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Email Content: Your Voice Is Valuable

Voice Lessons from My Dry Cleaner

Your customers love contentI gave my dry cleaner my email address because, yes, I want to hear about promotions and services from a service I use. But what I received was a surprise.

The first few emails landed in my Junk mail. His letters go against all email best practices.

He writes every Monday about his weekend. The weather. His wishes for my happiness. These emails are quaint, and they don’t ask me to bring in my pants for 50% off hemming or talk about spot removal. In fact, they hardly contain any content of value at all.

So why do they make me smile? The voice.

Clearly, these letters are from him, written by him, with high hopes that he’s reaching his audience. They are not edited or polished or designed; they come across as written by someone who learned English later in life. At the same time, they’re charmingly real. I feel like I’m getting to know my dry cleaner. Something that doesn’t happen too often in a large, spread-out city like San Diego.

In fact, now I know his name. And I know he just installed an eco-friendly hydrocarbon dry cleaning machine. Something I care about.

My dry cleaner may not have attended any email direct marketing seminars or read any books on writing email content. Someone has simply told him to email letters to his customers to increase business. But they ring honest and true, and there’s tremendous value in being yourself.

P.S.

This may go without saying, but I don’t recommend bypassing a strong content strategy or a good editor for your email campaigns; these missing components certainly would help my dry cleaner increase business. Just don’t let either one scrub the essence from what’s truly you and your brand.

Posted by Shelly Bowen on Jul 20, 2010. Filed under Content Marketing, Web Writing and Editing

 

6 Comments | RSS feed for comments on this post

  • There is no substitute for authenticity.

    Comment by Elea Carey on Jul 22, 2010

  • Elea, so true, so true.

    Comment by Shelly Bowen on Jul 23, 2010

  • [...] A nice little article that reminds us to couple good, strategic web content with authenticity: read Your Voice is Valuable. [...]

    Pingback by Latitude: the official blog of Atlas Advertising » Blog Archive » Email Marketing: Merging Strategy with Authenticity on Jul 26, 2010

  • I agree. Voice adds authenticity!

    Comment by Karen Bowen on Jul 26, 2010

  • I couldn’t agree more! It is surprisingly easy to lose track of your voice after going through too much editing or too strict regulation. Your dry cleaner reminds me of my real estate agent who has a similar email marketing strategy. If I take the time to read his emails I find out all about what is happening in his life as well as in my home town. I recommend him often, and plan to use him on my next home purchase.

    Comment by Redlincook | Vertical Measures on Sep 03, 2010

  • Redlincook, it is. I find it’s always good to “sleep” on a final edit — in the morning any forced editorial styles and unauthentic-sounding parts are so much more obvious and easily fixed.

    Thanks for sharing the real estate agent story — more service-oriented people should do more for that personal connection. In addition to building loyalty, it’s just a more fun way of doing business.

    Comment by Shelly Bowen on Sep 06, 2010

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