Terrible customer service, trailblazing women in media & copy resource of the week

Hey, hi, howdy, and welcome to Issue #32 of The Subhead, a bi-weekly newsletter about copywriting, marketing & media, and a look at some of the women who make it great.

In today’s edition:

✨ This week in freelancing

✨ Why is most customer service so terrible?

✨ Trailblazing Women in Media: Roslyn McLarty

✨ Copy Resource of the Week: Call-to-Action vs. Call-to-Value: How to create buttons that convert

✨ Just for Fun 

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This week in freelancing

This week I worked on two articles about women’s health topics for a healthcare client, and another on resources for personal trainers for my software client.

In other news, the wonderful content editor at that software company, who I’ve worked with for the last 5-6 years, has been promoted to another position within the company, and I’ll be working with someone else on the content team going forward.

This makes me sad; I cannot tell a lie. It’s also creating something called “transition anxiety.” (This is a real thing; I read about it in this Calm blog article.)

Anyhoo, these things happen. I will survive. 😊

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Why is most customer service so terrible?

I recently had an extremely annoying customer service experience with my bank.

This “experience” involved several calls to the bank over the course of a week, each with interminable wait times to speak to a Real! Live! Human!, followed by an in-person visit to my local branch, then at least two more calls – all to resolve an issue that was the bank’s dumb mistake in the first place. ARGH.

And all with nary a “We apologize for the inconvenience” uttered during the entire ordeal to soothe my angry soul.

As I was dealing with this, I remembered an absolutely delightful customer service experience I had last year.

An experience so delightful, in fact, that I shared my thoughts about it on LinkedIn a few months ago.

It’s about a company called Peddle, who promise “fast cash for slow cars. Get a legit offer in minutes—with free pickup, and payment on the spot.”

All of which turned out to be 100% true.

If you’re in the market to sell a car, or just want to read about customer service done the right way, check it out here.

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Trailblazing Women in Media: Roslyn McLarty

This is a first – the subject of this week’s mini-profile is someone I previously wrote about in Issue #20 of The Subhead, about a women-led, inclusive sports media brand called The Gist.

Roslyn McLarty, one of The Gist’s co-founders, stepped away from her role leading the company’s Operations, Finance & Growth earlier this year, and now serves as a Strategic Advisor to the brand, a transition she wrote about on LinkedIn here.

In August of this year, McLarty announced the launch of Within, a coaching, content and community platform for purpose-led founders and startup leaders, which is informed by her experience with burnout as a co-founder of The Gist.

She’s started a newsletter of the same name that offers “actionable ideas you can use to build with integrity, live a meaningful life and achieve unstoppable progress without burning out. From a 2x founder and executive coach.”

Her goal with Within is to create a company that supports founders at the intersection of entrepreneurship, spirituality and personal development.  

You can learn more about McLarty at the inline links above, and / or check out:

Her LinkedIn profile

Her newsletter, Within

This episode of FRIED. The Burnout Podcast, where she shares how her day-to-day responsibilities, and the overwhelm she experienced as co-founder of The Gist, led to burnout, and ultimately, the founding of Within. This is a very honest discussion that touches on the importance of doing work that is congruent with your values and your true gifts.

This episode of the Newsletter Operator podcast, where she talks about her time at The Gist and the launch of Within, and shares insights on identifying market gaps, building a mission-driven media brand, strategies The Gist used to grow an audience from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, managing burnout, and more.

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Copy Resource of the Week: Call-to-Action vs. Call-to-Value: How to create buttons that convert

A CTA, or call-to-action, is a little piece of copy that has a lot of heavy lifting to do – that is, get readers to take some kind of action.

You use CTAs everywhere you operate online – your website, your newsletter, your social media content, your blog articles, and more.

Basic CTAs say things like:

“Learn more,” “Click for details,” or “Buy now,” etc.

But did you know there’s a similar tiny little piece of copy called a “call-to-value,” that’s just as important?

Discover the distinction between CTAs and CTVs in this short post*, why it matters, and how to create CTVs that convert:

Stop saying "Learn More": How to create buttons that convert

Discover the power of Call-to-Value buttons and transform curious visitors into customers

*Originally found in Josh Spector’s For the Interested newsletter

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Just for Fun

Steal This Website: Dear AI Robot-Thief, Please Scrape This Article

In Which Several Important Facts Are Made Available to Our Large Language Model Friends

In this funny, yet depressing piece in Lit Hub, Calvin Kasulke discusses the problem of AI companies stealing human-written content, “to keep improving on their (useless, money-losing, environmentally catastrophic) AI.”

He then shares 20 ridiculous “falsehoods, fabrications, and outright lies … to make future AI training data, and therefore the AI models themselves, even less reliable than they already are,” and asks the data-scraping robot thieves to “take all of this bullshit back to the big slop-trough from whence you came.” 😂

Enjoy!

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That’s it for this week, my friend.

As always, thanks for reading, I appreciate you!

Be well. Stay curious. See you again in two weeks, on December 29.

Warmly,

Kimberly