Do you send emails from your business? Have a website that asks prospective customers to get in touch? Send direct mailshots? Struggling with a low response rate?
Consider this. Have you ever been to a party and found yourself standing next to the one person who just won’t shut up about themselves? They’re the person who will tell you their entire life story. And give you the director’s cut. While you drink your drink, try to keep smiling and look around the room in desperation?
Don’t be a dull Doris
Three handfuls of peanuts and a sausage-on-a-stick later you’re still there as they regale you with tales of their darling daughter’s achievements, what they ate for their dinner a week last Wednesday and the day they spent in Bognor Regis back in 1982…
This little word is magic
Your eyes droop, you begin to lose the will to live, you wished you’d stayed at home and caught up with on your accounts until suddenly, another face appears. A handsome/beautiful (delete as appropriate – you’re the one at the party and by this point, you deserve a break) stranger approaches you, nods a greeting to your excruciatingly dull companion, turns to you and says:
Hey! How are you?
Your mood lifts, the conversation shifts and all of a sudden you’re having a fabulous time. (Admittedly, the handsome/beautiful bit may help a bit here.)
So what changed?
Simple. The stranger talked to you. Not at you, not about themselves but to you.
And we all like to feel that people are interested in us, don’t we?
Hey – hello, you!
If you take a look online you don’t have to go far to find the online equivalent of the party bore. Company websites full of ‘we do this’, ‘we do that’ are all over the place. These sites sit there with not one thought to the reader, not one moment of inquiry as to what the reader needs or about how that company might help them.
If you want to engage your readers. If you want them to know that you are talking to them use the 3-letter word. ‘You’.
I just did – and you read all the way down to here.
Response rate results
Last year I held a training course on response rates for a national company. It changed the way they wrote their daily client emails – and it meant their response rate trebled.
What will it do for you?
