We’re in the business of marketing information over the internet – that’s you, me and everyone else reading this post. None of us have retail premises where we are able to meet our customers face to face and do our business. We all rely on the electronic media – our web sites, eBay sales pages, articles, Twitter comments etc. If our customers, or potential customers, get in touch with us it is again via electronic media – email, Skype and other Live Chat applications, blog comments etc. It truly amazes me how many people are getting this completely wrong and they are going out of their way to drive customers away!
You regularly see eBay listings written in “text speak” and full of grammatical errors such as
i will send u the video’s immediately after u pay m8
That’s part of a sales page I read – one of my “competitors”! I would guess around 95% of people selling on eBay communicate like that. Now – if a buyer is asking me a question about a product then I don’t care about that, after all the customer is always right. No problem with that at all. But I see this happening more and more in correspondence from sellers – emails riddled with spelling mistakes. Sales copy full of ridiculous spelling and grammatical errors, and this is for expensive digital products where there really should be no excuse.
Now I will readily hold up my hand – none of us are perfect, and I am sure the pedantic will find grammatical errors in this post (hopefully no spelling mistakes)! But really (yes I am aware that it is not good practise to begin a sentence with ‘but’!), there is no excuse at all for this. Almost every program has a built-in spell checker feature. This applies whether you are composing an email, writing an ebook or designing a web page with an HTML editor. This blog uses WordPress, and has a spell checker included. Before I publish this post I’ll click a button to make sure I haven’t made any errors with my spelling.
It’s so simple to do. Do the same with your emails, use the spell checker option. Look this is important. Most of your competitors will not do this, whether it’s due to laziness, lack of knowledge or a general feeling of apathy towards good communication I really don’t know. However I am totally convinced that if you make just a bit of an effort to communicate correctly then you will stand out from “the rest of the herd”.
Remember this. You have no store where customers can come inside and interact with you face to face. Obviously there are no worries about spelling when you are speaking with someone! It is far easier to communicate with customers when they are standing right in front of you. When I ran my offline business I would much prefer to drive 100 miles to visit a customer and negotiate face to face than attempt to do business over the phone. It was just a lot easier to do business that way.
However, in the online world generally we don’t have that option. The main interaction is the printed word. So make sure your emails, your web sites, your eBay listings, all your written communications are spelled correctly, check your grammar and stay away from the dreaded “TXTSPK”.
Alrite m8?Mor 2moro
PS I’ve spell checked and re-read this post several times – I just know I’ve set myself up for several people writing in to point out this error and that error. Never mind, I can take it 🙂 By the way, has anyone else wondered why almost every spell checker thinks the word “internet” is wrong? Weird.