Note to accountants and lawyers (and so on)
YOU SAY: “Our partners have over 100 years of combined experience.”
WHAT YOU WANT US TO THINK: “Wow, those guys must really know what they’re doing!”
WHAT WE ACTUALLY THINK:
(No, we don’t do the maths.)
“Why not?”
Here’s something I’ve been seeing a lot: businesses, especially small businesses, especially small businesses who write their own copy, using “why not?” questions in their marketing. As in: “If you’re looking for a nutritious snack, why not try our delicious nut mix?” “Bored in the evenings? Why not learn French?” And so on.
I’m not a great fan of this. But before I explain why, it’s important to ask what people who use this form think they are doing. What’s the attraction of “why not?” I think it boils down to three things:
- It’s a question. Asking customers questions is supposed to be good because it makes it sound like you’re interested.
- It’s not boasting. It’s politely inviting people to try your product, which will of course then proceed to sell itself. (This diffidence about actually telling people you’re any good might be an Australian thing.)
- It saves you the trouble of actually identifying and describing your product’s real benefits.
I think we can deal fairly speedily with 2 and 3. Regarding 2, this reluctance to brag about – sorry, to enumerate the wonderful features of – your product is just something you need to get over. (As true for me as it is for anyone, by the way, if not more so.) As for 3, if you can’t be bothered to articulate the benefits of your product for yourself, hire a copywriter to do it. (What a masterfully delicate hint.)
What about asking your customers questions, though? Isn’t that a good thing? Well, yes, asking questions in your marketing copy is often a very good thing: it helps people to engage with your product by identifying needs they might not have even known they had, which is a great kickstart towards giving you a chance to meet those needs. It also has the side benefit of filtering your customers down to your target markets, so that you don’t spend all your time dealing with queries from people you can’t help.
“Bored in the evenings?” is this kind of good question. But “Why not…?” isn’t. The trouble with “Why not?” is that it’s a rhetorical question, a question you don’t actually want an answer to. And the trouble with using rhetorical questions in marketing is that people tend to answer them. “Why not try your nut mix? Because it sounds the same as every other nut mix, that’s why not!” “Why not learn French? Because I tried to learn it in high school and I hated it!”
So concentrate on giving people reasons why. Don’t invite them to think of reasons why not.
Your e-mail is important to us
As a refugee from the call centre industry, Chris Brogan’s post arguing that businesses would be better off investigating other channels of customer service than obsessing about call centre performance really hit home with me.
As I say in the comments to Chris’s post, one of the important things for businesses to learn is that customers who contact you via a given channel (e-mail, for example) probably want to keep the conversation going using the same channel. I used to manage an e-mail enquiry service that was a sideline to a larger call centre, and one thing I asked my staff to do was to sign off every e-mail by inviting the customer to e-mail again with any follow-up, rather than just saying “if you have any questions, please call us”. If they wanted to make a phone call, they would have done so already.
This does have some technical and procedural implications–you need to make sure the e-mail address you’re sending from is not one of those “unrepliable” addresses (a huge peeve of mine), and you need to try to route follow-up e-mails to the person who answered the original enquiry wherever possible. But in my experience, if your turnaround time and the quality of your replies are good enough, those weird customers who prefer to communicate in writing really appreciate it.
I’m one of those customers, and by way of contrast, here’s a really bad experience I had earlier this year:
Click here. No, there. No, THERE.
My friends at Acorn Web Studio recently posted a plea to anyone thinking of using “click here” to indicate a link on their website:
I agree, of course, but I also think there are even worse ways of pointing to a link than “click here”! What about “To contact us, click ‘contact us’ at the bottom of the page”? “To see a list of our New Zealand offices, click the map of New Zealand on the left”? Or worst of all, “To submit an order, click ’shop’ on the menu bar, then click ‘online shopping’ and then ‘new customer’ or ‘returning customer’ as appropriate”?! You get the idea.
Why do people insist on referring to a link somewhere else on the page (or on some other page that first has to be navigated to) rather than just doing the sensible thing and re-linking? I think it has something to do with a fear of redundancy, of providing the same information more than once. This might be a carry-over from books: we “navigate” books by referring to a Table of Contents, one entry per section, so people think we ought to navigate websites the same way.
But when it comes to web navigation, redundancy is often a good thing. True, people like to be able to build a “mental map” of your site, so your navigation should be clean enough that it’s not confusing. But having a link in your menu bar that’s reiterated in your body text isn’t confusing, it’s helpful, and increasingly people expect it. (If we could, we’d do it in books too!)
Contractions: I’m into them
Here are two sentences:
1: “At Nemo’s Aquarium, we are committed to making sure you are happy with your new fish.”
