Canned Boredom from Ziff-Davis: How not to write an email – the complete lesson for beginners in two turgid paragraphs
The email you see above reminds me of a remark by novelist John Updike: “A healthy adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience”.
They must hire them by the shipload at Ziff-Davis because it is hard to cram so much boredom into such a short space – but you can rely on them every time.
They are publishers – and in quite a big way, too. Without fail they send out mind-deadening emails – this being a particularly depressing, witless example.
How come, I ask myself, they can’t find somewhere in the world just one moderately competent copywriter?
They start with a cliche – blurred lines.
Then they empty a dustbin full of jargon to tell you as drearily as possible – in a pig of a paragraph – what any idiot knows: customers matter if you’re selling to business.
Well of course, they do, Dumbo. They pay your wages. But you don’t need 127 ill-chosen words to say so. And you don’t need a dull, dull picture of two guys having a chat about nothing in particular to remind us that a day at work can be so bloody tedious even a gossip about nothing much at all can be a pleasure.
What you need is something acknowledging some simple truths – in an interesting way.
First, that – astoundingly enough – we do not grow a second head on the way to work. We remain people.
Second, and not surprisingly, we then behave like people, swayed more by our emotions than by reason. A minor science called behavioural economics is based on this fact.
And third, if you can’t get more customers or get them to buy more often or pay you more every time they do you won’t get rich/survive/be able to retire/sleep at night.
These are all the things good business people worry about.
And they are the people you want at your event, by the way. The people who care enough to want to do better. I hope the day isn’t as mind-deadening as this copy. But somehow …
Actually, somehow I fear this sort of boring junk will attract bores. Precisely the people who will never, never, ever understand people well enough to sell them anything.
Because who else would bother to read or reply to this email?
there was an internet marketer i used to follow who was great at explaining marketing to simple people like me. his videos were easy to understand, interesting, and the landing pages for his products were expertly written (in my humble opinion).
but the emails he sent out = rubbish. just like the email you posted above. my guess is that somebody else writes the emails.
A lot of people get to be big and delegate – and then lose what made them big. I have a saying you may like: the road to failure is paved with success. Ma\ybe someone else said it before, but I like it.
I mistakenly read your quote as “the road to success is paved with failure” (also a good quote). I love it that the opposite is just as relevant.
That is actually my converse saying. I have spent two long periods in my life failing repeatedly. One has just ended after something I have been trying for about seven years is finally paying off. I have probably already bored you all with my favourite Churchill quote, but it bears repetition: Courage is the ability to go on from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Bloody hard.