Newsletters - eagerness kills the sale
July 7th, 2004 by Bill
I’ve been working with online newsletters for a while now and I have found one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to be overly eager in your writing. By this I mean the use of what has become known as marketing "happy-talk." It’s not just language though; sometimes it’s punctuation and the use of case.
For the newsletters I work on I am both a writer and editor. I put together some material and in other cases I edit what others have submitted. The editing often involves removing exclamation marks (!) and changing uppercase to lower. In other words, I tone down the eagerness of what has been written because it comes across as overkill - or oversell, to be more precise.
As for language, often the overly eager want to pepper their sentences with modifiers - the best, the greatest, the newest and all that other hooey that not only do the readers not want or need, but sends signals to them that there is a lack of content in the newsletter item (whether that is true or not).
I’m not saying anything new here. It’s been written about many times and expressed in better than ways than I am doing. But at the heart of it is what I think is an over-eagerness that comes across as an almost desperate plea to, "Please buy what I’m trying to sell." And this is inevitably a turn off.
The best approach is not to be bland but to be helpful. The words can be creative if you forget about selling and simply try communicating - be conversational and friendly and, again, helpful. Provide information without hoopla. Show people how easy it is to buy. Consider them friends rather than potential sales.
Odds are you’ll end up selling a lot more.
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