Are your templates sabotaging your business? Using template letters, emails and proposals saves time, but if they’re written poorly, you damage your reputation, credibility and brand every time you use one.
Here’s a good (bad!) example, from The Sydney Morning Herald’s Column 8:
A reader wrote, saying, “I reeled with amazement recently at an email I received from one of my financial institutions following an enquiry. I received an immediate response, which one supposes is automatically sent, which read
‘We thank you for your inquirey [sic] and we assure you your matter will be investigated with as much immediately as soon as possible. As soon as we have a response we will email you the results and email you to let you know we have emailed you.'”
Lesson 1: At least read what you’re sending!
Several of our clients have kicked off the year by having us review their templates. They’re often stunned by the problems we find — yet they’ve blindly sent them to clients and prospects countless times.
What to look for
This list isn’t exhaustive, but we commonly find these problems in company templates:
- Structure — Is the “big news” first, or does it need a different structure, e.g. a persuasive one?
- Brevity — Is it long-winded or concise?
- Plain English — Does it make you sound like an 18th-Century lawyer?
- Headlines/subheads — Are they relevant, attention-getting, and reader-centric?
- Correctness — Does it have typos, or grammar and punctuation errors?
Have you seen a shocker example of business writing? Do tell, below!
Paul
4 thoughts on “Are your templates sabotaging you?”
Ouch! I don’t think that one would have even made it past spell check. I shudder to think of the damage that auto-response has done to the reputation of that business.
Funnily enough, I received a fax just today with some pretty bad writing:
“The Australian Government is providing $4000 to the employer/business for each eligible employee to do a National Qualification any of the above Nationally recognised qualifications.
The Australian Government has identified [course 1] or [course 2] or [course 3] or [course 4] to be the qualification/s that provides immediate and significant benefits to employers and employees to better run and manage their businesses.
If you feel that you or your staff can take advantage of this opportunity being offered…
Please note there is no limit to the number of staff each organisation can apply for eligibility.”
I won’t say who the fax was from… 😉
I got an email from someone looking to introduce themselves and their PR firm signed “KR” and then their name all in lowercase. They hadn’t even bothered writing Kind Regards.
I got so incensed by it, it ended up in the Heckler.
Hey PJ,
Reminds me of the old story about a bank’s template that was meant to be for internal use only:
(From New Scientist, 28 August 1993, Feedback column)
The National Westminster Bank admitted last month that it keeps personal information about its customers-such as their political affiliation-on computer. But now Computer Weekly reveals that a financial institution, sadly unnamed, has gone one better and moved into the realm of personal abuse.
The institution decided to mailshot 2000 of its richest customers, inviting them to buy extra services. One of its computer programmers wrote a program to search through its databases and select its customers automatically. He tested the program with an imaginary customer called Rich Bastard.
Unfortunately, an error resulted in all 2000 letters being addressed “Dear Rich Bastard”. The luckless programmer was subsequently sacked.