake one extra request into that CTA: “Kindly confirm receipt.” This accomplishes many things: 1) It requires them to take action, right then and there. 2) It gives you an audit trail. 3) It compensates for all sorts of technical email flubs out there, from messages that vanish into the ether, to timed-out servers, to misguided spam filters. 
 
A final note: A good business email takes anywhere from ten to 20 times more time to write than it does to read. That’s another reason you don’t receive good emails, generally. People don’t take the time, or make the effort. And, frankly, it shows. Thing is, when people read your well-crafted business emails, they won’t think of all the work you put into it. Because all that work will be invisible. It’s like a good movie that cruises by in 90 minutes. It feels like it happened in just 90 minutes. But if you stop and think about it, of course you realize that it’s the culmination of thousands upon thousands of person-hours of work. 
 
The cold call
 
Sometimes, you need to reach out to someone who doesn’t know you. For our purposes, we’ll call this “prospecting.” 
 
Be advised: If misused, this can veer into the realm of “spam,” thus our “taboo” caveat at the beginning of this article. 
 
We’re not going to delve into the details of the Can Spam Act in this article; you can research them on your own. Suffice to say, you can’t go blasting out tons of stuff to strangers, unsolicited. If you do want to do massive mailings, there are ways to do it: You can use services like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, and adhere to their guidelines and include things like their “Safe Unsubscribe” button in your emails. You can also use LinkedIn paid messaging to reach prospects that you reach via a filtered search.
 
Sometimes, however, you just want to reach out to a specific individual, say, someone who downloaded a PDF from your website, or who made an interesting comment on a board’s thread. 
 
In this case, tread lightly. Your email to them will look like spam. (It may well get trapped by their spam filter.) They’re not expecting it. They don’t look forward to it. Reading it is a burden. Responding is an even bigger burden. 
 
So what do you do? 
 
There are a few tricks you can employ. First, use the time-tested techniques to maximize your odds of getting past their spam filter. Include their first name in the subject line. Be sure to include their name, and perhaps their company, in the body copy. 
 
And above all, keep it incredibly short. We’re talking haiku-scale. Seriously. Two sentences should be sufficient: 
 
Dear Joe, 
 
Thanks for downloading our company’s whitepaper; I hope you enjoyed it. I have some other free information that I think you’ll also find valuable; do you have five minutes to discuss by phone?  
 
Some no-brainer guidelines: 

• Don’t expect a response. If you get one, great. You’ve beaten the odds. 

 

• You may get a nasty response. If you do, write back immediately, and politely: “Sorry for the intrusion. No need to remove you from ‘my list,’ since there wasn’t any list; I’d reached out to you individually. I hope you have a nice day.”  

 

• Practice what you preach. If you’re pitching a five-minute phone call, make sure it clocks in at five minutes. Establish your credibility from the get-go. 

 
Get help
 
You may be surprised to learn that, here at Copel Communications, we actually ghost-write tons of business emails. Yes, the stakes are often that high for our clients, and the ROI of using us is a zillion-to-one. 
 
You can get help, too. Contact us today for a no-obligation initial consultation.