Sacrilicious Marketing

It’s all in the tone.

“Hey hommies! Be sure to check out our hot new products getting hotter every day!”

Too casual?

How about,

“Greetings. Please examine our new products, with more becoming available daily.”

Too formal?

The tone of an email is vital to your audience. While email communication can be less formal than business or marketing writing, it is important to write to the tone of your audience. It’s important not to be too formal, nor too familiar, when emailing your customers.

The right tone for an email can vary.  It depends on both the customer being emailed and the topic of the email. For example, an email regarding financial information should be more formal than an email with product updates.  Also, an email apologizing to a customer for poor service should be more formal than your weekly newsletter.

You can absolutely make your email fun and saucy, if this is appropriate for the customer and the moment, but do not be overly casual and risk being disrespectful to your audience with the wrong tone.  The tone should be a direct reflection of how serious the topic is.

Less serious = casual tone.

More serious = formal tone.

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I can remember sitting in my seventh grade English class, listening to a lecture about the importance of “using the active voice.” This is still the case when you are trying to entice people to read your emails. Of the many lesson’s you’ve likely thrown away since then (when was the last time you heard someone use “whom” the proper way anyway?), abolishing the active voice should NOT be one of them.

The most effective way to communicate a message or idea is to use the active voice. The active voice focuses on the subject, rather than how the subject is being acted upon, creating a more powerful image or idea.

Now in case your grammar skills are evading you at the moment, in an active sentence, the subject is doing the action.  A straightforward example is the sentence “Kevin threw the ball.” Kevin is the subject, and he is doing the action: throwing the ball. The ball is the object of the sentence.

In passive voice, the object of the action gets promoted to the subject’s position. Instead of saying, “Kevin threw the ball,” it would say, “The ball was thrown by Kevin.” The subject of the sentence becomes the ball, even though the ball is not doing anything. The focus of the sentence has changed from Kevin to the ball.

While those examples were quite trivial, they do illustrate the point.

Here are some examples of the active and passive voice the might be used in marketing:

Passive

We’re happy to announce that there are now 10 new products on our site. Best of all, more are being added every day.

Active

We’re happy to announce you can now browse 10 new products, and we’re adding more every day!

Passive

You’ve been selected for a special discount on any of the below products.

When using the passive voice this sentence sounds gimmicky.

Active

Buy any of the products below and receive a special discount!

When transferred into the active voice the sentence becomes much more action oriented.

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While I am generally unforgiving of the entire state of Alabama and may have suggested on more than one occasion we solve the current financial crisis by giving Alabama, Texas and a few other choice states to Mexico, I have a long standing rant on social media advice with Alabaman, Ike Pigott.

This week, we had so much to discuss that I thought it might be useful to share some of our thoughts from our most recent discussions.

1.     Retweet anything anybody you like says if they ask

If you want to maintain some authority and credibility you need to curate the content you produce. That means you don’t re-tweet just anything, no matter who asks. God, Allah, Buddha and Vishnu could ask me to retweet something stupid and I wouldn’t. Your Twitter and Facebook Accounts/Pages are your Smithsonian – you are your own curator. You must maintain your integrity. That means, you don’t post links to articles without reading them first and you don’t retweet things you don’t find genuinely interesting. If you have the expectation that someone would follow your link or advice, you should expect to be held accountable for the info they found there. Does that mean you can’t be fun? Hell, no. I publish things from The Superficial and Cracked all the time because my mind is really only one Ivy League degree away from that of a 14-year-old boy’s. I am currently obsessed with this Charlie Sheen Site (http://livethesheendream.com/) and I am not above asking questions like “Could I have ever learned my ABCs without knowing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star first.” But, I guarantee you, if I publish it I think it, read it and/or find it interesting, educational or entertaining. To maintain any level of credibility and authenticity about the content you publish you need to curate that content based on your thoughts, beliefs, views, experience, sense of humor and education.

2.     Passive aggressively attack others because it’s more politically correct than directly calling someone out or trying to work out a beef privately.

To be fair, this isn’t really advice anyone is giving, it is just something that people are doing. The online community is far more accepting of a passive aggressive attack on one of its members than it is of a direct attack. However, the more passive aggressive the attack, the less likely it is to spark a conversation around a topic that benefits the community as a whole or help the parties come to resolution than it is to create a latent resentment between the parties that grows until it explodes. Basically, it is the practice of really bad social skills and even worse conflict resolution skills and the saddest part is the community as a whole condones it because it is easier to dismiss a passive aggressive attack as a mis-communication than to acknowledge it and deal with it. The most common examples of this are when someone asks a leading, yet general question to the universe like “I wonder if douchebags know they are douchebags?” after they just had a public argument with another user on a social network. Everyone knows that this is just a veiled way of saying, “Hey, @ikepigott is a dbag” but the person who said it can play it off like it was not directed at Ike.

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