2: “At Nemo’s Aquarium, we’re committed to making sure you’re happy with your new fish.”
See what I did there? Which do you prefer? (I’m hoping no-one says 1.)
This is not about lowering your word count or using fewer characters; the saving is pretty trivial in any case. What it’s about is talking to your customers, even when what you’re saying is written down.
Solutions, solutions
Businesses that deal with other businesses don’t sell products or services any more. They sell “solutions”. Technical Solutions, Mobility Solutions, Product Development Solutions, Volunteer Solutions…with this many solutions out there, we must have a lot of problems!
That, of course, is the point. Buzzwords become popular for a reason, and in the case of “solutions” the reason is basically a sound one. By offering a solution, we send the message that our starting point is the customer’s problem and what we can do about it, rather than our own products and our desire to sell them. The idea of a “solution” also enables us to bundle a whole lot of products and services together: for example, rather than a web development business saying “we do site design, coding, content creation, SEO, etc. etc.” they can just say “we deliver complete web solutions”. (“Solutions” are always “delivered”). I get it.
“Let your X do the Y”
Real estate signs are a great source of “copy in the wild”. This one caught my eye, but not for the right reasons. At the bottom right of the sign is a small ad encouraging viewers to list their houses on the company’s website: “Register at hockingstuart.com.au and let the house do the hunting.” (It’s a bit difficult to read on this picture, but trust me, that’s what it says!)
This is a pretty obvious homage to an old classic, “Let your fingers do the walking”. Advertising Age gives the latter slogan, used internationally for many years by Yellow Pages, an honourable mention in its list of the Top 10 Slogans of the [20th] Century. So famous was it that it became what the linguists at Language Log call a snowclone: a phrase with one or more substitutable words that becomes a kind of cliché generator, a template for new phrases, like “X is the new Y”, or “the mother of all X”, or (for the geeks among us) “I’m in ur X, Y-ing ur Z”. A quick Google search for “Let your X do the Y” comes up with “Let your thumbs do the trading” (about using a mobile phone to play the stock market), “Let your feet do the talking” (about an awareness-raising sponsored walk), and “Let your subconscious do the thinking” (about…well, I guess that one’s fairly obvious). “Let the house do the hunting” changes the template slightly by using “the” instead of “your”, but it’s still a very clear nod.
“Welcome”
Business owners, I have a question for you.
Does your website feature the word “Welcome” prominently on the front page or in the title bar? (Feel free to run off and check if you need to.)
If you answered “yes”, I want you to imagine you’re a first-time visitor to the site, then answer two more questions:
Does reading the word “welcome” actually make you feel welcome?
Would you feel unwelcome if it wasn’t there?
If your answer to both of these is “no”, as I think it might be, perhaps you should start thinking about what you can replace that “Welcome” with. Maybe something that really engages your potential customers and tells them something interesting about what you have to offer. Or something they might type into a search engine (nobody searches for “welcome” unless they want this place).
Don’t feel bad, though; you’re in good company! All of us have a tendency to repeat things we’ve seen on another sites without quite knowing why. But the conventions of web writing are still developing, and “Welcome to my website” has really had its day; it makes your site read like somebody’s GeoCities homepage from 1997, and it takes up room on the page or the title bar that’s too valuable to waste on formalities.
How to make opening an envelope interesting
This is a blog about words in everyday life. People often say we live in a visual culture, but (in case you haven’t noticed) words haven’t gone away. If anything, in our blogging, text-messaging, status-updating times, they surround ufs more than ever. This blog is simply a place for me to write about some writing I like, some writing I don’t like, and the reasons why. Because I’m going into business as a copywriter and editor, my main focus will be on the words businesses use to communicate with their customers. And because I’m particularly interested in writing for the web, you’ll probably read a lot about websites here. But I’m not ruling anything out; anything is fair game if I think it illustrates something interesting about communication.
To begin with, here’s something I got in the mail the other day. Yes, it’s a direct marketing letter; not exactly a form of communication with a reputation for creativity. But this one, I think, is an exception.
First of all, your eye is drawn to the big red “teaser” on the front of the envelope: “You’re probably thinking of throwing this away.” OK, so this is one of those marketing letters that starts its sales pitch on the envelope itself. At this point I’m only mildly interested; there’s nothing unusual these days about advertising that “winks” at consumers, trying to engage their distaste for the fact that they’re being sold to and turn it into a virtue. It’s a standard way of trying to reach a certain kind of customer, the kind who thinks he or she is “above” advertising. But hey, at least it’s more interesting than “FREE GIFT INSIDE!!!”
